Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Imagine how humiliating it would be to be Max von Mayerling of Sunset Boulevard. Once a top Hollywood director, married to his most exciting discovery (Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond), but now reduced to serving as her butler – tending her dusty mausoleum of a mansion, arranging parties with her fellow Hollywood has-beens, watching her parade new husbands and lovers before him, and forging fan letters in order to keep her from discovering that her fame has faded, lest she lose her already fragile grip on sanity. (In the movie’s supreme in-joke, Max is played by Erich von Stroheim (pictured, far right), who really was a once-great director who’d had a tempestuous working relationship with Swanson; one of the movies screened at Norma’s house is actually Queen Kelly, in which von Stroheim directed Swanson.)
Of course, Billy Wilder’s movie is essentially a gothic horror movie, with Norma as Dracula and von Stroheim as Renfield; it’s a notion made explicit in those scary organ chords that the perpetually scowling Max plays. No wonder a good chunk of the running time is over before Norma’s kept man Joe Gillis (William Holden) learns about Max’s distinguished past. Why does he stay in such a degrading job? No doubt he still loves Norma and wants to protect her. But there’s also the old joke inquiring why someone wouldn’t quit a job like that. The punchline: “What? And leave show business?”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3hajwRww6I]