Thursday, June 26, 2008
Still A Sweet Artistic Success
Sweet Smell of Success opens big and bold. Elmer Bernstein's swinging angular score immediately takes one to the Broadway and Times Square of the fifties. When I see names on the credit sequence, my blood rushes like it would if I was at a surprise all-star game or jam session. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman! Chico Hamilton! James Wong Howe! These credits made me giddy.
Sweet Smell of Success is undeniably a great film and a landmark one that somehow I have not taken opportunity to view in the thirty five years or so that I have taken movie viewing somewhat seriously. It is as hard driving and well crafted a film that has ever been produced in the United States. It is a noir. It deals with under handed dealings and human behavior dishonest and unclean, but it does it in such a well-crafted vehicle a view with exceptional acting. And this film is look by Cinematographer Wong Hall that uniquely captures mood alternatively between realistic documentary feel and Hollywood light that is just what the New York streets, night club, apartments and offices call for.
In an article about the current status of the locations in Sweet Smell of Success NY Times writer Charles Strum describes Sidney Furie, Tony Curtis press agent character as "the obsequious press agent who makes slime look pure" Burt Lancaster is uber-powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker, who was in part modeled after Walter Winchell. Hunsecker is such a powerful presence in this film but one not physically present for for the first 20 minutes with asides about his influence and the rants or Furie, who has recently been ignored by Hunsecker because he hasn't broken up a relationship between his sister and a jazz guitarist played by Martin Milner.
On one level, Sweet Smell of Success is about dysfunctional family. Hunsecker is definitely hung up on his sister. Furie's uncle is Milner's manager. And the night club denizens in the shadowy world are all related in a kind of virtual fraternity expressed with the the kind of language that A.O. Scott once called "a high-toned street vernacular that no real New Yorker has ever spoken but that every real New Yorker wishes he could."
There is much systemically New York about this film that continues to capture the imagination of writers and commentators. A lot of this surfaced in the NY Times in 2002 when Sweet Smell was converted into a Marvin Hamlisch musical. Is this in part because this film in 1957 can be seen as kind of beginning to the tabloid pop culture we live in. For instance in the Sunday Times Magazine Kurt Andersen wrote:
In the intervening 45 years the wardrobe and lingo have changed some, and the relative power of various players has shifted. But as a benchmark of modern cultural history, ''Sweet Smell'' is more like the end of a beginning than the beginning of any end. Since the film's release, the infotainment-industrial complex grew exponentially from post-vaudeville germination to the all-subsuming 500-channel efflorescence of global media-movie-music conglomerates; gossip columns and crypto-gossip columns began appearing in more and more magazines and newspapers, including this one; celebrity became both indiscriminately fungible and a genuine national obsession; murky symbioses between journalists and publicists grew more widespread and entrenched; and a sneering, clued-in, ''Sweet Smell'' cynicism about the quid pro quo bargains for fame and success became the standard American take. Hunsecker and Falco are monsters, but they're also pioneers, founding fathers of the world we inhabit now.
But regardless of its linkage to our times and culture, Sweet Swell of Success is first and foremost a rip-roaring ride empowered by themes we now identify as noir, great dialog and some fine black and white cinematography.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:55 PM
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