#susan's verbally destroying half their enemies

[tending-the-hearth]

thinking about how canonically the pevensie siblings are 13, 12, 10, and 8 in "the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe"

thinking about how lucy needed a stool to be able to get up onto her throne, how peter's sword is a little too large for him, how susan's bow is a little too difficult for her to pull back, how edmund's shield nearly covers his entire body.

thinking about the pevensie siblings and their first few months in narnia, getting to know their new people, and half the narnians sitting there horrified because WHAT have these literal babies been through to give them such traumatized, old eyes, and the other half of the narnians are preparing to adopt them, no it doesn't matter that they're the rules, they're children who are being put in charge of too many things, and if peter looks at the old man council long enough he's going to cry, so someone needs to give him paternal support while aslan is off doing Lion Jesus Stuff™️ and whoops oreius is being nice and encouraging and now he's adopted his kings and queens they're his kids now he doesn't make the rules.

just the narnians and the pevensies being thrown into it together, and just as the pevensies will do anything to protect their new kingdom, the narnians will do anything to protect their rules, because let's be honest, these children have no sense of self-preservation, and are far too overprotective of each other and their people to take into account their own safety, so a lot of battles it's just one of the pevensie siblings running headfirst into danger with oreius running after them because his kids are feral and don't know proper royalty manners and won't threatening old kings from different countries because they're being assholes and the last time one of them tried undermining the queens susan called him a self-righteous asshole and lucy tried to stab him SOMEONE help him corral his children please

#this started off angsty but now i'm giggling #oreius didn't want to adopt the rulers they kind of just... attached to him #and who is he to oppose his kings and queens when lucy gives him her puppy eyes and edmund looks so sad #and peter just needs fatherly advice and susan looks like she could use a good dad hug #he's their adoptive father they make the rules #oreius is trying his best but his four kids are going through puberty and have bonded with every narnian #and it's not like he's opposing lucy's desire to stab rulers who act like they're better than them #but he can't legally encourage regicide #oreius and tumnus trying to corral the pevensies #meanwhile peter's challenging every ruler who tries to make comments about his sisters to a fistfight #edmund's conning the rulers who peter isn't fighting into handing over their kingdom's #susan's verbally destroying half their enemies #and lucy's running around making pacts with nature spirits to haunt the other half of their enemies #i love that canonically lucy is the most feral of the pevensie kids #chronicles of narnia #the lion the witch and the wardrobe #peter pevensie #lucy pevensie #susan pevensie #edmund pevensie #oreius

[dweemeister]

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

When Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success was released to theaters in 1957, critics noted the film’s seeping ironies, its jaded tones. The film’s cast and crew might have been surprised that the film’s target – gossip columnist Walter Winchell, who wielded the power of his typewriter for libelous attempts to destroy the career of his personal and professional enemies – has faded into historical obscurity. Yet charlatans and peddlers of “alternative facts” will always be a feature of popular culture and politics; ambitious individuals wielding their fame and stature for ill are to be opposed. All of these themes intersect in Sweet Smell of Success, which stars Burt Lancaster as the Winchell-esque columnist and Tony Curtis as a publicist looking to push his clients further up the rungs of professional success. The world shown in the film – of smoke-filled, high-end Manhattan restaurants, oversized apartments for oversized personalities, and the soggy streets of a chilly New York – is seen as zero-sum to its central characters, making casualties of those who make their acquaintance.

J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster) is the New York columnist, whose fiery pieces can ruin careers in a few sentences. He has tasked desperate publicist Sidney Falco (Curtis), whose flailing career is not what he envisioned for himself, to have his Hunsecker’s sister Susan (Susan Harrison) break up with jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Milner; who has sometimes been criticized for his uninteresting acting here – a development who I think plays into the relational dynamics between J.J. and Susan) – who are secretly engaged to marry. Falco has found little success, but his prospects brighten when he convinces a rival columnist to fabricate a story that Dallas is a marijuana-smoking Communist – yes, younger readers, marijuana usage could destroy a career at one point. But Hunsecker, after a confrontation with Dallas, wants to mutilate the young musician’s image, and requests that Falco frame Dallas and have him assaulted by a crooked policeman (Emile Meyer). Falco refuses, believing that proposal to be unprincipled – he changes his mind when offered to write Hunsecker’s column during a vacation.

Whether intentional or not, The Sweet Smell of Success is in some ways reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The banner to Hunsecker’s column in the fictional newspaper and across advertising boards in Manhattan are the top of Lancaster’s head – his hair, his eyes and squarish glasses. This striking column banner recalls the billboard eyes of T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby – which, to explain for the sake of brevity, symbolized the emptiness of the American Dream and God’s eyes looking upon the moral wastefulness of those all around – and serves, in Sweet Smell of Success, as a reminder of Hunsecker’s influence over police, politicians, pushy publicists. The introduction of both Gatsby and Hunsecker in their respective works occurs later than most would anticipate, having first established the dilemmas of a character through whom the story is told. The relationship between Gatsby and Nick Carraway is an imperfect parallel to that of Hunsecker and Falco, but both pairs have a mutual regard for the other half of their friendship, and both Nick and Falco are used as means to an abusive, sexually-laced end (where Gatsby is attempting to reconnect with his old flame, Daisy, there are hints of either asexuality or incestuous feelings towards Susan on Hunsecker’s part).

Repressed sexuality and loneliness – Falco and Hunsecker have acquaintances in which they gather information on others, but do they have anybody that they could trust fully in spilling out their vulnerabilities – are a notable feature to Sweet Smell of Success, despite being set in the heart of America’s largest city and being surrounded by women immodest by 1950s standards. Screenwriters Ernest Lehman (on whose novelette this film is based on; Lehman was also slated as director but had to depart from that and his screenwriting roles before production began due to health concerns) and Clifford Odets combine Hunsecker’s serrated eloquence (in a scene where he is introducing Falco to a United States Senator)...:

Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of forty faces, not one – none too pretty, and all deceptive. You see that grin? That's the... Charming Street Urchin face... He's got a half-dozen faces for the ladies. But the one I like, the really cute one, is the quick, dependable chap... Mr. Falco, whom I did not invite to sit at this table tonight, is a hungry press agent, and fully up to all the tricks of his very slimy trade.

... and Falco’s street-like conciseness (”The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”) It has been reported that Lehman (1959′s North by Northwest, 1965′s The Sound of Music, 1967′s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) was most responsible for the former, and Odets (1944′s None but the Lonely Heart, 1946′s Humoresque, 1954′s The Country Girl), who was brought in the finalize the screenplay, contributed most to the latter.

With Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis starring, the Lehman-Odets screenplay has two tremendous actors to verbally spar with the other. Curtis, then contracted to Universal, had to fight his home studio to star in Sweet Smell of Success as Universal executives had grown dependent on Curtis’ image as a charming matinee idol. In this one picture for United Artists and Burt Lancaster’s co-owned production company of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, Curtis did just that. He’s still a pretty boy here – hell, even one of the characters makes such a suggestion – but is a dangerous figure whose characterization is not softened even when Curtis (and the screenwriters) is offered the opportunity to do so. Burt Lancaster, who can sometimes be so forceful in his performances one might swear he was a Method actor exudes a restrained, but whip-cracking ruthlessness in Sweet Smell of Success. Lancaster, capable of physically challenging roles and also reportedly clashed with Mackendrick’s direction throughout shooting, is nevertheless a physical menace in the less-cluttered scenes when he is alone with the likes of Harrison or Curtis. Even the choice of glasses for Lancaster’s character of Hunsecker emphasizes his character’s tastes of political and cultural influence, staring intently into the anxieties and fears of the person sitting across from him.

The man responsible for the glasses and Sweet Smell of Success’ atmosphere was cinematographer James Wong Howe. Howe’s suggestion for these thick-rimmed glasses proved an asset – especially when Lancaster is filmed from above his browline. Combined with the occasional smudging of Vaseline on those lens, Howe's decisions allow Lancaster’s eyes to be hidden behind an oily glare – concealing part of his reactions at certain moments of the film. Howe, an under-celebrated figure in Hollywood history who wore an “I am Chinese” pin to escape anti-Japanese remarks while serving as Warner Bros.’ first-choice cinematographer the decade before, photographs New York City in the early or late wintertime, amid the lights of midtown Manhattan as well as the Times Square/Broadway area. Unlike the Times Square of the present day, there was no LED lighting or enormous panels that filled the sides of buildings in the 1950s, so even among the lights there are areas of darkness that Howe uses to capture the anonymity of individuals passing through his lens outside. Howe and Mackendrick, while scouting locations for Sweet Smell of Success, devised plans to begin scenes from Manhattan exteriors – shooting at low angles to emphasize the characters’ entrapment – and follow characters as they made their way indoors. Numerous indoor scenes – restaurants, nightclubs – are filled with extras. Howe, an early user of deep-focus cinematography, captures an inordinate amount of background movement in these frames. But this decision never distracts from what plot developments are occurring directly in front of the camera; the deep focus deepens the secrecy of Hunsecker and Falco’s stratagems, and provides Sweet Smell of Success an authenticity that would never have been accomplished if this film was shot by someone other than Howe or if Mackendrick had made the decision to shoot on a set.

Composer Elmer Bernstein (1956′s The Ten Commandments, 1960′s The Magnificent Seven, 1962′s To Kill a Mockingbird), the son of a Ukrainian-American mother and Austro-Hungarian father, was a classically trained pianist who had graduated from Juilliard and studied composition with Aaron Copland. So it is all the more surprising that Bernstein, nearing the pinnacle of what would be a sixty-year career, composed a score mostly cued in the style of West Coast jazz to accompany events onscreen – some of this score even appears as diegetic music performed by the Chico Hamilton Quintet. The harmonies are unusually layered for an Elmer Bernstein composition, alongside an unorthodox instrumentation during the jazz quintet scenes – which includes cello, flute, and guitar. The harshest repeating theme – and there are few discernible leitmotifs in Bernstein’s score (another oddity given Bernstein’s compositional history and this era of film scoring) – is saved for the most dramatic moments involving Falco, and is best used at the film’s opening and closing minutes.

Sweet Smell of Success, in some ways, fulfills the promise of the synchronized sound film: uniting the communicability of moving imagery with the expressiveness enabled by music and diction. The film’s moving parts are numerous, operating with breathtaking efficiency and meticulous artistry. Is a figure like Walter Winchell or, in the case of Mackendrick’s film, a J.J. Hunsecker, relevant for cinematic audiences or – more broadly – a general public? Nationally-syndicated newspaper columnists still wield some influence, but the democracy of information and misinformation in a technologically-advanced, interconnected world has changed where the Winchells and Hunseckers might disperse their reckless rhetoric. Their motivations to exert power through their words – at least, in the view of Mackendrick, Lehman, and Odets – might force sycophants and flatterers to bend to their will, but such behavior creates enemies from unwilling friends, unwilling friends from authority-starved or actually starving bystanders. Whether or not individuals still operate like that – they need not be newspaper columnists or publicists – is a debatable point. But this story of mutual admiration through a litany of deceit and deceptions with total abandon is as immediate and salient as it has ever been.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Sweet Smell of Success is the one hundred and thirty-eighth film I have rated a ten on imdb.

#Sweet Smell of Success #Alexander Mackendrick #Tony Curtis #Burt Lancaster #Susan Harrison #Martin Milner #Sam Levene #Barbara Nichols #Jeff Donnell #Joe Frisco #Emile Meyer #Ernest Lehman #Clifford Odets #James Wong Howe #Elmer Bernstein #TCM #My Movie Odyssey