Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a Paramount Pictures noir you can watch online on iFILM. Director Billy Wilder opens on a dead man floating face-down in a swimming pool — and then lets that dead man narrate the film. William Holden plays Joe Gillis, a broke Hollywood screenwriter dodging repo men when his car blows a tire and he coasts into the wrong driveway.

The driveway belongs to Norma Desmond. Gloria Swanson plays her as a woman who was genuinely enormous in silent pictures and has spent twenty years in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard waiting for the world to remember that. She has one faithful servant, Max — played by silent-era director Erich von Stroheim — and a script she's been writing for her comeback, which she calls a return. Gillis agrees to polish it. The arrangement pays his rent. It costs considerably more than that.

Billy Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Brackett; both won Academy Awards for it, one of three Oscars the film took home in 1951 from eleven nominations. The American Film Institute ranks it among the twenty greatest American films ever made, and Norma's final line to the camera has been quoted in film criticism ever since. Stream Sunset Boulevard (1950) on iFILM.