“In Sunset Boulevard and Fedora, Billy Wilder captured two sides of the same warped mirror”, writes Candy Gent, reflecting on how Wilder’s later, less-feted film complements and contrasts his myth-busting masterpiece.
“There’s an energy in Sunset Boulevard — a wicked glee in its takedown of Tinseltown. Fedora is quieter, more mournful. It’s Wilder taking one last waltz through a dream factory he no longer recognizes. The pace is slower, the structure more fragile — but the emotional impact sneaks up on you.”
By the time Billy Wilder dropped Fedorain 1978, his place in the Hollywood hall of fame was already secure. From the noir bite of Double Indemnity to the bittersweet charm of The Apartment, Wilder had carved out a niche as the guy who could slice through the American dream with a sly grin. But no two of his films talk to each other quite like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Fedora. Nearly 30 years apart, they’re like eerie reflections — two haunting tales of stardom gone sour, with fame and fantasy tangled in barbed wire.
Here’s the kicker: Sunset Boulevard was a hit from the get-go. Critics loved it. The industry respected it. It became an instant classic. Fedora? Not so much. When it premiered, it was brushed off as an outdated relic. Pauline Kael dismissed it as “a waxwork thriller.” Audiences barely noticed it. Too strange. Too slow. Too removed from the flashy new wave of the ’70s.
Let’s rewind to Sunset Boulevard. Wilder’s pitch-black Hollywood satire follows struggling screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who ends up in the crumbling mansion of silent-era icon Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). What starts as an opportunistic deal spirals into full-on gothic horror, complete with obsession, delusion, and a swimming pool murder. Fast forward to Fedora, where an older Holden (this time as a washed-up producer) flies off to a mysterious European island to convince the elusive actress Fedora (Hildegard Knef) to stage a comeback. Instead, he finds a house of mirrors, masks, and a secret that flips everything upside down.
If Sunset Boulevard is rooted in old-school Hollywood rot — dusty film canisters, grand staircases, and faded stardom — then Fedora floats in a dreamier, weirder space. Fedora herself looks untouched by time, almost inhumanly so, like a waxwork. Where Norma’s decay is obvious and tragic, Fedora’s story is one of surgical illusions and buried identities. But both films are built around the same chilling idea: fame isolates, and fantasy, when left unchecked, becomes a cage.
William Holden’s casting in both movies is a stroke of genius. In Sunset, he’s a jaded young hustler trying to survive the studio system. In Fedora, he’s a worn-down relic, chasing ghosts of a glamour long gone. His journey mirrors Wilder’s own aging perspective. These aren’t just characters—they’re stand-ins for a director wrestling with his own legacy, watching Hollywood morph into something unrecognisable.
Both films open with death: Gillis floating face-down, Fedora being laid to rest. Flashbacks unravel the stories like old film reels, looping through lies, delusions, and regrets. In Sunset, the flashback is tight and merciless, leading inevitably to doom. Fedora, though, plays more like a foggy memory — messy, slow, and surreal, like an old gossip column where the names have been smudged out.
Norma Desmond and Fedora aren’t just fallen stars — they’re the living dead. Norma, played by real-life silent queen Gloria Swanson, is pure Hollywood ghost story. She’s trapped in her own legend, raging against irrelevance. Her famous line—“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small”—still cuts like a knife.
Fedora’s horror is more insidious. The big twist? HIGHLIGHT TO VIEW SPOILER:
The woman parading as Fedora is actually her daughter, Antonia (Marthe Keller), surgically altered to keep the brand alive. The real Fedora, scarred and discarded, lives in exile. It’s plastic surgery as identity theft, celebrity as performance art turned Frankenstein.
Wilder doesn’t offer easy answers. Whether aging out or being forced into perpetual youth, the women in these films are destroyed by the same system that once adored them. Their bodies become battlegrounds for cultural expectations—one punished for getting old, the other punished for pretending she didn’t.
Visually, the two films couldn’t be more different—and yet, both feel like closed-off worlds stuck in a time warp. Sunset Boulevard is all noir shadows and baroque decay, dripping with menace. Fedora, with its soft-focus cinematography and pastel gloom, feels more like a ghost story wrapped in gauze. Norma’s mansion is a mausoleum; Fedora’s island villa is a psychological bunker.
There’s an energy in Sunset Boulevard—a wicked glee in its takedown of Tinseltown. Fedora is quieter, more mournful. It’s Wilder taking one last waltz through a dream factory he no longer recognizes. The pace is slower, the structure more fragile — but the emotional impact sneaks up on you.
Both films are deeply meta. Sunset Boulevard has Wilder gleefully biting the hand that fed him, casting Cecil B. DeMille as himself and turning Swanson’s silent-era credentials into narrative gold. It’s a Hollywood movie about how cruel Hollywood can be.
Fedora, though, steps back. It’s less a satire, more a eulogy. The story drifts across European locations — Corfu, Paris, Munich—like a movie in exile. The glitz has been outsourced. And Wilder, decades older, seems to be asking: What did we lose when the dream got global?
Casting Marthe Keller and Hildegard Knef wasn’t just a choice — it was a statement. European actresses playing fractured Hollywood fantasies. It’s Wilder, an émigré himself, folding in his roots, his regrets, and his reflections on a world obsessed with reinvention.
How does Fedora’s accidental camp stack up against the intentional camp of Sunset Boulevard? Norma Desmond’s dramatic line deliveries, her kabuki expressions, her grand staircase descent — these are high-camp on purpose, theatrical and knowing. Wilder was in on the joke, and so was Swanson. The camp in Sunset is stylised, a sharp weapon aimed at a dying industry.
Fedora, on the other hand, veers into unintentional camp — precisely because it plays everything so straight. The performances (including a meta-cameo from Michael York) are earnest, the drama is solemn, and the stylization is soft-focus sincerity. But in its quest for gravitas, Fedora sometimes stumbles into melodrama so overripe it borders on the absurd. That very tension — the space between what Wilder aimed for and what audiences saw — has become part of its strange allure.
Maybe that’s what makes Fedora fascinating now: its sincerity curdled into kitsch. Or maybe, like its titular character, Fedora was just ahead of its time, wearing too many masks to be seen clearly in its day.
In Sunset Boulevard and Fedora, Billy Wilder captured two sides of the same warped mirror. One snarls, the other sighs. One is high drama, the other elegy. But both are fiercely smart, painfully personal, and chillingly accurate in their takedown of fame’s darker side. Wilder, ever the cynic, ever the romantic, holds the mirror up to the industry — and to us — and lets the image crack.
❉ ‘Fedora’ was released by Eureka Entertainment in 2016 as a dual-format DVD and Blu-ray as part of its The Masters of Cinema Series. A 4K restoration of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ will be released on Blu-ray on August 4, 2025.
❉ Previously writing as Jay Gent, We Are Cult founder Candy D. Gent is a writer, editor, and designer whose work explores music, film, TV, and fandom.
Leave a Reply