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Sunset Boulevard is crammed with detail—witty, revealing, evocative, sometimes contrived but always effective. Much of it, as the camera roams the Desmond mansion, sustains the mood of a good ghost story: a pet chimpanzee is solemnly buried by candlelight; the wind sighs through a pipe organ; rats scurry across the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The modern Hollywood is reflected in a gallery of expertly drawn types. Actress Desmond's Hollywood of the past comes alive in the fantastic trappings of her house and in her visiting bridge companions ("the Waxworks"), played by Hollywood Oldtimers Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner.
The picture is more than a brilliant exercise in moviemaking techniques; it is also a blistering commentary on Hollywood manners & morals. The film shows Hollywood as a jungle stronghold of anarchic opportunism, where success is the highest end, to be pursued by any means and at any price. It also suggests that the movies have their honest craftsmen and—derisively labeled "the Message Kids"—their idealists.
The picture itself may strike some as a disturbing symptom of a jungle mentality that flourishes in the U.S. far beyond the boundaries of Hollywood. By making a gutless heel into a sympathetic, attractive, and pseudo-sophisticated "hero," Sunset Boulevard seems to say that the smudged line between right & wrong is about the same as the line of least resistance. Yet a good deal of the sympathy the "hero" arouses is the shamefaced, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God kind of sympathy aroused by any conscience-stricken, miserable human being.
Actor Holden plays the picture's most difficult role to perfection. Von Stroheim is equally right as the onetime brilliant director, conveying as much by swallowing hard or tilting his head as he does with any of his lines. Actress Olson is an engagingly unaffected ingenue who can act.
Gloria Swanson, in a role which, at first blush, seems to hew ticklishly close to her own lifeline, gets a chance to mimic a parasol-twirling Mack Sennett bathing beauty, to impersonate Charlie Chaplin (as she did in 1924's Manhandled) and to burst into dazzling emotional pyrotechnics. It is as juicy a part as any actress could hope for, and Actress Swanson squeezes the last drop from it.
A 51-year-old grandmother, Gloria Swanson has made 63 movies, five marriages (all ended in divorce) and even two or three comebacks. She has also made—and lost, through wild extravagance and woolly business deals—several million dollars; she says she has lost track of just how many. She looks younger than her years, is still energetic enough to have taken on a three-month tour of 30 cities as advance agent for Sunset Boulevard. She insists, with justice (but probably in vain): "It is not the story of my life."