Films I Love #25: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Sunset Boulevard's Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is quite possibly the greatest of Hollywood cinema's many self-parodic characters. Norma is an antique of the silent age, one of the many great stars of the silent era who, too invested in the expressive melodramatics and gestural acting of silent cinema, simply could not make the transition to sound. If anything, though, Billy Wilder's darkly