In a not-so-distant depiction of his actual descent, von Stroheim plays Max von Mayerling, a once-esteemed silent film director who is now the butler of the actress he used to direct. An iconic exposé of the dark dementia lurking just beneath Hollywood’s silver screen, Sunset Boulevard is an endless hall of ironic mirrors, obscuring the lines between onscreen and offscreen, fiction and fantasy. Playing the aging silent movie star with famously bizarre delusion, Gloria Swanson is the woman von Stroheim directed in Queen Kelly and was responsible for the brutal amputation of that film. In Sunset Boulevard, von Stroheim’s dour-yet-empathetic character is in charge of preserving Norma Desmond’s dream that she is still a much-loved, sought-after star while coolly observing her psychological entrapment of the young, hack writer who stumbles unwittingly into her macabre lair. When Von Stroheim’s Max tenderly “directs” the final scene, it is an act all the more poignant because, for von Stroheim it was never to be.