Although Mr. Wilder is considered a very cynical fellow in Hollywood, he seems to me not cynical enough; he uses bitter chocolate for his icing, but underneath is the stale old cake. Love Conquers All, ultimately...

A genuinely cynical director like Lubitsch would have had Holden stay on with Swanson because he has come to prefer loveless luxury to impoverished love. A real sentimentalist, on the other hand, would have him marry the girl and begin a new, clean life. Mr. Wilder’s ending tries to have it both ways, something as impossible in art as in life, though a feat achieved hourly in Hollywood, whose relation to either is distant.

Much of the detail is marvellously effective and clever; Miss Swanson watching her young face in an old movie and standing up into the murderous glare of the projector to cry: “They don’t make faces like that any more!” (they certainly don’t and it is our loss)....

The lost people are given splendor, recklessness, an aura of awe; the contemporaries by comparison, are small, smart, safe-playing, incapable of any kind of grandeur, good or bad; and those who think they can improve or redeem the movies are largely just a bunch of what Producer Fred Clark aptly calls Message Kids, and compares with the New York critics. This is certainly a harsh picture of Hollywood; too harsh, considering some of the people who work there. By still quieter inference, of course, Hollywood is still essentially all right because it can produce such a picture as Sunset Boulevard; and with that, the considerable distance it goes, one is bound to agree.

A young scriptwriter (William Holden), speeding away from the finance-company men who have come to repossess his car (it is Los Angeles, where a man can get along without his honor, but not without his car), turns into a driveway on Sunset Boulevard and finds himself at the decaying mansion of the once great silent star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson)... Glint-eyed Swanson clutches at her comeback role almost as if it were Salome, yet the acting honors belong to Holden. When he makes love to the crazy, demanding old woman, his face shows a mixture of pity and guilt and nausea. This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood’s leopard-skin past—it’s narrated by a corpse—is almost too clever, yet it’s at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.