newcritics - Latest Comments in Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

danleo — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:50:42 -0000

I'm drawing a blank on any other B&W epics since Schindler, or even between Longest Day and Schindler's List.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Jim — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:42:20 -0000

I see Schindler's List also was B&W in 1993. I guess that would be considered an epic. Anything since then?

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Jim — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:31:09 -0000

The Longest Day also was in B&W, in 1962. Would that be the latest epic in monochrome?

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Jim — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:26:46 -0000

I had no idea Ed Sullivan was like that. Good on him.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

noelbotevera — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:58:38 -0000

Funny the mention of Dr. Strangelove--saw it being shown to some youths today, and found a particularly smart young man currently misspending his energy and intelligence laughing his head off at the mention of fluids. Amazing how the talk of fluids goes over the head of most kids--they need Adam Sandler to underline the funny in a comedy. This one got it--wish he'd stop wasting his time doing what he does...

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Ben Alpers — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 22:37:36 -0000

One of my favorite movies....sorry I missed the discussion!

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

danleo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:58:18 -0000

Great comments, Henry. One of the reasons that I'm so fond of the decade following Sweet Smell is that this was the last era when film-makers could reasonably be able to make movies in black-and-white because they knew that black-and-white was best for the material:

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...

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Dan Leo — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:05:02 -0000

Good point, Fuzzy. But, still, I wish those two just weren't so damn dull!

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

That Fuzzy Bastard — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:22:56 -0000

Actually, I think it's an important part of the movie's nasty kick that the lovers are such Grade-A saps---they're the world's ordinary people, who think they have a life when they're just being moved around the board by the more powerful, or even those who merely hope to become more powerful. Like the teenagers in a slasher movie, part of the thrill the movie provides the viewer is watching these dumb little bunnies stroll wide-eyed into the meat grinder.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

HenryFTP — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:43:06 -0000

Sorry to be so late to this party, but "I love this dirty town", too, and having first glimpsed New York as a wide-eyed seven year-old in 1962, this film preserves a nocturnal Manhattan that my parents knew but that was largely gone by the time I was an adult. Curtis really makes the film, better I think than even Brando or Clift could have done, as I don't think they could have brought across the desperate striving that was obviously a part of the makeup of the real Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx.

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?

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

jmhm — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 22:02:35 -0000

See you boys there, then.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

jmhm — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:59:18 -0000

My favorite Sweet Smell of Success factoid: Remember Darva Collins, the hard-as-nails blonde who discovered her self-respect when she found out the Millionaire she Married on the show of the same title wasn't one, really?

Harrison was her mom.

And if they’re saints, what are they doing here?

Entropy is only a problem in a closed system :)

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

tomwatson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:08:30 -0000

Really? I was reading some figures from the Sickness and Accident Claims Division. You know that the average New Yorker between the ages of twenty and fifty has two and a half colds a year?

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

tomwatson — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:04:17 -0000

Ah, Larry Tate...the classic clueless boss fall guy.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

wwolfe — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:14:59 -0000

I love knowing that Hunsecker lived in the Brill Building. Now I can picture Lieber and Stoller holed up in their office somewhere else in the same building, in that very same year, writing "Jailhouse Rock."

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.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Mike Schilling — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:19:16 -0000

Milt something.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Vanwall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:13:12 -0000

Nity nite, sweet dreams of sweet success.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Campaspe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:09:04 -0000

All right, time for me to hit the hay. I have a cold, which is bad timing, since a cold would have been perfect for next week and The Apartment.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Vanwall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:08:47 -0000

He was certainly fearless, I think he was too stubborn to back off anything he believed in. I'm sure this wasn't seen as a good career move, but for chance to say those lines, I'd've jumped, too.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Vanwall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:02:23 -0000

Well, at least I don't have blinders on mine, tho that smearing vaseline thingy sounds interesting.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Vanwall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:57:36 -0000

Yeah, I'd zero Falco out after that, it was an almost subtle execution.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Campaspe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:57:27 -0000

You have to hand it to Lancaster for even wanting to do the picture. No one else would touch it.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Vanwall — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:55:45 -0000

I always marveled at his uniform in "From Here to Eternity" - no human bein' could look that good, but he sure did.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Campaspe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:55:12 -0000

I had no idea. For my money Meyer is the scariest thing in the picture. Part of me thinks Sidney couldn't survive a beating from that guy.

Re: Wednesday Night at the Movies: Sweet Smell of Success Open Thread

Campaspe — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:53:49 -0000

Thanks, Dan! Harrison we haven't discussed, really. She looks wonderful, this little trembling greyhound in a coat, but she's out of her league and can't give Susie enough weight to make me care all that much if she goes over the balcony. Milner is better, but more like Dudley Do-Right than a jazz musician. Fortunately they both play a lot of scenes with Curtis, which helps a lot to maintain interest.