Billy Wilder’s SUNSET BOULEVARD begins as memorably as it ends, with a dead body floating in a pool, and concludes with an iconic staircase and a line you’ve probably quoted (or misquoted!): “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” Starring Gloria Swanson as the ravishingly delusional, aging diva Norma Desmond, SUNSET BOULEVARD is a claustrophobic cautionary tale of Hollywood which finds Desmond wasting away in her decaying mansion on the famed street, hanging on to her glory years as a silent film star. Co-starring William Holden as a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, Erich von Stroheim as an enabling butler, and Nancy Olson as an ambitious young script reader (all of whom, alongside Swanson, were Academy Award-nominated for their performances), SUNSET BOULEVARD is a cold-blooded critique of the entertainment industry that The Nation called an “uncompromising study of American decadence.” In the final moments, as Desmond descends that famed staircase and the frame blurs to black, her audience (“those wonderful people out there in the dark”) can’t help but feel complicit: we loved her, we dismissed her, and our gaze has observed her undoing.