Word: smell
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...half where you, you plant big lies about me and the club all over the map... [But] you are a personal liar too, because ya don't do the work that I pay ya for." - Joe Robard (Joseph Leon) in the film "Sweet Smell of Success...
...Sweet Smell" is noir, oui - but as brisk as the winter nights on which Sidney refuses to wear a topcoat. Mackendrick, whose aim was to play it "fast and high," wastes no time on dead spots for the audience to mull over what's just been said. The actors, servants of the superb dialogue, speak it quickly and crisply, without trying to find meaning in Method or profundities in pauses. Lancaster and Curtis never go outside their roles to remind us that they're really lovable scamps on a holiday in the sewers; that may have been what kept their...
...Sidney: "I am J.J. Hunsecker! It's who I'm gonna be, only bigger." - from the Broadway show "Sweet Smell of Success...
...victim, Curtis was the victor in the movie. I'll bet that when he first read the script he thought exultantly, "That's me all over!" Curtis may have spent the 50s playing pretty boys at Universal, but he was still Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx, and "Sweet Smell" gave Curtis the role he was born to play - even as he knew Sidney was born (and condemned) to play J.J.'s well-tailored foil. "Look at the way Sidney looked," Curtis told Buford. "So...perfect. Great-looking, lean, silk shirts, tapered trousers. Couldn't get out of that environment...
...world "Sweet Smell" so pungently defines was nearly in the past tense. The Broadway we glimpse under the opening credits reveals a street little like today's. The Trans-Lux Theatre, the Warner and Capital and Rivoli: all are gone. So are the roomy, stately Checker Cabs. The Palace Theatre, where the Herbie Temple sequence was shot, dropped vaudeville shortly after the picture was made. The Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley's Deco palace, still gleams, though it was never a residence; J.J.'s penthouse apartment, with its marble finishings, a Xanadu-size fireplace and a terrace that beckons frail...