Joe Gillis
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The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star who draws him into her deranged fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen.
Sunset Boulevard: Directed by Billy Wilder. With William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson. A screenwriter develops a dangerous relationship with a faded film star determined to make a triumphant return.
- (239K)
- Drama, Film-Noir
- Billy Wilder
- 1950-08-04
A hack screenwriter writes a screenplay for a former silent film star who has faded into Hollywood obscurity.
Sunset Boulevard is unmistakably a noir movie, characterized by a dark storyline and archetypical characters of the antihero (Joe) and the dark lady (Norma), with the latter representing the femme fatale who seduces and manipulates the main character.
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
- Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)
Sunset Boulevard, American film noir, released in 1950, that is often cited as one of Hollywood’s greatest films, especially noted for Gloria Swanson’s portrayal of a fading silent-film star. The movie is named after the iconic street that runs through Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, Calif. Deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” to America’s film heritage, it was among the first films selected in 1989 for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
(Read Lillian Gish’s 1929 Britannica essay on silent film.)
Britannica Quiz
Pop Culture Quiz
A sharp critique of the film industry, Sunset Boulevard centres on the delusional aging film queen Norma Desmond (played by Swanson), who lives in a ramshackle mansion with her butler and former husband (Erich von Stroheim) while planning a doomed comeback. When Desmond takes on frustrated young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) as her lover, his attraction to a younger woman and his disgust with his own inability to leave the pampered life Desmond offers him culminates in murder.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
•Studio: Paramount Pictures
•Director: Billy Wilder
•Writers: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D.M. Marshman, Jr.
•Music: Franz Waxman
•Gloria Swanson (Norma Desmond)
•William Holden (Joe Gillis)
•Erich von Stroheim (Max Von Mayerling)
•Nancy Olson (Betty Schaefer)
•Picture
•Director
•Lead actor (William Holden)
•Lead actress (Gloria Swanson)
•Supporting actor (Erich von Stroheim)
•Supporting actress (Nancy Olson)
- Lee Pfeiffer
The story of a struggling Hollywood screenwriter who encounters an aging, almost completely forgotten silent film star living in a delusional world in which she’s convinced that her major comeback is waiting just around the corner, was appropriately called Sunset Boulevard after the famous street which was a kind of a symbol of Hollywood film ...
Oct 5, 1983 · It also brings Actress Gloria Swanson back to the screen, after a nine-year absence, in a performance that puts her right up in the running for the first Oscar of her 37-year career.
