Sweet Smell of Success
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Movie Reviews of Sweet Smell of Success
Movie Review: Sweet Smell of Success very much succeeds
Summary: 5 Stars
Probably the best New York scenes of the late 1950's ever. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis shine and each one is better than the other one.
Burt Lancaster's character is probably loosely modelled after Walter Winchell. I do not remember the name but the New York Times has a piece a number of years ago about the real life character played by Tony Curtis's Sydney Falco. I do not remember the content but he was a real press agent.
Having grown up in New York City in the 1940's and 1950's the camera work is par excellance. The shots of the exterior of the 21 club, the interior shots of the 21 club, the bar at Toot Shor's are fantastic. On several ocassions I ate at 21 and drank at Toot Shor's and the shots are so realistic as not to be believed.
Tony Curis's performance as Sydney Falco the hungry press agent is probably his best dramatic performance. Lancaster as the gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker is fantastic.
The plot is well known, JJ Huynsecker's young adult sister is dating a jazz musician named Dallas,
excelently played by Martin Milner(remember him-from the TV show Route 66) a relatively minor role but well played by Milner.
Falco is assigned by JJ to break up the romance which Falco tries to do by planting drugs on Dallas, then arranging a crooked cop to beat up and arrest Dallas.
Eventually Hunsecker's sister finds out about the plot hatched by her brother and Falco's complicity. Hunsaecker's sister leaves and goes out on her own and leaves her brother wondering how things could go so wrong. He just does not get it.
As a final act of revenge Hunsecker tells his crooked cop friend that it wss Falco who planted the drugs on Dallas and the crooked cop proceeds to beat up Falco and arrest him as the movie.
Hunsecker's sister Susan Hunsecker, played by a newcome Susan Harrison shines even though hers is a relative minor role, with not much screen time.
The last scene's at Hunsecker's apartment at the top floor of the Brill Building, 1619 Broadway, has a lot of memories for me as my Uncle had an office in that building and I worked for him in the late 1950's. It was my uncle who used to take me to dine at 21 and Toots Shor's. The lobby shots at 1619 Broadway were authentic as well as the exterior shot of the building.
All the shots of New York City, 21, Toots Shor, Times Square area were fantastic and realistic.
Perhaps most interesting of all is how much the scenes changed over the years with the buiding booms after 1957. The original Toots Shor is gone, 21 is still there, glorious as ever but everything surrounding 21 is change.
All and all a great movie, great photography, and most of all great acting.
Movie Review: Prospecting for Dirt
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a nearly perfect 1950s meatgrinder of a film. I saw it about 20 years ago when I was a teenager, and just "liked" the movie. But, rewatching it, I sat awestruck by Alexander Mackendrick's fast-paced direction, James Wong Howe's simultaneously sumptuous and repulsive photographic portrait of 1950s Manhattan, Elmer Bernstein's street-smart jazz score and a screenplay by Ernie Lehman and Clifford Odets that's so cynical it makes Billy Wilder come off like Frank Capra -- what more can I say? Wow!Burt Lancaster as the caustic and ruthless gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker is one of his greatest roles. The ever-present horn-rimmed glasses that span his eyes and bridge his nose are somewhat off-putting on the screen idol at first, but they grow on you. Lancaster is droll and owlish as Hunsecker -- who's based on real-life dirt maven Walter Winchell -- and the glasses are so much more appropos for the wiseacre Hunsecker than Winchell's trademark newspaperman's hat.
As immutable as a force of nature, Lancaster plays Hunsecker ramrod-stiff-and-straight, a man so consumed by his own megalomania and self-righteousness that his blinding certainly in his own infallibility radiates brilliantly and deadly. No one can rival Lancaster in this type of role, which was followed by equally stirring performances as Elmer Gantry (1960) and Gen. James Matoon Scott in "Seven Days in May" (1964).
Constantly about the immovable mover Lancaster is Tony Curtis as sleazy publicity man Sidney Falco, a scurrying rat of a satellite whose sole purpose in life is to revolve around Lancaster, scrounging for crumbs along the way. It is fascinating watching Curtis plead, cajole, manipulate, self-efface and backstab just to get his clients' names in Hunsecker's column. Curtis' mind, soul and being are so accustomed to the gutter that he cannot even contemplate the stars. Like Hunsecker, Falco is a force of nature, but on a much smaller scale, sort of like the flu, or syphillis.
One day, though Falco finally sees daylight as Hunsecker offers him the opportunity to guest-write his column while Hunsecker is on a cruise. The price, though, is to destroy an up-and-coming musician played by Martin Milner, who is wooing Hunsecker's sister. Falco barely flinches as he sets about setting the boy up, causing Hunsecker's sister to attempt suicide.
An engrossing indictment of the insatiable quest for celebrity, "Sweet Smell of Success" is a wonderful companion piece to Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd" and Sidney Lumet's "Network."
One caveat: Lancaster speaks his trademark line "of course," but doesn't repeat it immediately thereafter.
Movie Review: "AN APPLE MADE OF ARSENIC."
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the problems with studying in film school, being a movie buff and getting older is that at some point in ones' life a man ventures into the video store, peruses the shelves and reaches the conclusion that he has seen every movie worth seeing.I thought I was getting there until a few years ago when I heard about and checked out "The Sweet Smell of Success". It was like that with "Chinatown", which I never saw until the 1990s and now consider one of the best films ever.
"Sweet Smell of Success" holds up totally even though it is black-white, set in 1957. Burt Lancaster is J.J., based on Walter Winchell, who was a leading accuser of Communists in the media.
Tony Curtis is a lackey publicist who lives on the whim of those who pay him to place items in various columns, which means he must grovel at the feet of clients and columnists. J.J. plays him like a fiddle. This has lines so vitriolic and perfect, Frank Manciewics in "All About Eve" is no more biting, and Bette Davis in "Eve" bites with the best of 'em.
Lancaster just fills the screen with irony and sardonic, hurtful wit. Curtis fends it off with skill, it is like a fencing match. Anybody who has any desire to study dialogue must watch and memorize this. Everything is tremendous; the acting, the directing, the score, the noir shadows of New York at night. The music is unreal, lots of horns, filling the room with its wailing sobs of a corrupt, naked city.
A love story between J.J.'s little sis and a musician (Martin Milner I think, who was in "Adam 12"), is the heart of the story. It is the one true, good thing, but J.J. is a monster. Perhaps Bob Towne had this in mind when he cast John Huston to be an incestuos father in "Chinatown". The inference, being the '50s, is much more subtle but it seems J.J. has the hots for sis and wants nobody to have her. He brands the musician a Commie, using sycophant secondary journalists to keep his own hands clean.
Any chance for this dark one to have a happy ending goes down the tubes when sis, as much to torment her bro, kills herself. Curtis is utterly ammoral. His picture appears in Webster's next to the word ammoral.
Many films have played off this theme. "Swimming With Sharks" (1996, Kevin Spacey, Frank Whaley) comes to mind. If this could be 20 stars I'd give it 20.
Steven Travers
Author of "Barry Bonds: Baseball's Superman"
straversca@aol.com
Movie Review: On my list of favorite overlooked films.
Summary: 5 Stars
April 12, 2002 If I had to pick one American studio movie that I felt was
unjustly forgotten in surprising relation to how entertaining and
timeless it was, there'd be no contest. `The Sweet Smell Of
Success' nearly always comes out of my mouth first when I'm asked
about my favorite movies.
Inevitably, I'm told rather pleasantly, "Never heard of it."
Try explaining to someone under forty that it stars Burt
Lancaster and Tony Curtis (two studio stars who don't penetrate
very far into contemporary consciousness) and that it concerns
newspaper columnists, and you're liable to receive a puzzled smile
in return. "That's one of your favorite films?"
By contemporary standards, on the surface, it just doesn't
appeal.
Trying to explain its excellence in five hundred words or so
isn't easy, but I'll try.
For starters, we like to think that our present day is as
wise and hip a period as has ever existed. Why, this is the age
of irony. We've been there, done that. We're tougher, more jaded,
more cynical, more smart-alecky that anybody else, right?
Wrong. The flick is sharper, more adult and more vicious
than ninety percent of the stuff being made today, fifty years later.
What's more, watch this movie and you'll quickly realize that
the smarter-than-smart, hipper-than-hip dialogue of today (like all
that light weight mush from Kevin Williams and the beating-around-the-bush
repetitions of Quentin Tarantino) is apple pie easy compared to having
to do it a) without pop culture references or cursing, b) in double
time, and c) with a perfectly balanced ear. The dialogue in this movie
is like jazz: it's syncopated, it's learned, it's clever, and it demands
more than one listen.
`The Sweet Smell Of Success' tops a short list of films from
roughly the same period (`The Asphalt Jungle' and `The Killing' are
two) that form a last hurrah for the black and white movie with bite.
Before things supposedly became so complicated in this world that
the movies forgot how to talk.
PEOPLE WHO'LL LIKE THIS MOVIE: classic Hollywood fans; hard-boiled
fans; incurable Manhattan enthusiasts (like myself).
PEOPLE WHO WON'T LIKE THIS MOVIE: it is in black and white, folks,
and Tony Curtis is in it.
Movie Review: Impeccable, influential noir.
Summary: 5 Stars
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander MacKendrick, 1957)
I've no idea where I got the notion that Sweet Smell of Success is a comedy-- perhaps it's because MacKendrick is these days best known for having directed The Ladykillers, of which the Coen brothers directed a quite useless remake a few years back-- but oh, how wrong I was. This is noir in all its glory, a film to rival Wilder's Ace in the Hole as the definitive muckraking-the-muckrakers movie. Where the latter film deals in the fabrication of news stories by drawing out a tragedy, Sweet Smell of Success gives us the relationship between press agent and columnist, and how that relationship can be abused.
Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is one of those press agents-- a slimy huckster who evades his clients and a would-be stringer for highly influential columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Hunsecker, however, has "frozen" Falco out of his column, and Falco is getting increasingly desperate. Why did Hunsecker do this? Because he asked Falco to interfere with Hunsecker's sister Susan (Susan Harrison)'s relationship with Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), a promising musician. (Hunsecker explains why he wants this to happen to Falco, but we get the feeling there's more to it than Hunsecker lets on). After Falco finally tracks Hunsecker down, Hunsecker intimates that Falco has one more chance to come between the lovers, and that if he does, he'll be back in Hunsecker's good graces. Falco hatches an elaborate plan which seems to be going well, but Hunsecker, not content to leave well enough alone, tosses a monkeywrench into the works at the worst possible time.
Sweet Smell of Success has been called the most quotable movie ever, and I'm not going to argue-- the script, from Ernest Lehman (based on his own novel) and playwright Clifford Odets, is a jewel from beginning to end. With a foundation this solid, a director as fine as MacKendrick, and two top actors in the lead roles, how can you go wrong? Well, it's certainly possible, and it's been done, but not on MacKendrick's watch. Sweet Smell of Success is a tight, pitch-perfect piece of noir with a comedic bite and, ironically, a gossip columnist's sensibility for wallowing in the depths to which it aspires; think of it as Valley of the Dolls for the newspaper industry and you won't be terribly far off. A brilliant movie. **** ½