-
Website
http://www.newcritics.com -
Original page
http://newcritics.com/blog1/2008/09/18/wednesday-night-at-the-movies-sweet-smell-of-success-open-thread/ -
Subscribe
All Comments -
Community
-
-
Top Commenters
-
Popular Threads
and when I try to remember him in Spartacus I think of him saying "I am Spartacus" which is not helpful. Antoninus? is that it?
Plus it was 1957, times were good. People didn't want to sit in a movie theatre for 96 minutes and be told we're no damn good.
I adore him in movies but I doubt I would have found him nearly as appealing in real life. He was an arguer on set too; he had a huge blowup with Mackendrick over what the ending should be.
It's not the sweet smell of success, it's the sweet stink of patheticness, if that's a word. What horrible lives of seedy desperation and flop sweat all these people lead, and for what meager results: A line or two in a column.
Is the movie's weakness the whole I want my sister routine? You know, as a plot point it's kind of lame.
Marty Milner's jazz combo is hot.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE Sidney Falco's combination press office-apartment.
And the thing about Lancaster's great performance is not that he doesn't blink (" a night owl whose eyes never seem to blink behind his glasses."). He blinks. What amazes me is how Howe shot that entire movie and managed to black out the area between the top frame line of Lancaster's glasses and his eyelid. That little space is always in shadow and it adds this menace to his character, along with the dialogue and the almost balletic grace that he hands out his little punishments.
By the way, why is Ernest Lehman always whining?
If I read right, Milner's combo is actually the Chico Hamilton quartet. Actually I think one of the weaknesses is that I don't believe Milner is hep enough to play jazz.
I also read that Howe put Vaseline on Lancaster's glasses to give them that opaque look.
I have to say that in SSOS New York looks like too damn much fun for me to find the characters completely pathetic. It's more like they can't enjoy what's around them because of the obsessive ambition.
And flacks aren't really flacks any more...
(but yeah, when I found out the source of the quote I did wonder who on earth wrote that speech. One guess I liked was Bill Kristol.)
now begone Palin, before somebody drops a house on you...
To me this movie is Tony Curtis's masterpiece. I just find his performance perfect, and, yes, sympathetic -- but maybe that says something about me. After I had seen this movie a lot of times I read an interview with Curtis (I had never really read much about him before), and I saw how vulnerable he is and was, how insecure he was as a young man. Whatever, he played this part brilliantly. I was trying to think of how other, more vaunted actors would have fared in the part, Brando or (my favorite film actor) Montgomery Clift. Those men would have been great in the piece, but I don't know if they would have been better.
The one thing I don't like about this movie? (And it's one of my all-time faves.) The two-young-lovers plotline. These two are just two fucking nice for my money. What the hell, if the movie was going to bomb anyway, couldn't they at least have shown Marty Milner smoking a joint? I mean, come on, the dude was a jazz musician.
A re-make would undoubtedly suck, but if the Coen Brothers (the obvious choice) did re-make it I vote for making the young couple kinda fucked up too. (Clooney as J.J. and, uh, Brad Pitt as Sidney?)
Some years ago, American Heritage magazine ran a long piece about Ed Sullivan. Ed hated Walter Wichell, for his bigotry and all-around thuggishness. One night when Ed was dining at 21, or one of the other famous places of the day, when Winchell walked in. The latter had just written a nasty piece in which he smeared someone for the usual racist and/or red-baiting reasons, Seeing him enter, Sullivan got up from his table, walked across the room, grabbed Winchell by his belt and collar and hustled him into the men's room, where he stuck Walter's head in the toilet and flushed. That little story upped my opinion of Ed a lot.
Harrison was her mom.
And if they’re saints, what are they doing here?
Entropy is only a problem in a closed system :)
The original failure of the film at the box office still mystifies me -- the 50s weren't entirely saccharine sweet. Curtis's character in Trapeze may be something of an ingenue, but the Lancaster and Lollabrigida characters are anything but sweet. The #2 and #8 top grossing films in 1957 were Peyton Place and Pal Joey, again hardly populated with sympathetic characters. I was surprised to see that The Searchers did rather well in its original release in 1956 (#13, with John Wayne in his darkest role). In 1958, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Vertigo and Some Came Running were all top ten (##3, 8 and 10). It is perhaps not coincidental, however, that all of the films I've cited were shot in color, while both SSoS and A Face in the Crowd both did relatively poorly, notwithstanding Sweet Smell's breathtaking cinematography and memorable score. I think it's easy for us to forget nowadays how television had changed moviegoing habits -- very few of the top 20 grossing films in 1956-58 were shot in black and white.
A few B&W films still managed to break through afterwards: Some Like It Hot (#3, 1959), Psycho (#2, 1960), The Apartment (#8, 1960), La Dolce Vita (#7, 1961), To Kill a Mockingbird (#7, 1962) and, surprisingly, The Manchurian Candidate (#15, 1962 -- I'd always heard this classic failed in initial release).
John Frankenheimer and Billy Wilder kept shooting in black & white until they were forced to change (and Frankenheimer keeps his palette very limited in Ronin to great effect), but wouldn't Woody Allen's Manhattan be more ordinary if Gordon Willis hadn't shot it in black and white?
Besides Wilder's and Frankenheimer's B&W work from that tiime, just off the top of my head: Hud. The Hustler. Dr. Strangelove. Lolita. Hell Is For Heroes. Night of the Iguana. King Rat. A Hard Day's Night. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Darling. The Knack. A Taste of Honey. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Bergman's movies, and Godard's and Truffaut's early movies. I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, 8 & 1/2. Rocco and His Brothers. Le Doulos. Not to mention Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!...and on and on. God movies suck nowadays...