Sunset Boulevard (1950)

[In the] late afternoon of the studio system, Wilder’s exercise in gothic neorealism is pure magic hour, satirizing yet attesting to the power of motion pictures to reanimate the past and raise the dead.

— J. Hoberman (Artforum)

[*Sunset Boulevard*] was the movie which suddenly convinced me that films were our contemporary cathedral murals, our stained glass windows, our new visual masters. [It] was transformative. The realization that films actually were paintings that moved, so to speak, has never entirely left me, and it has also drawn me into a love affair with movies that accepts the fact that they are a stolen series of photographic stills rapidly filtered past a shining lens.

— Donald Brackett (Senses of Cinema)

Since Holden was then thirty-one but playing a younger character of twenty-five, Swanson was told she would need to be aged with make-up. She declined, arguing that women of fifty who took good care of their looks did not look old, so why not make Holden youthful with make-up? They did a test and agreed with her.

[…]

'There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't good enough. Oh no! They wanted the ears of the world, too. So they opened their big mouths, and out came talk, talk, talk.' This difference sets up a trope through performance that contrasts Norma and the younger Joe Gillis, who writes scripts composed of dialogue and whose voiceover is nothing but 'talk, talk, talk'.

[…]

Norma first appears in Sunset Boulevard calling out to Joe in a voice-off, 'Why are you so late? Why have you kept me waiting so long?' Norma thinks he is the tardy undertaker come to bury her dead pet chimpanzee but, given her belief that as a star she is eternally youthful and awaits the industry's invitation for her to 'return', she may as well be asking the same two questions of modern-day Hollywood.

[…]

One has to note the off-screen irony that the huge success of Samson and Delilah prompted the cycle of biblical epics that dominated the 1950s. Norma's script, while bloated and overwrought, anticipates this cycle.

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Julie Grossman [explains] that when film noirs like Sunset Boulevard 'portray women who seem insane', these femme fatales 'are, in narrative terms, mentally unstable, but their instability reflects a rebellion against patriarchal rules that [make] them crazy, ready to act and react violently to the authority figures and patriarchal institutes that govern their lives'. Despite her unbalanced mental state, Norma is not without that kind of 'crazy' agency [according to Janey Place], since she has also been called 'the most highly stylised "spider-woman" in all of filmn noir as she weaves a web to trap and finally destroy her young victim, but even as she visually dominates him, she is presented as caught by the same false value system'.

[…]

The film repeatedly fractures and challenges one's affinity with Joe. After all, he is surprised when Norma confesses her love on New Year's Eve, which indicates that, even though he is narrating the film after the fact, he was not paying close enough attention to her behaviour, as an alert viewer does, for he was blinded by his second-rate hustling. Similarly, since he is shocked at Max's revelation in the garage about his history with Norma, Joe must not have been listening in the earlier scene when the bulet pointed out what had been his former, lavishly appointed office as the director on the Paramount lot.

[…]

In other film [noirs], corruption arises from gangsters, gamblers, dirty cops or rich, powerful men; in Sunset Boulevard it arises from Hollywood, which draws young hopefuls like Joe Gillis from the Midwest to Los Angeles, only to toss them aside when they cease to matter.

— Steven Cohan: BFI Film Classics: Sunset Boulevard (2022)