Sunset Blvd. (1950 Billy Wilder)

Unlike Hitch, with Wilder it's all in the script (though he's cinematic also), co-authored by Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman Jr., whoever he or she is (won Oscar). Narrated by a dead man with impressive opening trick shot (filmed by shooting a mirror on the bottom of the pool):

Gloria Swanson is nuts. Inspired casting of Eric Von Stroheim as the faded film director and ex-husband (and with beautiful irony features a clip from the 1929 Queen Kelly, which Swanson produced and von Stroheim directed .. until he was fired by her), Nancy Olson as the good girl; with cameos by Hedda Hopper, Cecil B. de Mille and Buster Keaton.

Shot by John Seitz (nominated) and scored by Franz Waxman (won), it abounds with cynical wit ("Here we are, back at the pool again, the one I always wanted.")

You know, the usual monkey burial scene.

I love the sound of Wilder's original opening in which dead Holden discusses his murder with other bodies in the morgue! (Preview audiences found it too funny.)