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Hollywood is poison - and few films understand its horrors like Billy Wilder's 'Sunset Boulevard'

- Xan Brooks

In the autumn of 2012, a team of archeologists trekked into the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes on the coast of California.

Digging into the sand, they uncovered the ruins of a lost Egyptian city that included 21 giant sphinxes, a gate, a temple and four plaster statues of Pharaoh Ramses II. This excavation provided a fascinating piece of buried history, an insight into a forgotten world, although it proved nowhere near as old as first appearances would suggest. It was the mouldering set from The Ten Commandments (1923), a silent epic directed by Cecil B DeMille and subsequently abandoned in the desert for future generations to find.

DeMille, as it happens, appears as himself in Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilder’s classic portrait of Hollywood’s musty relics, which has itself been dug up and dusted down for its 75th birthday reissue. Sunset Boulevard is variously labelled as a noir thriller, a Gothic melodrama and an acid satire on celebrity culture, but it is also – at least in part – a comedy-horror about the accelerated nature of American time.

Its grotesque heroine, Norma Desmond, lives in a “grim sunset castle” – leaking and rat-infested – that was built in the suburbs not quite three decades before. “Norma Desmond? She must be a million years old,” marvels a studio employee to DeMille, when the woman is actually 50, around the same age that Angelina Jolie and Reese Witherspoon are today. Wilder’s film depicts a period in which the industry was moving at such a breakneck pace that the silent era already felt like ancient Egypt and the stars of the 1920s seemed as distant as the pharaohs.