August Film Club #1

 Happy August everyone. We're moving into our last month of our Summer Series of Film Noir and we have two more films. The first film for August is Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard.

Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American black comedy film noir directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman Jr. It is named after a major street that runs through Hollywood and western Los Angeles.

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. Erich von Stroheim plays Max von Mayerling, her devoted butler, and Nancy Olson, Jack Webb, Lloyd Gough, and Fred Clark appear in supporting roles. Director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper play themselves, and the film includes cameo appearances by silent film stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson.

The film currently holds a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert awarded it 4/4 stars, added it to his list of the Great Movies and said this in his review, "Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” is the portrait of a forgotten silent star, living in exile in her grotesque mansion, screening her old films, dreaming of a comeback. But it’s also a love story, and the love keeps it from becoming simply a waxworks or a freak show. Gloria Swanson gives her greatest performance as the silent star Norma Desmond, with her grasping talons, her theatrical mannerisms, her grandiose delusions. William Holden tactfully inhabits the tricky role of the writer half her age, who allows himself to be kept by her. But the performance that holds the film together, that gives it emotional resonance and makes it real in spite of its gothic flamboyance, is by Erich von Stroheim, as Norma’s faithful butler Max. Sunset Boulevard remains the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t. When the silent star first greets the penniless writer inside her mansion, they have a classic exchange. “You used to be big,” he says. Norma responds with the great line, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

We will be meeting Thursday, August 20 @ 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQWqIA1-kvA

Hope to see you there!