Sunset Boulevard Review

Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote this inside the industry it dismantles, and the nerve of it still registers. Gloria Swanson, whose own career the talkies ended, plays Norma Desmond with a silent performer's enormous gesture vocabulary, so her acting style is itself the tragedy: she is pitched for a medium that no longer exists. Erich von Stroheim, a genuine deposed director reduced to playing a servant who forges fan mail, gives the film its bleakest joke.

John F. Seitz shoots the mansion in dust motes and deep focus, with an organ that plays itself and a swimming pool drained then refilled for a man who will die in it. William Holden's narration is fatalistic without self-pity, which keeps the whole thing from tipping into camp. The dialogue is the reason to return: aphoristic, contemptuous, and never showing off. The plot mechanics are relatively simple noir. The final descent of the staircase, camera-ready madness fully achieved, needs nothing more.