Viale del tramonto (Sunset Boulevard, USA/1950) di Billy Wilder NUOVO RESTAURO 4K- 75° ANNIVERSARIOV.O. con Sott. in Italiano

**Presented by film critic Sergio Pio Sasso**

"She sat next to me and smelled of tuberose, a scent I have never been able to endure." Legend has it that **Gloria Swanson** adored **Narcisse noir**, a perfume created by *Ernest Daltroff* for Caron in 1911, thus appropriately outdated by 1950; she overused it, infesting film sets, especially that of **Sunset Boulevard**. Three years earlier, the same perfume had titled the film by **Powell and Pressburger**, **Black Narcissus**; in both cases, stories of madness, of a frenzy of senses either out of time or out of place. From such a misalignment, from a wrong turn of fate, begins the story of **Joe Gillis**, a young, struggling screenwriter who, fleeing creditors, swerves into a driveway along *Sunset Boulevard*; he ends up at the mansion of an elderly silent film star, living a macabre and grotesque life among memories of past glory. He becomes her kept man and then, torn between pity and disgust, her lover, and the ending is known: *le mort saisit le vif* ("the dead seize the living"), when he tries to leave, she shoots him, and he dies telling the story. **Sunset Boulevard** remains the cruelest and most mocking film about **Hollywood**, the most finely balanced in its chiaroscuro, supported by a black humor over which Eric von Stroheim presides as the grand master of ceremonies; but it is also a poignant tale of aging and the shattered illusions of everyone involved. With each viewing, ***Gloria Swanson***'s performance becomes more unbearable and ***William Holden***'s more engaging – the memorable tenderness of the nocturnal dialogue along the **Paramount** sets, between two who are falling in love, and he, with an olfactory counterpoint, tells her she smells of fresh air and clean laundry. (For the record. There is no tuberose in Narcisse noir. It is the deadly embrace between orange blossom picked a moment before collapse and Mysore sandalwood. Conversely, in 1948, Fracas was released to great success, intoxicating tuberose, born from the tempestuous creativity of Germaine Cellier. How much *Fracas* must **Wilder** and **Brackett** have endured at the Hollywood parties of those years... Thus I have always thought that it was that tuberose that soaked the fake hair of *Norma Desmond*, that cone of light streaked with smoke, while an old projector played back the silent ghosts of Queen Kelly. But this, as **Wilder** himself might say, is another story – about which I may have already said too much).

(*Paola Cristalli*)
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