Want to see a cinematic masterpiece? You can watch this must-see movie on streaming

Norma Desmond, the great silent actress, lives in her luxurious villa in Beverly Hills in the company of Max von Meyerling, her butler, who was also her director and husband. Joe Gillis (an enthusiastic William Holden), a penniless screenwriter, stumbles into the apartment and Norma offers him work on a film script that signals her return to the screen, Salome.

Joe accepts, moves in with her, both fascinated and horrified by her extravagance and delirium, and soon becomes her lover. When his delirium turns to paranoia, he appears in the middle of Paramount Studios to convince Cecil B. As DeMille takes a picture with him, Gillis begins to distance himself…

“Hollywood killed me!”

Fraudulent producers, illegal actors and actresses, screenwriters who devour ambitions, broken careers, Hollywood and its falsified Star System, all its crooks… American cinema regularly looks at the cradle of the Hollywood industry and its cruel predatory nature that consumes. His talents only to spit them out later, destroying the entire system that caters to royal dollars and the studios that mold them as they please.

On this subject, the most famous film is undoubtedly Billy Wilder’s Twilight Boulevard, available on Paramount+. An absolute masterpiece that fully deserves its huge reputation, confirmed by AlloCiné viewers with an average of 4.3 out of 5.

When Erich von Stroheim returned to Europe after his painful experience as a director in the United States, where his films were regularly mutilated by a quarter, a half, or even three quarters, he bitterly stated: “Hollywood killed me.”

So it’s not without cruel irony to see him in his last major movie role Twilight Boulevard, for which he received the only Oscar nomination of his career (Best Supporting Actor). He plays a former director turned servant to Norm Desmond, of former silent film fame, convinced that Hollywood still wants him. Although it has long been relegated to the Hall of Antiquities.

The observation is all the more cruel since Billy Wilder in his film actually invited the former glories of the silent cinema, such as Buster Keaton, or the stars of the golden age of Hollywood, such as Gloria Swanson, who portrays the fabulous Norma Desmond, whose thought-provoking last series. The film has largely gone down in history.

But it’s also a work of extraordinary clarity: it really evokes the collapse of the Empire, of Hollywood, of what was once the New Babylon, even though the 1950s are considered a new golden age for the majors, which go into recession again in the 60s and 70s with the rise of the New Hollywood.

A must see movie to see (or rewatch!) on Paramount+.