<\/p>\n
I\u2019m a longtime fan of the movie The Sweet Smell of Success<\/em>, but my admiration has redoubled after seeing it for the first time in a theater. Appropriately, it was the venerable Brattle St. arthouse in Harvard Sq, where the Bogart revival began in the 50s and Bergman got his American foothold. I\u2019ve been watching movies there since 1964. As usual with classics at the Brattle, some of the audience seemed to have the script memorized: they chuckled before the lines arrived.<\/p>\n There are films you admire because they\u2019re profound as well as well-made: Vertigo, Persona, 2001<\/em>. Some you admire for their sheer near-perfection. Two I cite for the latter quality are Dr. Strangelove<\/em> and Sweet Smell<\/em>.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t spend much time on the plot of Sweet Smell<\/em>\u2014I\u2019ll refer you to the Wikipedia article, which is pretty good. It appeared in 1957. Bottom-feeding press agent Sidney Falco wants attention from the most famous and feared of columnists, J. J. Hunsecker. (The names evoke the characters.) Sidney will do anything, betray anybody, to climb the ladder\u2014though there is a small but nagging murmur of conscience. J. J. has nothing but contempt for Sidney and his ilk, but he\u2019s also dependent on them for his items. He has a younger sister, Susie, who lives with him in his penthouse. Their relationship may not be literally incestuous but is psychologically so. She has a boyfriend, a jazz musician, whom J. J. wants out of the picture. \u201cYou\u2019re all I\u2019ve got, Susie,\u201d he says to her. It\u2019s maybe the only honest and human thing J. J. says in the movie. He wants Sidney to wreck the relationship and preferably the musician too. Sidney has qualms, but he beats them back. The rewards of serving J. J.\u2019s corruption can be great. I\u2019ll leave the plot at that.<\/p>\n What I mean by near-perfection is the way the elements of the film work together. All the elements have earned boundless praise individually. Start with the script, begun by Ernest Lehman based on his own story, thoroughly reshaped and rewritten by Clifford Odets. The latter has been largely forgotten, but in his day he was celebrated as a leftie playwright whose immediate disciples included Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky. Odets\u2019s plays of the 30s include Golden Boy<\/em>. By the end of the decade he was in Hollywood. He spent most of the rest of his life there, writing screenplays and drinking himself to death. His reputation as a socially conscious writer tanked when he sold out in the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Those contemptible episodes tended to ruin or derail both those who caved\u2014Elia Kazan, Sterling Hayden\u2014and those who didn\u2019t\u2014Paul Robeson, Orson Welles. The eventual HUAC blacklist included over 300 Hollywood figures.<\/p>\n Tony Curtis remembered Odets pounding at the typewriter with an open bottle of whiskey next to it. Some of the script was filmed hours after the lines were written. Director Alexander Mackendrick would lay out the pages on the floor, trying to make sense of them. Yet in the end it\u2019s one of the greatest scripts ever to come out of Hollywood. It\u2019s most famous for its zingers, legendary in themselves: \u201cYou\u2019re dead, son. Get yourself buried.\u201d \u201cThe cat\u2019s in the bag and the bag\u2019s in the river.\u201d \u201cEverybody knows Manny Davis\u2014except for Mrs. Manny Davis.\u201d \u201cHere\u2019s your head. What\u2019s your hurry?\u201d And above all: \u201cI\u2019d hate to take a bite outta you. You\u2019re a cookie full of arsenic.\u201d But the script is a great deal more than a collection of dazzling lines. Every one comes out of its character and amplifies that character. The story is beautifully shaped, with a rising line of tension and corruption that overwhelms everything in its path. In the end, everybody loses: Sydney beaten up by the police, J. J. losing his sister and only real human connection, his sister heading out to nowhere to see if she can find a life, and the prospects don\u2019t look so good.<\/p>\n The performances. Nobody at the time knew that certified big-boxoffice stars Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster could actually act, or would care to. Least of all that they would take on parts of repellent characters. The film flopped with audiences because they didn\u2019t want to see their favorites covered in slime\u2014though the reviews were prescient and glowing. Tony Curtis was at that point the leading pretty boy in movies, familiar in sword-and-sandal epics, romantic stuff, light comedy. He was felt to be limited by his dropdead looks and his Brooklyn accent. His line delivery in the cheesy historical Taras Bulba<\/em> is legendary: \u201cYondah lies da castle of my faddah.\u201d<\/p>\n But Curtis had a lot in him, and with Sweet Smell<\/em> he knew he had something meaty and he wanted to show his stuff. He fought for the part. The fact is, in the relatively few roles Curtis got in movies with strong scripts and directors, he usually nailed it, whether in Sweet Smell<\/em> or Some Like it Hot<\/em>. His Sidney in Sweet Smell<\/em> is astonishing, all burning eyes, kinetic energy, searing sarcasm and a brilliant gift for improvised manipulations and betrayals\u2014though never brilliant enough to move him one rung up the ladder. Now and then, though, in his eyes in the most subtle way you see regret and the gnawing of conscience, though you know it won\u2019t last. Curtis is onscreen most of the movie. In his eyes, his face, his voice, his body, he\u2019s never less than exhilarating and horrifying to watch. It\u2019s one of the great performances in all film, unsurpassed by a lot of the supposedly classier actors including, say, Olivier and Guinness.<\/p>\n Lancaster is on about the same level, in an opposite way. Here\u2019s where the relationships and balances of the movie come in. Sidney is ablaze all the time, J. J. as cold and calm as a snake waiting for prey to come to him. He\u2019s on top of the world and he knows it, expects it as his due. To insult me, he tells Sidney, is to insult sixty million people, my readers. (He\u2019s based on the notorious columnist Walter Winchell.) J. J.\u2019s face is impassive, but his rage and revenge and corruption are revealed in little moments, little tics of eyes and lips. Curtis is over the top, Lancaster all subtlety, and that\u2019s why they play off each other so well. Director Mackendrick had Lancaster wear his own heavy glasses, which look somehow threatening. But he smeared the lenses of the glasses with vaseline, so Lancaster could not focus on anything, and that contributed to his look of scary detachment. Often when J. J.\u2019s talking to you, saying terrible things, he\u2019s not looking at you.<\/p>\n Director Alexander Mackendrick. I don\u2019t know how he did it, because neither before or after did he do anything like it. This most echt-New York, echt-Broadway, echt-American movie was directed by a Scotchman, though born in Boston, whose most celebrated film is the immortal Alec Guiness\/Peter Sellers comedy The Ladykillers<\/em>, among the most British of movies. Mackendrick managed to hold together a chaotic situation in which the script was being written day by day and some scenes were filmed without a script. Lancaster as producer was touchy, interfering. At the premiere Lancaster blamed the commercial failure on Lehman and threatened to beat him up for getting sick and leaving the production. (\u201cGo ahead,\u201d said Lehman. \u201cI can use the money.\u201d) In the end Mackendrick shaped a classic of clear arcs and gathering gloom, with a script like a stream of bullets.<\/p>\n It’s the cinematography that welds it all together. It was by James Wong Howe, who came from China and somehow by the 1930s had risen to the top of the profession in Hollywood. One of his Oscars was for Hud<\/em>. He remains one of the greats of cinematographers, with Gregg Toland and a handful of others. Sweet Smell<\/em> is usually called a film noir<\/em>, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s really part of that genre. It\u2019s a one-off, a genre unto itself, though its influence has been enormous. Noirs are classically dark and grainy, like Double Indemnity<\/em> and The Naked City<\/em>. Sweet Smell<\/em> has two lighting modes, both of them unforgettable, neither of them grainy and dark. Many of the scenes have a weird lucidity, crystalline in lighting, icy in effect. Some of the interiors look like they were shot in glaring fluorescent light. Somehow that look makes the darkness they depict more unnerving. The other lighting mode is used mostly for J. J.: he\u2019s lit from above, casting long shadows down his face. I suspect this had a big influence on the top-lighting of The Godfather<\/em>, among later movies.<\/p>\n The music has two aspects too, both of them involving mid-50s jazz in its prime. The actual Chico Hamilton Quintet is in residence, providing cool jazz (the guitarist boyfriend is in the group). And there\u2019s a blaring, hairy, brilliant big-band element by Elmer Bernstein, an old hand as Hollywood composer, best known for splashy scores like The Ten Commandments<\/em> and The Magnificent Seven<\/em> but also delicate ones like his work in To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>. (Elmer was not related to Leonard Bernstein, but they were friends.) The old line for success as a film composer is this: to know how to write in every style but your own. Bernstein\u2019s big-band stuff for Sweet Smell<\/em> welds itself indelibly to the story and images and lighting: dissonant, glaring, scary. It\u2019s the ancestor of a lot of intense jazzy themes to come by among others Henry Mancini: Peter Gunn<\/em>.<\/p>\n Helping out are the secondary performances\u2014some excellent, like Emile Meyer\u2019s grinning, crooked cop and Barbara Nichols\u2019 abused cigarette girl Rita–others at least good enough, such as Susan Harrison as the helpless Susie. (Her acting career didn\u2019t go far after this.)<\/p>\n The perfection is in how all these elements work together, amplify each other. You can\u2019t imagine the film without any of them: story, script, acting, lighting, music are welded together in a seamless, brutally effective whole. It\u2019s what all movies aspire to but few reach at this level. It\u2019s what we composers aspire to: to weld sound and rhythm and structure and emotion into a seamless whole. Music and movies after all are closely allied, because they both move in time.<\/p>\n You come out of Sweet Smell of Success<\/em> feeling like you\u2019ve been dipped in slime, but no less exhilarated, partly by the inexhaustible energy of the whole thing (you end up feeling at least a little sorry for Sidney), no less by the energy and mastery of the filmmaking. And the best way to experience that as with all great movies is in the theater, where they were made to be seen. I remember taking in Lawrence of Arabia<\/em> on a big screen in 70mm, and I\u2019ve never quite gotten over it. Even on the Brattle\u2019s smallish screen, the effect of The Sweet Smell of Success <\/em>was gigantic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m a longtime fan of the movie The Sweet Smell of Success, but my admiration has redoubled after seeing it for the first time in a theater. Appropriately, it was the venerable Brattle St. arthouse in Harvard Sq, where the Bogart revival began in the 50s and Bergman got his American foothold. I\u2019ve been … Continue reading “THE SWEET SLIME OF CURTIS AND LANCASTER”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janswafford.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}