'Sunset Boulevard' - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.
The cold, mean 'Sunset Boulevard' - a beautiful title, though I suspect it was shot on another boulevard - is further proof of the resurgence of art in the Hollywood of super-craftsmen with insuperable taste.
The golden age of Hollywood was the conceit of the movie and the style of the movie.
What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.
The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.
Hollywood is the backdrop of my family, and I know that the movie business is incredibly cruel as you get older.
If I were given a choice between two films and one was dark and explored depraved, troubled or sick aspects of our culture, I would always opt for that over the next romantic comedy.
When you go off in the world and make your life, and you come back to your home town, and you find your old high-school friends driving in the same circles, doing the same things, that's what Hollywood's like. It's a little block, little town. It doesn't really grow or change.
Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.
Hollywood is something else. It's such an exaggerated idea. The concept of what 'beautiful' really is is ludicrous.