Summary: Struggling Hollywood writer Joe Gillis (William Holden), while trying to evade the repo men who are after his car, stumbles onto the decrepit estate of aging, washed-up, yet still fantastically wealthy, silent-era actress Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). She hires him to help her edit a screenplay she's written (the story of Salome, the dancing-girl who was paid to murder by beheading John the Baptist). Norma is desperately lonely, so she uses all kinds of gifts and tricks (including a suicide attempt) to keep Joe around. Meanwhile, Joe starts falling in love with Betty (Nancy Olson), an aspiring writer who also happens to be his best friend's fiance. Through it all, there is Max von Mayerling (Eric von Stroheim), Norma's faithful servant and driver (and ex-director and ex-husband). Things don't really go well for anybody.
The opening scene reveals a lot about the ending of the movie, and it's one of those scenes that leaves me wondering how much the director expects his audience to grasp. My brain finally made the connection maybe about ten minutes after the scene, and I'd guess that while many other viewers also probably come to the same realization, many others probably don't. There are other movies where the ending is also revealed early in the film, but the director tries to obscure it to some degree. (I'm sorry if that paragraph is opaque, but I'm trying to avoid spoilers... I know, I know...)
Also, this being a movie about a forgotten silent-era movie star, there are connections to The Artist. Valentine is certainly partly inspired by Norma Desmond (watching her old movies alone in her house, as smoke wafts up into the light of the projector), but you could also make the connection between the butler/driver Max and James Cromwell's character in The Artist, as well as the two cars themselves. Also, in Sunset Blvd. they keep mentioning some guy named Valentino, which sounds a lot like The Artist's main character.
There's a bonus to watching the DVD rather than just streaming the movie online: the bonus features for Sunset Blvd. actually included a little (15-minute) retrospective, with interviews from various cast members and others. I've wished for that kind of thing on several other of the older, classic films we've watched recently, but surprisingly (or not?) many of those older films don't have any special features whatsoever. Without that special feature I never would have known that the actor who plays the butler/ex-husband/ex-director Max has such an epic name, Eric von Stroheim (well, I might have figured that much out), and that he himself was a former director, who had directed Gloria Swanson in her youth, and even directed the film Queen Kelly, whose footage we see in the scene where Desmond watches her old film. Or that Swanson's career at least somewhat mimicked that of her character in the film (although, if you're casting a 50-year-old Hollywood actress to play a 50-year-old Hollywood actress, there are inevitably going to be some similarities).
Ultimately, I can see why this is a classic movie. There are a few great shots (mainly the early shot from under the pool, which turns out to have actually been shot above the pool using a mirror), quality performances, and a classic story line. As I watched, I was imagining a remake starring Helen Mirren as the old actress and Ewan McGregor as the writer, although it might be that they're both too old for those roles at this point. But then I saw Glenn Close talking about how she'd only done "Sunset Blvd: The Musical" because it was a musical and it would be impossible to do a straight remake of the movie. That's definitely true; you can't remake classic movies. But when you have a classic story, you can remake it forever, and at the heart of Sunset Blvd. is a classic story. (Even within the movie, you have at least two classic stories referenced: Cecil B. Demille is in the process of filming "Sampson and Delilah", and Norma's script is the story of Salome, the famous beheader of John the Baptist, who has been endlessly painted.) Although she gets a lot of praise for her acting in this movie, I think Gloria Swanson goes just a little too overboard for my taste. That said, I really enjoyed watching this movie and I'm glad I did. It's even probably worth a re-watch after a year or so.
(On the word "gay"; Norma recalls to Cecil that the last time they met was at a "gay" place, meaning a dance club or a party or something like that. Just interesting that it's 11 years after the "gay" line in Bringing Up Baby, but still plenty early enough to use the word "gay" in the joyous sense without a second thought. Also, there's really no homosexual content in this movie, explicit or implicit, as far as I could tell, not that that's surprising.)
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