It is surprising how loath film-makers have been to make films about themselves, or about the magic medium of illusion they transmit to the world. As egotistical and narcissistic as most film artists are—including the writers and directors, who are the crucial creators, of course—they have seldom dared turn their cameras on their own involuted lives or explore the cultural importance and impermanence of most of the work they do. For that reason, Sunset Boulevard … was not only rare as an invasion of a ticklish subject when it came along, but it was—and still is—the most arresting and subtly philosophical film about Hollywood that there has been. (p. 198)

Sunset Boulevard takes a long look at the past of this mesmeric medium and makes the sardonic discovery that most of its yield is vaporous and vain, that the seeming triumphant creations accomplished in one age will be, with but few exceptions, crumbling celluloid in the next. It offers the sobering implication that the major output of movies is myth, momentary excitements and exaltations that are as evanescent as dreams….

Norma Desmond, one of the great, glamourous stars of silent films who now dwells in a musty mansion set back from Sunset Boulevard, where she has been in archaeological seclusion for a couple of decades when the story begins, represents more than the delusions of grandeur of one old star. She represents the ostentation and arrogance of a whole generation of filmmakers which has passed—a generation that produced a glittering output of gaudy trumperies and vast vulgarities, yet whose craftsmen assumed the postures and played the roles of great creators of Art.

She is further a haunting reminder of the massive mythology of silent-screen gods and goddesses whose well-advertised images drew millions of devoted worshipers into darkened temples all over the world. She is altogether a living relic of a tempo and taste that are dead. (p. 199)

[It] is notable that it is not a touching picture. As loaded as it is with what might be easy inducements to tearful nostalgia, it is brutal and unrelenting in its exposure of the haughty vanity and selfishness of Norma, who is wholly without true sentiment. (p. 200)

[There is something sad about the final scene]. But I find this calculated scene more a pointedly ironic comment upon the phoniness of much that is in films. Like everything else in the picture, it is a shrewd reflection of the basically evanescent creation of Hollywood. (p. 201)