Sunset Boulevard grossed only $2.5 million in the U.S. during its initial release, not enough to turn a profit on its $1,572,000 price tag. It took international revenues and re-issues to put the film into the black. By 1960, its worldwide gross had climbed to $5 million.

"That this completely original work is so marvelously satisfying, dramatically perfect, and technically brilliant is no haphazard Hollywood miracle but the inevitable consequence of the collaboration of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder." -- The Hollywood Reporter.

"...Sunset Boulevard is much the most ambitious movie about Hollywood ever done, and is the best of several good ones into the bargain." -- James Agee, Sight and Sound.

"At first her [Swanson's] performance requires a bit of readjusting on the audience's part -- it is bravura, mannered and out of proportion to the requirements of most sound pictures. One may easily fall into step with it, however, and it becomes strangely and vividly appropriate." -- Otis L. Guernsey, Jr., The New York Herald Tribune.

"William Holden is doing the finest acting of his career. His range and control of emotions never falters, and he engenders a full measure of compassion for a character who is somewhat less than admirable." -- T.M.P., The New York Times.

"Glint-eyed Swanson clutches at her comeback role almost as if it were Salome, yet the acting honors belong to Holden. When he makes love to the crazy, demanding old woman, his face shows a mixture of pity and guilt and nausea. This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past - it's narrated by a corpse - is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequence dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt & Co.).

"Miss Swanson's performance takes her at one bound into the class of Boris Karloff and Tod Slaughter." - Richard Mallett, Punch.

"The most intelligent film to come out of Hollywood for years; lest the idea of intelligence in the cinema should lack allure, let me say that it is also one of the most exciting." - Dilys Powell.

"Incisive melodrama with marvellous moments but a tendency to overstay its welcome; the first reels are certainly the best, though the last scene is worth waiting for and the malicious observation throughout is a treat." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerennial).

"What better locale for a "ghost" story - about a woman long thought dead - than Hollywood, a town built on illusions and delusions, where people grow old but remain young on celluloid, where people become has-beens before they've made it. Picture also laments the passing of film noir, from which it borrows several elements, fatalism; its Los Angeles backdrop; its weak, tarnished hero and his destruction by romantic entanglement with a strong, manipulative, and also doomed woman; and its first-person narration." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"The film was hailed on its release as a ruthless portrait of Hollywood but it remains essentially superficial. Wilder's creation of atmosphere is compounded by clever devices and exaggerated characterizations that remain unconvincing or even cheap - as in the ceremonial bridge party for (real) forgotten ex-stars." - Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films (University of California Press).

"Bitter, funny, fascination. Gloria's tour de force." - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

"Wilder grasped that Hollywood itself could be a scene of Gothic isolation and solipsistic emotion. He showed the grandeur that could emerge from the parasitical relations between actors and writers, performers and directors, stars and star-gazers - cannibals all. Like most noir films, with their dark motives and circular structures, Sunset Boulevard makes corruption and betrayal seem inescapable. Yet Wilder pays tribute to what can emerge from this hothouse world, just as he does honor to the film formulas he lightly parodies. As Hollywood keeps reinventing itself, as Wilder's own films become relics of a distant age, his barbed tribute stings and sings with even more authority." - Morris Dickstein, The A List (Da Capo Press).

AWARDS & HONORS

The National Board of Review named Sunset Boulevard Best Picture and Gloria Swanson Best Actress.

The film won Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture Drama, Best Actress in a Drama (Swanson), Best Director and Best Score. It also won nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Erich von Stroheim).

Director Billy Wilder was nominated for the Directors Guild Award but lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for All About Eve (1950). He won the Writers Guild Award, however, along with co-writers Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr..

Sunset Boulevard was nominated for 11 Academy Awards®, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (William Holden), Best Actress (Swanson), Best Supporting Actor (von Stroheim) and Best Supporting Actress (Nancy Olson). It won for Best Story and Screenplay, Best Score and Best Art Direction.

In 1989, Sunset Boulevard was voted a place on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

In 1998, members of the American Film Institute voted the film the 12th greatest American motion picture of all time.

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford