Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies".

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the 1950 black comedy, film noir, takedown of Hollywood, "Sunset Boulevard".

Released by Paramount, it was produced and co-written by Charles Brackett and directed and co-written by his longtime collaborator, Billy Wilder.

[light wistful music] "Sunset Boulevard" stars Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, and Nancy Olson with Fred Clark, Lloyd Gough, Jack Webb, and several cameos featuring former stars of the silent era.

The film begins with a narrator speaking over scenes of police cars driving through a wealthy neighborhood in the early morning sun.

"Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California," he explains, "It's about five o'clock in the morning.

"That's the homicide squad "complete with detectives, the newspapermen."

The cars stop outside a mansion where police are already fishing the dead body of a man out of the sunken swimming pool.

The narrator, a screenwriter named Joe Gillis, says the death will soon be all over the news because an old time movie star was involved.

He tells the story in flashback, going back six months to when he was out of money, in debt and in danger of having his car repossessed.

He goes to see a contact at Paramount Studios, a producer named Sheldrake, to pitch a baseball story.

But Sheldrake's script reader, Betty Schaefer, unaware Joe is there, says she thinks the script is flat and trite.

So Sheldrake passes on it.

Joe then tracks down his agent, Morino, at a golf course, but Morino has no prospects for him and refuses to loan him any money.

Driving back to his apartment and considering his prospects, Joe was spotted and chased by two men from the finance company.

To evade them, Joe turns into the driveway of what appears to be a long, abandoned mansion on Sunset Boulevard and hides his car in the garage.

When he explores the neglected property, a voice calls him from the house and a livery butler takes him up to the bedroom of an older woman who has mistaken him for an undertaker.

He recognizes her as silent motion picture star Norma Desmond, who has not made a movie since the introduction of talkies.

Provoked, she rants about the crassness of the modern film industry, but when she learns Joe is a writer, she asks him to read a script she's writing about Salome, a script she hopes will be the basis for her triumphal return to the screen.

Seeing his opportunity to lie low and makes him easy money, Joe agrees.

He finds himself unnerved by Norma and the bizarre private world she has chosen to inhabit in the glow of her lost celebrity.

When "Sunset Boulevard" was released in 1950, the motion picture business was going through a difficult period of transition.

After peaking in 1946, attendance at movie theaters was in decline.

An anti-monopoly lawsuit, United States versus Paramount Pictures Incorporated et al, brought the end to vertical integration, a system in which movie studios also owned theaters that were required to play whatever films and shorts the studio sent them.

Fears of communist influence in Hollywood led to congressional investigation and the blacklisting of major writers, actors, and directors.

Americans began moving from urban centers to suburbs, cutting cinema attendance, a problem made worse by the burgeoning television industry.

Hollywood responded with technicolor, widescreen epics, and the sort of entertainment either lavish and lively or dark and gritty that could outdo anything on a 12 inch black and white television screen.

But "Sunset Boulevard" recalled an earlier, considerably more traumatic transition in the motion picture business, the transition from silent movies to what were derisively called "talkies".

Once that transition was made, the entire film industry changed both in style and content.

Movies now needed fully developed screenplays and whole new crews of technicians.

Independent production companies were overshadowed by the major studios, and actors who had become major stars in a distinct form of visual entertainment passed from public view when a new form of visual and audio entertainment became the order of the day.

Some made the transition successfully, others tried and failed, and still others decided to retire, often very comfortably, but more often not.

After Billy Wilder had considered several other silent movie actresses for the role of Norma Desmond, fellow director George Cukor suggested Gloria Swanson.

Swanson's history ran parallel to that of Norma in many ways, although Swanson, after some talking pictures, accepted the end of her movie career and moved on to New York where she worked on stage and in radio and television.

She was not looking for a return to movies when offered the part of Norma Desmond.

And in fact, was offended when she was asked to do a screen test for the film.

She had made 20 films for Paramount and wondered, "Why do they want me to audition?"

She asked Cukor if she should refuse.

He told her Norma Desmond was the role she would be remembered for.

"If they ask you to do 10 screen tests, do 10 screen tests," Cukor said, "Or I will personally shoot you."

[bright music] The many pictures and photographs of Norma Desmond that filled her mansion in the movie are all pictures of Gloria Swanson at her cinematic prime.

Another connection to Swanson's glory days in Hollywood was Erich von Stroheim, who plays her butler and ex-husband, Max von Mayerling.

Born in Vienna in 1885, von Stroheim began work in Hollywood as a stunt man and actor before becoming a screenwriter and director.

He became known for lavish, expensive productions that tried the stamina of both his actors and his financial backers.

His greatest film was 1924's "Greed," based on Frank Norris's novel "McTeague" that clocked in at eight hours in its initial cut.

He was fired as director from several different films including 1929's "Queen Kelly," starring Gloria Swanson.

Scenes from that film appear in "Sunset Boulevard" as scenes from one of Norma Desmond's silent movies.

During filming, Billy Wilder said to von Stroheim, "von, you were always 10 years ahead of your time."

To which von Stroheim replied, "20."

He came to resent the fame he received from what he dismissed as "The Butler role" because it depicted him as a has-been.

In fact, the only reason he accepted the part was because he needed the money.

[bright music continues] "Sunset Boulevard" includes cameos by several other actors famous for silent films including gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and the trio, Joe Gillis calls, "The Wax Work," made up of H.B.

Warner, Ann Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton.

Warner played Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's silent version of "King of Kings" in 1927, While Nilsson was named the most beautiful woman in America in 1907 and later became a silent movie star.

Keaton, the "Great Stone Face" was with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, one of the three great comic actors of the silent era.

During filming, when he sat down at the bridge table with his fellow actors, he muttered "Wax works is right," sending them into gales of laughter.

Before the film's release, Paramount held a private screening of "Sunset Boulevard" for various studio heads and other guests.

MGMs Louis B.

Mayor was outraged by the movie.

He told Wilder, "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you.

You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood."

Wilder responded with a short, obscene directive.

But other guests had a different reaction.

When Gloria Swanson looked for silent star, Mary Pickford after the screening, she was told, "She can't show herself, Gloria.

She's too overcome, we all are."

For her part, Barbara Stanwyck, who became a star shortly after the end of the silent era, knelt to kiss the hem of Gloria Swanson's skirt.

[bright music continues] Critics generally agreed with Stanwyck.

A review on the Hollywood Reporter said that this completely original work is so marvelously satisfying, dramatically perfect and technically brilliant is no haphazard Hollywood miracle, but the inevitable consequence of the collaboration of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder.

James Agee wrote in the British Film Magazine Sight and Sound, "Sunset Boulevard is much the most ambitious movie about Hollywood ever done and is the best of several good ones under the bargain."

A review in Time magazine put it more simply, "Hollywood at its worst told by Hollywood at its best."

More recently, "Sunset Boulevard" has been consistently rated on the top 100 of the greatest American films ever made.

Billy Wilder treated the whole matter with his typical irreverence.

When asked whether "Sunset Boulevard" was a black comedy?

He replied, "No, just a picture."

When crew members wanted to know how Wilder intended to shoot the bizarre burial of Norma's chimpanzee, he said, "You know, the the usual monkey funeral sequence."

When people asked what happened to Norma Desmond after the film's conclusion, he would say, "I have no idea!

All I know is that she's meshuga, that's all.

That's the end."

And what an ending it was.

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland, goodnight.