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Venomous, perverse, wicked and sensationally sleazy
's‘uusé'r BLVD (PG) 110min 00000
The very best film about Hollywood is also one of the most venomous and perverse. To begin with it's narrated by a dead man. Opening with the cops fishing the bullet-riddled corpse of washed up screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) out of the swimming pool of a Hollywood hills mansion, Gillis tells his sorry tale before, he says, we read the sensationalised story in the latest edition. But the screenwriter tells his story in a sensationally sleazy style (perfectly summing up Tinseltown). That‘s just the first of the film’s many mean jokes.
Flashback. Gillis‘ story begins with the out-of-work writer on the run from the repo men after his car. He bursts a tire, swerves into the grounds of the aforementioned mansion, and stashes his wheels there. Soon he meets the house‘s occupants: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), former star of the silent screen, now as washed up as Gillis (but considerably wealthier), and her servant Max (Erich von Stroheim). They’re a bizarre couple - she’s deluded, depressive and suicidal; he's unhealthily devoted - but in no time Gillis falls into Desmond‘s employ and thereafter the arms of a woman old enough to be his, yep and yuck, mother. From there things go very badly for Gillis, ending with him you-know-where.
With a wickedly sharp script by Charles Brackett and equally wicked, sharp direction by Billy Wilder, Sunset Blvd is in equal parts Hollywood satire, Gothic melodrama and film noir. All of which is given greater resonance by the modelling of Norma Desmond on the life and career of none other than Swanson. In a word: terrific. (Mile Fielder)
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