Growing older, in many ways, is a slow and steady reckoning with one’s own mortality. For silent film star of yesteryear Norma Desmond, (Gloria Swanson) growing older is a continual process of denial. The reality that she will not perpetually be twenty-five is a horror she cannot face, and she works on her return vehicle—an unwieldy, un-filmable adaptation of Salome—unaware that Hollywood and the world has also aged beyond her glory days. When down and out screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) stumbles into her home, she recruits the younger man to help polish her script, but the dichotomy between Norma’s vision and the reality of Hollywood proves to be an unbridgeable gap, a cruel reality in an industry that prizes youth above all else, which Billy Wilder unflinchingly exposes. — Evan Cogswell
- Directed by: Billy Wilder
- Produced by:
- Written by: Billy Wilder Charles Brackett D.M. Marshman Jr.
- Music by: Franz Waxman
- Cinematography by: John F. Seitz
- Editing by:
- Release Date: 1950
- Running Time: 110
- Language: English
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