Salome on Sunset Boulevard

Abstract This chapter focuses on Alla Nazimova’s avant-garde adaptation of Wilde’s play Salome (1922). It locates Nazimova’s film as the epitome of Hollywood in the early 1920s: a booming industry that was developing new cinema techniques at speed, while poised between popular entertainment and experimental art; created by an émigré community, and full of possibility but with increasing concerns about the morality of its subjects. It traces how Nazimova’s vision of Wilde was defined in Moscow, with the film coming about after her attempt to adapt Pierre Louӱs’s Aphrodite. It analyses how the set and costume designs by Natacha Rambova, that drew on Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations, encoded a homoerotic vision of Salome, at odds with ‘American values’. It ends with a discussion of how Nazimova, Wilde, and Salome influenced Sunset Boulevard (1950).