"Sunset Boulevard" has a special place in my heart as one of the first classics that interested me in cinema. It still works great after 70 years as it's a simple, straightforward, but focused film that manages to deal with timeless themes with sarcasm and intelligence without having no arthouse pretentiousness or making no life-changing statements. Video quality aside, there is nothing I would change about it.

The characters are iconic thanks to the fact that they are played by actors that actually experienced the dawn of the silent era and the struggles to survive in the ever-changing Hollywood industry. Forgotten silent era diva Norma Desmond is played by Gloria Swanson, who was herself a faded star who lost her job due to the advent of sound films. Her butler and former director Max is played by Erich von Stroheim, who happens to have directed some of Gloria Swanson's classics (one of them gets even projected in Norma's living room). Director Cecil DeMille plays himself, and other silent era actors and old Hollywood personalities like Buster Keaton also have cameos.

I also loved how, in the end, none of the characters is really positive. Norma and Max are self-delusional and unable to accept that the world around them has changed, they would do anything to prevent their dream from falling apart. Joe and Betty represent the "young" Hollywood, but they are blinded by their ambition and egoism to the point they both chose to embark on a clandestine affair, even though they owe everything to their partners.

First-person narration by the already dead protagonist Joe Gillis makes the film even more fascinating. Gillis is a talentless but arrogant screenwriter who succumbed to Hollywood's trap of fame, and it feels almost ironic that "Sunset Boulevard" could have been the first successful screenplay in his career.

The dialogues tend to be over the top at times, but they perfectly suit Norma's character and lifestyle. Gillis' cynical tone in the narration, combined with the awareness of his tragic fate, also manages to make us understand that we are not dealing with the usual melodramatic sentimentality of Hollywood.