Word: smells
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...hurt each other. Yet the film was a flop at the box office (Winchell announced, with apparent pleasure, that it lost $2 million) and invisible at awards time (it was the only one of Lehman's 50s scripts that did not win a Writers Guild nomination). Since then, "Sweet Smell" has become a retro-classic. Its wonderfully ornate cynicism is cited in "Mad Max," "Diner," "Rain Man" and "Boogie Nights" and on "The Simpsons"; this week's A&E special "New York at the Movies" had Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Peter Bogdanovich reciting passages of dialogue from memory...
...Sidney Falco - what underworld poetry that name expresses! What an amalgam of Jewish brain and Italian muscle! What a collision of the scurrying nebbish (Sidney) and the soaring predator (falcon)! Sidney is the protagonist of "Sweet Smell of Success," originally a novelette by Ernest Lehman, published in 1950 in Cosmopolitan. Seven years later, the story, rewritten by playwright Clifford Odets, was made into a film directed by Alexander Mackendrick and starring Curtis as Sidney and Lancaster as the Winchellesque columnist J.J. Hunsecker - another fabulous name, for an Attila who sucks the honey out of his minions and spits it into...
...Beyond the dialogue - so ripe you could squeeze it in a rival's face, like Cagney with a grapefruit - "Sweet Smell" is exemplary for being the very smartest, least preachy expos? on the wages of spin. The film tells us that this, dear ignorant America, is how your entertainment dreams are made: by bartering and bribery. These are the folks to whom you entrust the anointing of the famous: slimes. But slimes with style - for the watchworks of malevolence have their own precision, their own seductive movement. "Sweet Smell" is as much in love as in judgment of the moral...
...Sweet Smell" has to be seen as well as heard, and the place to do that right now is at Manhattan's Film Forum, where a splendid new 35mm print is unspooling through March 28. The big screen and clear print lets you see the pockmarks on J.J.'s skin (the harsh lighting that cinematographer James Wong Howe threw on Lancaster makes him look by turns reptilian and leprous), allows you to read the small print on the cover of a scandal magazine called Sensation (the lead story: "Sex in the City"). But the picture looks good in any size...
...lives that revolved around those columns. As I walked uptown, I kept seeing trash cans filled with people. And it didn't make me feel any better to know that I had filled more trash cans than any press agent in town." - from Ernest Lehman's story "Sweet Smell of Success...