Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a struggling screenwriter. When debt collectors try to take away his car, he drives off with them close on his tail. He spots an open garage in what he thinks is a deserted mansion off of Sunset Boulevard. Once he parks, Max (Erich von Stroheim) hurries him into the mansion. Obviously he thinks that Joe is someone else. When Joe gets inside he is ushered into a room where silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) mourns over a covered body. She starts describing the type of coffin that she wants only to find out Joe is not from a funeral home. Disgruntled, she starts to throw him out until she realizes that he is a writer. Norma shows him an epically long script that she has been working on and asks if he can help her with it. Joe, needing the money and a place to hide out for a few days, reluctantly agrees.
The script is rubbish and Norma doesn't give him a moment alone with it. Always hovering over his shoulder and questioning what he does. He slowly gets sucked in to her warped world. Watching movies in her home theatre (all of her own pictures of course), watching her play bridge with her friends, she even starts buying him nice clothes and jewelry. He begins to feel suffocated since he never seems to have a moment alone to himself. On News Year Eve, he realizes that Norma is in love with him. He tells her he does not feel the same and she runs off to cry in her room. Joe decides to leave and go to his friend Artie's (Jack Webb) house.
There is a party going on and Joe finally starts to loosen up being around people his own age again. He runs into Artie's girlfriend Betty (Nancy Olson), who is a reader at Paramount. It was with her negative notes on Joe's script that he was unable to sell it. She has been reading some of Joe's stories and thinks she has a good idea for a screenplay and wants Joe to help her write it. It is obvious the two have chemistry (not only in a professionally way, but a romantic one too). He calls Max to tell him to pack up his things because he will not be coming back to the mansion. However, Max tells him that Norma tried to kill herself. Guilt consumes him, and Joe goes back to the mansion to check on Norma.
When he arrives, he tries to cheer her up so she won't kill herself. He ends up kissing her and is suck back into the isolate life of the mansion. He gives up writing and basically becomes Norma's pet doing exactly as she asks. Norma decides to try and sell the script she wrote to a famous director she use to work with. After a few days, she starts getting calls from her assistant. She refuses to speak to an assistant and instead goes to Paramount to visit the director personally. While there the director is confused why one of his assistants would be calling her. It turns out they were interested in using her car in one of their pictures. While Norma is meeting with the director, Joe runs into Betty. They talk about the script idea until they are interrupted by Max saying they need to leave before Norma realizes they are not interested in her.
Norma, thinking she is about to make her triumphant return to the silver screen, starts going through extreme beautification procedures. Since she is preoccupied, Joe has time to sneak out of the house. He works on the screenplay with Betty and the two fall in love. When Norma figures out what is going on she is consumed with jealousy.
The movie sucks you in from the get go. You can tell that Norma is one crazy bi-otch. Desperately clinging on to her golden years by latching onto the youthful screenwriter with those claws she calls hands (they are really creepy). There is just something off about the whole situation that even makes the audience uneasy. The dialogue is not only realistic (actors really are crazy) but they have some great one lines. "I am big! It's the pictures that got small." And Gloria Swanson is great in this film. She always seems to have her head tilted back in order to give her face more of a horrific (not like ahhh she looks terrible, but more like monstrous) sight. Billy Wilder did it again! Pulling everything together, lighting, acting, screenplay, soundtrack, into another masterpiece.
Rating: *****
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