SEALED
World Premiere Recording
Academy Award WINNER for BEST SCORE!
The score for Sunset Boulevard is one of the greatest ever composed. Amazingly, and in spite of it winning the 1950 Academy Award for Best Score, this CD is the world premiere release of a genuine film music masterpiece and features over 70 minutes of music. Also featured as a special bonus track is the nine-minute, never-before-heard cue Waxman wrote for the film’s lost morgue scene prologue. Paramount located the music in their archives and supplied the score for this landmark recording. Joel McNeely conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
1. Sunset Boulevard Prelude (3:51)
2. Paramount Studio (:55)
3. Chase and Mansion (3:42)
4. Norma Desmond (2:18)
5. An Aging Actress (:54)
6. Reading the Script (2:34)
7. The Strange Garden (1:56)
8. Norma's Gallery (1:24)
9. The Waxworks and The Bridge Game (1:44)
10. Afternoon Outings (1:00)
11. Sacrifice of Self-Respect (4:07)
12. The Old Bathing Beauty (2:29)
13. Parading to Paramount (:55)
14. Old Friends (1:27)
15. DeMille's Compassion (:42)
16. Norma's Suspicions (3:55)
17. A New Interest and The Studio Stroll (5:08)
18. Her First Husband (2:56)
19. The Showdown (4:14)
20. Farewell (1:56)
21. Joe Walks Out (5:22)
22. The Corpse (1:11)
23. The Comeback (4:24)
24. Sunset Boulevard Cast (:31)
Bonus Track:
25. Prelude and Conversing Corpses (9:01)
Sunset Boulevard ranks 12th on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time.
Billy Wilder's noir-comic classic about death and decay in Hollywood remains as pungent as ever in its power to provoke shock, laughter, and gasps of astonishment. Joe Gillis (William Holden), a broke and cynical young screenwriter, is attempting to ditch a pair of repo men late one afternoon when he pulls off L.A.'s storied Sunset Boulevard and into the driveway of a seedy mansion belonging to Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a forgotten silent movie luminary whose brilliant acting career withered with the coming of talkies. The demented old movie queen lives in the past, assisted by her devoted (but intimidating) butler, Max (played by Erich von Stroheim, the legendary director of Greed and Swanson's own lost epic, Queen Kelly). Norma dreams of making a comeback in a remake of Salome to be directed by her old colleague Cecil B. DeMille (as himself), and Joe becomes her literary and romantic gigolo. Sunset Boulevard is one of those great movies that has become a part of popular culture. Also stars Buster Keaton and Anna Q. Nilsson (who starred in Seven Keys To Baldpate,1917 written by George M. Cohan) as the "waxworks". 1951