{"id":1952868,"date":"2025-08-10T18:11:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T18:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1952868"},"modified":"2025-08-10T18:11:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T18:11:09","slug":"at-75-sunset-boulevard-is-ready-again-for-its-closeup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/at-75-sunset-boulevard-is-ready-again-for-its-closeup\/","title":{"rendered":"At 75, “Sunset Boulevard” is ready again for its closeup"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There are some movies where just about every line is quotable. Take Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard,” which premiered 75 years ago this month.<\/p>\n

Gillis: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.”
Desmond: “I AM big. It’s the pictures that got small.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The film was anything but small! The legendary director had Gloria Swanson as the rejected silent film star, Norma Desmond, who seemed to be going quietly out of her mind; and William Holden as the failed screenwriter Joe Gillis, who became her kept man.<\/p>\n

“She was 52 at the time; William Holden was 31,” said UT Austin film professor Noah Isenberg. “The age difference was extraordinary. Today we might not think much of it, but it was big.”<\/p>\n

Isenberg says the noir “Sunset Boulevard” tested the limits of what a 1950 audience would bear. The opening scene is gruesome enough, with the murdered Gillis face down in a swimming pool. But the film originally started in the L.A. morgue, with Gillis and other cadavers talking about how they got there. \u00a0Isenberg said, “It was too dark, too morbid. Audiences weren’t ready for it. Instead, you have John Seitz’s camera trained on that curb.” Appropriately, the film begins in the gutter.<\/p>\n

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