Although my recent revisit to SUNSET BLVD. must have been close to the twentieth time I've seen it, I'm just as stunned and captivated by it as the first time I saw it. In SUNSET BLVD, everything just clicks, complete with all the now classic taglines; "It's not me that got small, it's the pictures that got smaller." "We didn't need dialog. We had faces then." "I'm ready for my close-up now, Mr. DeMille." I can't think of any other picture about Hollywood - or the world of film in general - that has achieved this unique self-reflective look at the film community. Ironically, none probably could have dreamed of the magnificent performance Gloria Swanson turned in. At barely 5 feet tall, she commands the screen like no-one else and really towers above them all as Norma Desmond, the aging, completely delusional film star from the silent era. Hard to imagine Gloria Swanson wasn't first choice to play the part of Norma Desmond with Pola Negri (too much Polish accent), Mae Murray, Mary Pickford (too sweet) and even Mae West all considered for the part of Norma Desmond.<br /><br />The movie opens with the bullet-riddled body of a young man floating face down in the pool next to a mansion. Soon, the story is told with the brilliant device of a voice-over of a dead man, Joe Gilis (William Holden), recounting the events leading up to his death. A broke screenwriter, down on his luck and desperate to take on any job, he stumbles upon what looks like a deserted mansion, when he's hounded by some creditors. Soon, he's ordered into the house by a female voice that turns out to belong to legendary silent screen star Norma Desmond who retreated from the outside world, now living a lonely and isolated existence with her aging servant (Erich von Stroheim). After some lamenting the current state of the film industry, she offers Joe a job of doctoring her script for SALOME, which she plans as her comeback vehicle. Clearly this is never gonna happen, but Joe decides to take the job, and he money, but soon becomes a virtual prisoner of the actress's creepy past and increasingly delusional dreamworld.<br /><br />Almost every sentence, remark, Swanson's antiques and postures have become part of our cinematic heritage now, we sometimes forget how delightfully crisp and clever the dialog was at the time, and still is. After the death of Norma Desmond's chimpanzee, Holden acidly remarks; "This must have been one important chimp. The grandson of King-Kong perhaps." "And then the rains came, over-sized, like everything else in California."<br /><br />This film closed the door to the old Hollwyood-generation, opened one to the new and basically started a new era in self-conscious film-making and - in the process - reconciled the until then completely forgotten silent film stars. Of the three directors featured in the film, Cecil B. DeMille was still well respected and would make some of his greatest films in the years to come. Erich von Stroheim, now degraded to being Desmond's butler, was largely an outcast by then, just as the totally forgotten Buster Keaton who's allowed to play card games at Desmond's mansion once in a while. It's quite outstanding how the cynical Wilder achieves to really make us care about the characters, all of them, but especially Norma Desmond's, whose oblivious outlook on the world surrounding her and her own long since gone fame (Von Stroheim writes her fake fan letters) really makes you pity her fate.<br /><br />With the right ingredients, the right script, the right casting, Wilder was able to achieve phenomenal results. Needless to say, he made a whole string of films now considered classics, but this is the pinnacle of his career and head and shoulders above any other self-reflective turn Hollywood embarked on in all the years to follow. If forced to make a shortlist of ten films I couldn't do without, this one's on it.<br /><br />Camera Obscura --- 10/10