Sunset Boulevard (1950)

This is arguably the ultimate and original twist movie that reveals its twist less than a minute into the feature. American Beauty (1999) is one of my all-time favourite films, and it harks back to Billy Wilder's classic in several ways, the most obvious of which I won't give away right here. Although if you haven't seen American Beauty you should probably rectify that before you read any further.

Having said that, I hadn't seen Sunset Boulevard until now- it just felt like I had.

After that opening, we rewind six months, to a time when Joe (William Holden) is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who's visited by repo men seeking his car; he flees from them and turns into an abandoned looking house where former silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) lives.

She abides there alone apart from her butler who appears to dote on her unreservedly (a performance of devastating sadness by Erich von Stroheim which nearly pulls the film from under everyone else in it), and when Joe wanders in (originally thinking the mansion deserted) and she learns he's a screenwriter, she insists he read through a script she has written that will put her back on the big screen.

I remember watching a few minutes of Sunset Boulevard on TV when I was much younger, and thinking that Gloria Swanson's wide eyed stare meant she was blind, and in some ways this is truthful. Norma has struggled and in many ways refused to come to terms with the death of silent cinema, and with it her career. She lives in the past, blind to the present; and swiftly becomes attached to Joe in the mistaken belief that he can resurrect her star persona.

Joe's happy to play along for a while, especially with Norma offering him a place to live as well as essentially an unlimited supply of money for him to use; it seems a small price to pay for a degree of freedom that looked to be hurtling away from him. But Sunset Boulevard slowly descends into a depiction of self-imposed depression, impaled on a spike of the past. Norma isn't the only one; her brash and unhinged personality (and subsequent actions) threaten to overshadow her equally succumbing butler Max. It's these two displays that anchor the film, and although Joe is needed to ignite the piece, the characters of Norma and Joe are ones that are steeped in sadness and depict a hollowness that wasn't uncommon in Hollywood as talkies began to take over the business.

Billy Wilder is a master at such portraits; his 1945 film The Lost Weekend that deals with alcohol addiction is one the of the finest films ever made, and to build on such promise with Sunset Boulevard before later down the line conquering comedy in Some Like it Hot (1959) proves Wilder is one of the all time greats.

Sunset Boulevard fully justifies its legendary status not simply because it's an excellent film, but because it's also one of the most influential to ever grace our screens. As well as the aforementioned American Beauty, Wilder's film sees its paw-prints strewn across cinema today, often deliberately, as in David Lynch's Mullholland Drive (2001). 8.4/10