Sunset Boulevard is perhaps the most acclaimed, but darkest film-noir story about behind the scenes Hollywood, self-deceit, and the price of fame. The mood of the film is immediately established by the narrator - a dead man floating in a swimming pool. This movie is considered one of the greatest movies ever made about a struggling Hollywood writer and his price for fame. Sunset Boulevard, directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, was a classic, and tragic film and was highly-regarded at its time, honored with eleven Academy Award nominations and the recipient of three Oscars. This movie is one of my personal favorites because of its use of narration, its cleverly written story, and its amusing and complex characters. .
The mood and tone of the story is established by the main character and narrator, Joe Gillis. The narrator's voice sounds amused. He promises to tell us, in a unique flashback structure, the story of a young screenwriter, Gillis, and how he ended up murdered, face down in a pool. The story flashes back to six months earlier when Joe finds that he is unable to sell his scripts. Gillis as a narrator provides brief parts of comic relief and sets the mood of the movie. For example, when Gillis is forced by Norma Desmond to read her script he says, "Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad "bad" writing could be. This tested the limit. I wondered what a handwriting expert would make of that childish scrawl of hers." The interesting thing about his narration is that the narrator is actually dead. This has a different structure than to what most movies tend to do. The movie starts off with the main character dead, and then goes to a flashback. The viewers are more interested in the movie because they want to find out how he became this way. Gillis narrates through his relationship with obsessive Norma Desmond and how he is kept on a leash. He talks about his opinions and observances, and provides dramatic irony to the story.
