'Sunset Blvd.' Is Your New Year’s Sanity Test

Last New Year’s Eve, I wrote about Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. It’s the best movie on the ambivalence with which we welcome the end of one year and the coming of a new one, worrying whether it promises that our dreams will come true, whether we will live up to our resolutions to be better. This year I’ll take up that subject with Wilder’s most famous movie, Sunset Blvd. (1950), a story, almost a film noir, about trying to live the American dream in Hollywood rather than Manhattan, the setting for The Apartment.