Sunset Boulevard review – Hollywood never looked more glorious or more tragic

Gloria Swanson is extraordinary as faded film-star Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s cameo-packed self-referential masterpiece about tinseltown ghosts and delusions

Billy Wilder’s film starring Gloria Swanson as a reclusive former silent movie star, and William Holden as a young wannabe writer who becomes her kept man, more than ever looks not merely like tinseltown satire or LA noir, but a ghost story. It’s the ultimate film about how the screenwriter is always the loser and the chump. You can tell that Norma Desmond (Swanson) is washed up because she has actually written a screenplay – which is, however, more than Joe (Holden) ever achieves in the course of this film.

Sunset Boulevard’s own script, co-written by Wilder with Charles Brackett and DM Marshman Jr, is of course superb. And after 75 years, we can appreciate the movie’s sober judgment about the dangers of cinephilia and Hollywood ancestor worship. The street name itself, with its dying fall, is an occult omen of the eerie and macabre things that happen here. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive had the same chill. The street name is about the final ending, and this is one of the very few films of any sort with a really satisfying ending: the way in which the delusional old celebrity, her eyes pinwheeling, is finally induced to come placidly down the stairs to surrender to the authorities. She grimaces and gurns directly into the lens at the very last, rather like Anthony Perkins in Psycho – a film that incidentally was very much influenced by this one.