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i-just-want-to-destroy · 2 years

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Roger Ebert’s review on The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

#roger ebert #the sweet smell of success #film #sidney falco #j.j. hunsecker #archive #you cant have one without the other!!!!!!

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theparallaxview · 2 years

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An Affirmation.

#film noir #sweet smell of success #sidney falco #j.j. hunsecker #original content

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streamondemand · 2 years

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'Sweet Smell of Success' – Broadway noir on Amazon Prime

‘Sweet Smell of Success’ – Broadway noir on Amazon Prime

“I love this dirty town.” The first and only time that Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker drops the cynical twist from his clenched smile and allows genuine appreciation cross his face in Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is when he drops that line while strolling down the nighttime streets of Broadway. It’s not a proclamation or even necessarily a compliment. He loves this town because he rules it from…

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lesbiancolumbo · 3 months

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the list of lesbiancolumbo-authorized j.j. hunsecker/sidney falco castings is as follows:

burt lancaster/tony curtis (the holy grail) orson welles/joseph cotten (duh) robert ryan/montgomery clift (i would like to see it) grace kelly/ava gardner (lesbian version) john lithgow/brian d'arcy james (the holy grail broadway edition)

and that's it

#not taking suggestions at this time please and thank you

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letmerambleplease · 2 months

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Hey everyone! This is my first time doing this but in the following lines I’ll try very hard to convince you to watch a movie. ^^ (Yeah this isn't a balanced review of the movie, more like me just gushing about it) The name is « Sweet Smell of Success » and it’s is really underrated. However, when I went on twitter the other day, I did see that it still gets some love there which makes me very happy! You can rent it on amazon prime.

Ok but first things first. I‘m not a native english speaker so please excuse any mistakes! Also… and this is pretty important, I feel like I need to give trigger warnings because the movie deals with some heavy themes, like abusive relation ships, self harm, questionable sexual situations (sorry don’t know how to describe it) and probably more stuff that you should be midful of when watching it. It is not very explicit though in my opinion, so you won’t see any blood for example on screen. Furthermore (haha I’m trying to remember fancy words from english class ^^‘) I really love the characters as characters, that does not mean I condone any of their actions obviously.

Ok! With all of that out oft he way let’s begin!

Sweet Smell of Success is a film noir drama released in 1957, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. It is based on a nouvelette « Cosmopolitan » by Ernest Lehman and in the main roles are starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, and Martin Milner.

The movie is about a press agent named Sidney Falco (dope name btw) who works under the very powerful colomnist J.J. Hunsecker. J.J.‘s sister Susie Hunsecker is in a relationship with a man J.J. deems unworthy, which is why he wants Sidney to get them to break up. He himself does not want to ruin his relationship with his sister, who is already getting wary of him.

I will try to stay spoiler free for this first section. Later on I want to talk about more of my personal viewing experience and will probably get into Spoilers, but I’ll warn you then.

I would like to start by talking about the acting and the characters. The actors are all great but stand outs for me are Tony Curtis who plays Sidney and Burt Lancaster who plays J.J.. Even though the charcters are both very manipulative and horrible people, the two actors play them very differently, which makes it super fun to watch. Sidney is always on his feet and you can practically see how many gears in his head are turning to devise a new scheme. Tony Curtis portrays this very well through nervous gestures and facial expressions. He is also very good at showing Sidneys deceptive side and his charme. The movie establishes his motivation in the very first minutes, which is great because everything he does comes back to a desire to find financial and social success. To achieve his goals Sidney does not really care about anyone, however he is very nice to most people, in case they could be useful later. There are always a lot of people greeting him when he comes into a bar and he himself even says that he is basically keeping up appearances 24/7.

J.J. on the other hand is very calm and seems threatening even in seemingly normal conversations. In stark contrast to Sidney he does not seem that occupied with being nice and keeping appearances because he can get away with it. He doesn’t need to appease someone, peoply try to appease him.

The movie is very interesting because it portrays different kinds of power struggles and power dynamics. From a first glance it seems like J.J. is basically at the top. He is very influencial, super intimidating (like damn, I would be very scared of him in real life) and commands every conversation he is in. But inspite of all of that he still has his limitations. One of his biggest limitations is his sister Susie herself. I think she is the only person he at least tries to keep a friendly relatinship with, while also controlling every aspect of her life. I think he knows that when she decides to leave that he can’t really do anything about it, so he pressures her into staying by intimidating her, while also trying to not push her over the edge. And at the end their whole dynamic switches, which leaves him standing quietly and kind of in a crouching position behind a door. It is a little difficult to explain tob e honest and if you are someone who watched the film let me know what you think.

Another thing is that, while Sidney definitly ranks beneath him in the power pyramid if you will, he still needs him to accomplish his goals. Because as I said before Sidney is very cunning and fast to not only devise a plan but to execute it as well.

There is a lot more to say about the characters and their dynamics however I’ll stop here for now to talk a little bit about how the movie structures it scenes.

Most oft he time the Movie follows Sidney and his schemes, and there are just some scenes here and there with him missing. And it is so much fun to see scenes building on each other, while his plans get more complicated. And to be honest at least for me there never is a dull moment. Because the movie is very good at making even little scenes matter later.

Maybe I can give you an example. These scenes are mostly there to show how Sidney works and acts, so they primarily exist to characterize him and I think they are very cool. So, Sidney goes to J.J.’s Column (I think) where he visits some kind of secretary who has information on what will be printed in the next issue. He flirts with her a little (again showing how charming he can be) however she already knows that he only wants information and tells him about a comedian without existing press agent who will be featured in the paper under the headline « Funniest man in New York » or something similar like that. That scene alone is fine, however it gets really cool when he later meets said comedian. He obvously wants to get hired so he tells the Comedian that he has connections that can get the comedian into J.J.‘s paper (which is a big deal). He then proceeds to fake a phone call with J.J. (It’s hilarious because he just calls his own secretary who hangs up confused about what he is talking about). He pretends to suggest an article about the comedian and even uses the same Headline he found out about earlier. After that he goes back tot he comedian, knowing fully well that the article will be published the next day. And later in the movie the comedian comes back to hire him. (At that point he get’s ignored though, because Sidney has bigger plans). Like, Sidney is awful, sexist, racist, manipulative and overall pretty bad but it is a real delight to see what plans he comes up with.

I want to also mention the visuals of the movie. Because they are gorgeous! The movie is in black and white which I did not like for a long time because I thought it made everything look washed out and kind of dull. However the contrast in Sweet Smell of Succes is very nice! There are bright highlights and deep shadows and the lighting is often used to convey a specific athmosphere. For example when half of the face of a character is completly covered in shadows. Another neat example is how the glasses of J.J. cast some sharp shadows on his face to make him seem more menacing. A lot of it is shot at nighttime in New York, where are a lot of lights, which makes a very cool backdrop.

It is also very cool how each indovidual shot subconsciously tells us something about the relationships between the characters. J.J. is often sitting but takes still more space up in the frame to show his dominance of a scene. Or sometimes the focus of the camera shifts slightly away from a conversation that is happening in the foreground to show Sidney in the back, because he orchestrated the situation.

In general the movie is full of cool, little things and tricks. That is in the script and the visuals. In one of my favourite scenes (not because oft he content but because of how it was shot) Susies Love interest gets surroundet by corrupt police men and before anything happens it cuts tot he drums oft the Jazz band that is playing in the club he just left. Our mind automatically makes the connection that he was beaten up pretty badly, without even seeing it.

Why is all of this important? Well, as someone who likes to watch movie reviews on Youtube I feel like a criticism I hear a lot is that a movie treats ist viewers like they are too dumb to understand subliminal messages and thus becomes boring or even insulting. It is also just a lot more fun to watch a movie that does not take you out of the story wit exposition and instead let’s you figure stuff out for yourself.

This all may sound like Sweet Smell of Success is a movie without a lot of taking. But that is very far from the truth. I would actually say that the dialogue is one of its biggest strengths! Not only informs you a lot about the characters, it also includes some of the coolest lines I have heard in any media. The lines „Cat’s In The Bag … ” and “. . . And The Bag’s In The River” even served as episode titles for a show I also love very much : Breaking Bad. Side note, Sweet Smell of Sucess is also one of the favourite movies of the creator of Breaking Bad. Haha maybe that’s a more convincing argument to watch it that anything I could say. Anyways, the dialogue is also great at referencing itself at later points and creating awesome foreshadowing.

I also want to talk about the music very briefly. I think the soundtrack fits the story and overal vibe of the setting perfectly. A cool little easter egg is that the Band of which Susies Love interest Steve is a part of is also the band who made the soundtrack fort he movie.

Just for fun I want to talk about my first viewing experience, which might include Spoilers. Maybe you can watch the movie first and come back later to compare your experience to mine. However the movie does not get ruined through Spoilers. I watched it a few times already and noticed something cool and new almost every time.

For a little bit of context : I actully only watched the movie because I already liked Tony Curtis. By chance I caught Operation Petticoat on TV. And to be completly honest I just thought he was very handsome, so with nothing better to do I started to watch more movies he starred in. I did not expect to find one of my favourite movies of all time XD So I started watching and the first thing I noticed was that it was interesting to start the movie with the main character already stressed and angry. I feel like normally we get so see the characters in their „normal „ state, which get’s disrupted by an inciting incident. Sweet Smell of Success throws you right in the action though. On second thought, stressed and angry might me Sidneys default state…

Something to know is that a lot of the audience back when the movie was released did not like that Tony Curtis portayed such a scheming character. They expected him tob e a nice guy like he was in pretty much all of his other movies. And the funny thing is, I did too. It took me soooo long to finally realize that Sidney was just not meant to be a nice character. I think in one of his first scenes he even says „I‘m not a good person“ or something along those lines. For an explanation: A lot of the movie was very difficult for me to understand in english, partly because I just didn’t know the words they were using and partly because Sweet Smell of Succes’s story line is not that simple. So fort he majority oft he film I sat there a little confused but still intrigued. And then came the scene in which Sidney tries to persuade a woman into sleeping with a man for his own gain and clearly against her wishes. And I was like „???? that is not ok Sidney! How am I supposed to root for you now? Is this a 50’s thing? Did they think back then something like that was ok?“. And then later when he plants the drugs on Steve I thought for sure he would go back and save him from the police, as a redeeming moment. And when he didn’t it finally occured to me that we weren’t supposed to root for Sidney in the first place. And that is when the movie got super interesting. Because Susie pretty much finds out that Sidney and J.J. were behind the assault of her Lover (though it is a little ambiguous). And she and Sidney meet up in her and J.J.‘s apartement and honestly my heart beat so fast while watching this scene! Because you really don’t know what will happen. If there is a happy end for the main character, that would not be really a happy end, because the main character is a selfish, horrible person.

*Major Spoiler incoming* At the end Susie tries to jump of her balcony, however Sidney is barly able to rescues her. She is obviously very distraught by the whole situation and just in that Moment J.J. comes back home. As I said before the movie is not always very clear with what is going on inside of the minds of the characters however this is how I understood the ending: Sidney got a message from J.J. which ordered him to come to his apartement, however when he arrives J.J. is not there… just Susie. I am pretty sure she called him there to make it seem like he was directly responsible for her death. This way she would have taken revenge on Sidney and J.J. simultaniously, while also escaping her current seemingly hopeless living condition. And I guess this ending would have worked, however it would have been pretty dark. I love happy endings and I think the actual ending is as close as you can get to one with a movie like this. The dialogue is very well written, especially at the end. It is honestly a little to difficult to summerize all the nuances, because there are a lot of lies and truths that are made out to be lies and so on. I think you’ll need to see it for yourself.

I love the ending because it seems like every character gets what they deserve (except for Steve, poor guy is in the hospital) Sidney told Susie the truths about their schemes, which made J.J. turn on him and send a corrupt cop after him. Not only gets he beat up and who knows what happens after that but also are the chances of him achieving the goal he chased after the whole movie : finding succes, pretty much down to zero. Susie finally breaks free from her brother and goes to her boyfriend. I am really glad she did not need to die but instead gets to have a better future, symbolized by a ray of light she walks into in her last scene. You could say that J.J. gets of a little to light, however it is stated that Susie is the only family he has and that he cares for her (though in a crontrolling way). And with her breaking free from him he lost the only human connection he actually wanted in his life. At any rate it feels like a very satisfying conclusion to me.

#sweet smell of success #old movies #movie recommendation #movie 1957 #50s #50s movies #tony curtis #burt lancaster #50s actress #50s actor #movie review #cinema #love this movie #criterion collection #hollywood #classic movies

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doriangray1789 · 5 months

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Judas Priest - A Touch of Evil ve Noir: Sweet Smell of Success - filmi

Büyük Kısmı Gece Çekilen ve Az Bilinen, Nefis Bir Film Noir: Sweet Smell of Success - filmin büyük çoğunluğu gece çekilmiştir -ki ışığın giderek öldüğü bir filmdir filmin tantım konusu için şöyle bir not düşülmüş "jazz club'lardan ışıltılı caddelere, yarı gölgeli iç uzamlardan tekinsiz sokaklara; ışık-gölge sembolizmi ve aydınlatma tekniğiyle alman ekspresyonizminin görsel üslubuna bağlı kalan film, dönemin düşük aydınlatmalı öteki kara filmleri gibi dışavurumcudur. örneğin erotik-noir gilda'da (1946) somutlaşan ve insan profillerinin yarısının aydınlık diğer yarısının karanlık betimlendiği bu sıra dışı çalışmalar, film noir'ın arketiplerini bünyesinde barındıran güzide örneklerdir. alexander mackendrick'in en karamsar filmidir. zaten 40'lı ve izleyen 50'li yıllarda iyimser bir ruh halinin kara filmlere epey uzak olduğunu mimlemek durumundayız. ace in the hole (1951) ile birlikte gazetecilik ahlakına saldıran en önemli filmlerdendir. bu yanıyla sweet smell of success (başarının tatlı kokusu) aslında zeitgeist'ın değil, bütün zamanların filmidir.filmde ferah, lüks bir dairede yaşayan nüfuzlu gazeteci, tv şovu sunucusu j.j. hunsecker (burt lancaster), emrindeki köşe yazarı ajanı sidney falco’yu (tony curtis) savunmasız küçük insanları ezmek için görevlendirir. iftirayla örülü, çıkar ilişkileri ve şantajdan kurulu, kirli hesapların dünyasında köşe yazarlarının yozlaşmışlığı, seks düşkünlüğü, ahlaksız kirli polislerin nüfuzlu kişilerin emrine girdikleri kasvetli, karanlık bir atmosfer büyüteç altına alınır. Sidney Falco'nun polisten dayak yediği sahne o döneme dek çekilmiş kara filmler arasında, lady in the lake (1947) ve touch of evil (1958) ile birlikte birkaç örnekten birini teşkil eder. bu döneme yani 50'li yıllara dek polisler genelde idealist tiplemeler olarak çiziliyorlardı." Judas Priest'in "A Touch of Evil" şarkısı, bir adamın ayartma ve arzuyla mücadelesini konu alır. Şarkının sözleri anlatıcının dikkatini çeken baştan çıkarıcı bir gücü tarif eder ve "kötülük" kelimesinin yerel yorumu ayartmaya bir göndermedir. Anlatıcı, gücünden korkmasına rağmen kötülüğün gizemli gücüne doğru çekilmektedir. Bu canlı imgeler aracılığıyla şarkı, insanın içsel bir anlayışa ulaşmak için ayartmalarla yüz yüze gelmesi gerektiğini ve onlara direnemeyeceğini veya onlardan kaçınamayacağını öne sürer. Nakarat, ne kadar direnmeye çalışırsak çalışalım, nihayetinde bu "kötülüğün dokunuşunun" getirdiği arzuya teslim olmamız gerektiğini hatırlatır.

#Youtube

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titleleaf · 6 months

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This J. Edgar Hoover biography talks a lot about his friendship with Walter Winchell, he and Clyde Tolson hobnobbing with Winchell’s social circle as a couple, and his gossip columnist allies embarking on a deliberate press gambit to promote the notion that Hoover might wed Lela Rogers (mother of Ginger) after his mother’s death left his enduring bachelorhood open to innuendo. But unfortunately I have two fucking brain cells so I am absolutely thinking about the various fictionalized noir Winchell analogues hanging out with the Hoov.

RIP J.J. Hunsecker, you would have hated his little dogs.

#ska reads a thing

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byneddiedingo · 9 months

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Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Jeff Donnell, Sam Levene, Joe Frisco, Barbara Nichols, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater. Screenplay: Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Lehman. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Edward Carrere. Film editing: Alan Crosland Jr. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

What do Sweet Smell of Success, His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) have in common? They are all among the critically acclaimed films that, among other honors, have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. And none of them received a single nomination in any category for the Academy Awards. Sweet Smell is, of course, a wickedly cynical film about two of the most egregious anti-heroes, New York newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), ever to appear in a film. They make the gangsters of Francis Ford Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's films look like Boy Scouts. So given the inclination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stay on the good side of columnists and publicists, we might expect it to shy away from honoring the film with Oscars. But consider the categories in which it might have been nominated. The best picture Oscar for 1957 went to The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean), a respectable choice, and Sidney Lumet's tensely entertaining 12 Angry Men certainly deserved the nomination it received. But in what ways are the other nominees -- Peyton Place (Mark Robson), Sayonara (Joshua Logan), and Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder) -- superior to Sweet Smell? The best actor Oscar winner was Alec Guinness for The Bridge on the River Kwai, another plausible choice. But Tony Curtis gave the performance of his career as Sidney Falco, overcoming his "pretty boy" image -- in fact, the film makes fun of it: One character refers to him as "Eyelashes" -- by digging deep into his roots growing up in The Bronx. Burt Lancaster would win an Oscar three years later for Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks), a more showy but less controlled performance than the one he gives here. Either or both of them would have been better nominees than Marlon Brando was for his lazy turn in Sayonara, Anthony Franciosa in A Hatful of Rain (Fred Zinnemann), Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, and Anthony Quinn in Wild Is the Wind (George Cukor). The dialogue provided by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman for the film crackles and stings -- there is probably no more quotable, or stolen from, screenplay, yet it went unnominated. So did James Wong Howe's eloquent black-and-white cinematography, showing off the neon-lighted Broadway in a sinister fashion, and Elmer Bernstein's atmospheric score mixed well with the jazz sequences featuring the Chico Hamilton Quintet. Even the performers in the film who probably didn't merit nominations make solid contributions: Martin Milner is miscast as the jazz musician who falls for Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison), but he hasn't yet fallen into the blandness of his famous TV roles on Route 66 and Adam-12, and Barbara Nichols, who had a long career playing floozies in movies and on TV, is surprisingly touching as Rita, one of the pawns Sidney uses to get ahead. As a director, Alexander Mackendrick is best known for the comedies he did at Britain's Ealing Studios with Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). His work on Sweet Smell was complicated by clashes with Lancaster, who was one of the film's executive producers, and after making a few more films he accepted a position at the film school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1967, where he spent the rest of his career.

#Sweet Smell of Success #Alexander Mackendrick #Tony Curtis #Burt Lancaster

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samtrapani · 1 year

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top 5 comfort characters !

ASK ME MY “TOP 5/TOP 10” ANYTHING!

rusty galloway (la noire)

henry tomasino (mafia 2)

thomas burke (mafia 3)

j.j hunsecker (sweet smell of success)

francis mcreary (gta iv)

#thanks for the ask :3c #jessepng #answered #ask #i have SO many comfort characters #picking 5 was so hard ngl #francis and derrick are the newest additions but i had to pick one :(#three of the people on this list fall into the category of irish + alcoholic + GREEN MOTIF

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susiehunsecker · 19 days

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"Dallas is more like Hunsecker than he can admit: they are both prigs, self-righteous, and combative. Susie is accustomed to being smothered, and Steve is willing to take over that task from her brother. He loses the confrontation over her because he can’t leave well enough alone or get past his own ethical superiority. Dallas is a cipher and no hero; credit Milner for getting that."

— Sweet Smell of Success: The Fantastic Falco by Gary Giddins for Criterion, 2011.

#Is anyone else here insane.#sweet smell of success #susan hunsecker #j.j. hunsecker #there's more from this essay about jj and susan #mostly about how susan and jj are a lot like daisy and tom from the great gatsby #in that jj and tom are both self-righteous conservatives #and how susan and daisy shrink into themselves the same way during confrontations about who they should be with #I'm just crazy right now. I love you susan I love you jj....

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pennyserenade · 2 years

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parallels: dave york + j.j. hunsecker / “ you spare me the righteous bullshit, alright? you do what you have to do and you move on ” ( equalizer 2 ) / “ son, i don't relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don't you just shuffle along? ” ( sweet smell of success )

#dave york you're so jj coded #goodbye inspo.#kings of hard looks and betraying those who would've moved mountains for you

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