Sunset Boulevard is one of those iconic films that really is as good as everyone says it is. It’s ranked #12 on AFI’s top 100 films of all time. It’s also recognized as one of the greatest, if not the greatest Film Noir of all time. It launched William Holden into the A-List of Hollywood superstars and he would parlay that cache into starring in other iconic films like Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Sabrina, Network, and many, many more. This film also reintroduced the movie-going public to Gloria Swanson, who had been one of the top 2 or 3 actresses of the silent film era, and it reignited her career. Further, it cemented Billy Wilder as one of the great directors of the 20th Century, and perhaps one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema.

Why it’s essential

Many film scholars and films historians with much greater pedigree than I, have written about the virtues of this film, so I’m not going to try and stand on their shoulders pontificating about the nuances and subtleties that make this a great film. From my much more macro point of view, this is a very dramatic film, it is a smart film, and it is a thoughtful film.

I will say that one thing that always puzzled me about his film is that it’s often labeled as Film Noir, and for me it doesn’t entirely fit into that style of film making. Yes, the lighting component is similar, but to me it’s a stretch to call Sunset Boulevard true Film Noir. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, which I blogged about here is a much better example of Film Noir and more classically fits the genre. However, Sunset Boulevard is one of the most dramatic and spellbinding films that I’ve ever seen, and for me there are three main components that make it essential viewing.

Sunset Boulevard is a movie about Hollywood, and I’m always a fan when Hollywood gets introspective. This is a movie about a struggling screenwriter named Joe Gillis (Holden) who can’t get work and is ready to give up on the business and move back to Ohio until he stumbles upon a writing opportunity from a washed up actress from the silent film era named Norma Desmond (Swanson). Many of the issues Joe deals with in terms of the studios and his agent are issues that writers continue to deal with today, and seem especially ominous with a writers’ strike looming.

But since Gillis is a writer, he has an excellent command of the English language and the dialogue that Wilder and co-writers Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr. wrote is elegant and poetic. Indeed, the screenplay won the Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Oscar for 1950, and the dialogue obviously played no small part in that decision. And what’s so ironic about the great dialogue in the film is that it’s about a woman from the silent film era who still is holding on to the belief that talking killed pictures, when in reality it just killed her career.

But there are some iconic lines of dialogue in this film. To wit:

“All right, Mr. DeMille. I’m ready for my close up.”

“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

“Norma, you’re a woman of 50, now grow up. There’s nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25.”

“So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her.”

That last line was from the narration. I’m generally not a huge fan of narration, but the narration in Sunset Boulevard is so exquisitely written that it’s impossible not to love it. The narration actually enhances the story in a rather haunting way, especially since we know from the beginning that the narrator is dead. Finding out how he got that way leads me to my next favorite component of the film.

Sunset Boulevard is a highly dramatic film, and the drama is set up by showing what Joe has to gain and what he ultimately ends up losing. We see Joe as a down-on-his-luck writer, but he’s clever and he’s still hustling, so we empathize with him rather than feel sorry for him. That allows us to engage with his character on an emotional level and we root for his life to get better because he’s a likable guy.

Also, we get to watch his relationship with studio reader Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) grow parallel to his relationship with Norma, and we really and truly root for Joe to end up with Betty, even though we know that it will be impossible. We root for this because the two of them have good chemistry. They start writing a script together and they seem like they could be happy together. Wilder and company were very effective in tantalizing us with this alternate life for Joe where he’s happily writing for free with a woman he loves, as opposed to being miserable while getting paid to write for Norma.

The drama is created in this film by the fact that we know what would be good for Joe and we see him get a taste of it, thus we get a taste of it also, and we even root for him to get it, but we know that he’ll never have it.

The final component that I love about Sunset Boulevard is one of the things that it’s known for, and that is the acting, specifically the acting of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond. Swanson was, in her own right, one of the biggest stars of the silent era, and in fact worked with Cecil B. DeMille as well as Erich von Stroheim, who played her servant Max Von Mayerling, who had previously worked with Norma as her director and was Norma’s first husband.

As an aside, Sunset Boulevard was nominated for all four acting awards, Best Actor (Holden), Best Actress (Swanson), Best Supporting Actor (von Stroheim) and Best Supporting Actress (Olson). But it is Swanson’s acting that carries this film, and for which the film is known. She has a line in the film where she tells Gillis that they didn’t need words in the silent era because they had faces, and Swanson had a gift for contorting her face into extreme expressions that showed more than just whatever emotion she was supposed to be feeling at that time. Swanson was able to get us inside Norma Desmond’s head and show us the depth of her psychoses.

Swanson’s eyes are especially expressive, and they provide a window into Desmond’s soul and show it to be a haunting and frightening place. Norma Desmond is a woman who cannot admit that her prime is long in the past, and that inability for self awareness has driven her mad. The resulting character arc is unique in cinema history as Norma goes from being suicidal to being homicidal.

Those are just a few of the components that make Sunset Boulevard essential viewing for anyone who loves cinema. That’s especially true if you’re an aspiring film maker. Indeed, this film could be instructive for almost any discipline of film making, save for modern VFX. But if you love cinema, and you want to be a film maker, then Sunset Boulevard is essential viewing.