In an age of ring lights, content calendars and the panic of a post that has not performed, Norma Desmond seems as a modern patron saint. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is now more than seventy-five years old and yet the sight of a former star rehearsing her own comeback in a mansion full of her own photographs plays as pointedly as anything on a phone screen. It was the right film to see on the big screen as part of Almost Perfect: The Films of Billy Wilder, the BFI Southbank season that runs until the end of December and the right one to see after the introduction for audiences aged 25 and under, which mapped Wilder’s life from Vienna to Hollywood.
Wilder was born in 1906 and grew up in Vienna besotted with American jazz, American slang and the American idea that anyone might become someone, before working as a journalist in Berlin, co-writing the screenplay for People on Sunday in 1930, and leaving Germany. He arrived in Hollywood as a refugee who wrote in his second language, and he was quick to master the studio system with a wit that could make the bleakest scenario laugh at itself. It is hard to watch Sunset Boulevard without sensing an outsider’s double vision.
That double vision is what the season’s curator, the BFI’s Ruby McGuigan, has built the programme around. Running from 19 October to 31 December and featuring more than thirty films, Almost Perfect arranges Wilder’s career into four themes namely Billy Liar, Class Warfare, A Crisis of Masculinity, and In Pursuit of Fame and Fortune, the last of which takes in Hollywood, media manipulation and the pitfalls of ambition and is the natural home for a film as steeped in the industry’s self-mythology as this one. McGuigan describes Wilder as the definition of the American Dream, a refugee turned Hollywood titan, and the themes make clear that the season is equally interested in what that dream cost.
The story is told by a dead man, which remains one of the great provocations of studio cinema. William Holden’s Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter dodging his creditors, narrates from a swimming pool with the weary self-mockery of someone who sold out and still did not get paid, and Holden plays him with an easy, slightly shabby charm that makes his eventual entrapment all the more believable. Gloria Swanson, herself a silent star, is magnificent as Norma Desmond, gliding through her gloomy house in a fog of grandeur and grievance, and her performance never tips into caricature because Swanson plays the loneliness first and the theatrics second. Erich von Stroheim brings a haunting stillness to Max, the butler with a past that the film reveals with delicacy, while Nancy Olson gives Betty Schaefer a bright and sceptical decency that makes the audience wish for Joe a different story. Cecil B. DeMille, Buster Keaton and Hedda Hopper appear as themselves – the film’s refusal to separate fiction from the industry that produced it is part of its appeal.
The writing, by Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman Jr., is as dense and quotable as anything Wilder ever made, with Norma’s line that she is big and it is the pictures that got small standing as both a joke and a diagnosis. What lingers is how little the film’s central anxiety has aged. Norma Desmond is a woman who cannot bear to be forgotten and her descent is both a horror story and a tragedy. Wilder always denied he was a cynic, pointing to the hope threaded through his tales of human fallibility, and it is there in the compassion with which the film regards its monster. The final close-up is chilling, but it is also strangely tender: a reminder that behind every performance there is a person desperate to be seen.
Almost Perfect: The Films of Billy Wilder runs at BFI Southbank until 31 December 2026.