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| Wednesday, September 1, 2004 03:47 PM |
| The Sweet Smell of Black and White |
 by Fëanor |
Almost every Wednesday night for a few years now, some friends and I have gathered together and watched a movie. We each get to pick a movie to show in a cycle. Once you've been to a certain number of meetings (the exact amount to be determined by our erstwhile host, Peccable), you get added to the cycle and get to pick a movie, too.
The movie night group has gotten bigger and louder as time has gone on. We've watched movies of every kind imaginable. Last week our host was sick and movie night got cancelled. But movie night was back this week, and the absence made me realize how much I really enjoyed it.
This week, a new member of the group, who goes by the name of Super Tarzan (do you really want to know why?), got his first choice of movie. It will be difficult for him to top it. It was a film called Sweet Smell of Success, and it was truly excellent.
I'd heard of Success before. It showed up in one of those lists of greatest movies that people are always making. I knew I wanted to see it then, but I want to see a lot of movies, and I never got around to this one until now.
It stars the inestimable Burt Lancaster, an amazing actor who blew me away when I first saw him in Field of Dreams, and only impressed me more in Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May and The Train. In this film he's amazing again as the looming, powerful, but all too human Hunsecker, a newspaper columnist who can make or break people with his words. Tony Curtis is here, too, in what may be the role of his career as desperate, sleazy, conniving press agent Sidney Falco. Falco hates Hunsecker, but also desires nothing more than to become him. Hunsecker hates Falco, but needs him to do his dirty work. Theirs is the twisted central relationship of the film, but Hunsecker's relationship with his sister is just as important and just as twisted. Desperate to keep her for his own, he sends Falco out to destroy her relationship with a perfectly nice jazz musician. But Falco, in his own, secret heart, loves her as well. Perhaps she's a symbol for him of the soul he lost long ago.
This is a movie about the dark, bitter hearts of city men, and the terrible things that people will do for "success." It's also about love, in its healthy and unhealthy forms. The screenplay is a hard, jagged ball of barbed wire, full of fantastic, steely one-liners dropped with intensity out of the mouths of these amazing, larger-than-life actors. The soundtrack blares with jazz, the music of the city. The black and white photography is brilliant and beautiful, spreading the sweaty, intent faces of these cold, bitter men across the screen and turning them into incredible architectural monuments to the evil that man does to man.
Success made me fall in love with black and white all over again. There's something clean and stark and fantastic about it. The director here is Alexander Mackendrick, somebody I'd never really heard of before, and who apparently didn't make too many films (although it turns out I did see another movie by him--The Ladykillers--but I didn't like it very much). Orson Welles was the first director to make me fall in love with black and white. See his Citizen Kane, or his Macbeth, or Touch of Evil, or The Trial, or Falstaff.
But definitely see Sweet Smell of Success. It's a jagged, poisoned dagger of a film. Which isn't to say that it's all dark and evil. There's some hope at the end that goodness can survive. But not without beating the sneaks and the liars at their own game, and getting a little stained in the process. |
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