Film Noir File: ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ and a Buñuel bundle are this week’s baubles on TCM

By Film Noir Blonde and Mike Wilmington

The Film Noir File is FNB’s guide to classic film noir, neo-noir and pre-noir on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). All movies below are from the schedule of TCM, which broadcasts them uncut and uninterrupted. The times are Eastern Standard and (Pacific Standard).

Pick of the Week

Sweet Smell of Success” (1957, Alexander Mackendrick). Sunday, Jan. 25, 10 p.m. (7 p.m.).

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster star in “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster star in “Sweet Smell of Success.”

“Sweet Smell of Success,” an American movie masterpiece and one of the best and gutsiest of all the classic film noirs, is a sleek killer comedy/drama about Broadway in the ’50s.

It centers around two influential New Yorkers: megalomaniac star gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and one of his more energetic publicist-sources, scummy but fashionable Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis).

And yes that is actor David White aka Larry Tate from TV’s  “Bewitched”as Otis Elwell (uncredited). Watching  “Sweet Smell of Success” now, you naturally think of “Mad Men” and an elite long-ago world of white men climbing the ladder of success: ruthless and glamorous, cut-throat and captivating.

Yes, that is actor David White (right) aka Larry Tate from TV’s  “Bewitched”as Otis Elwell (uncredited).

Yes, that is actor David White (right) aka Larry Tate from TV’s “Bewitched”as Otis Elwell (uncredited).

Read the full review here.

Monday, Jan. 26

Five by Luis Buñuel

Five superb films, from his middle and later years, by the great dark Spanish movie surrealist Luis Buñuel, whose extraordinary films, whether made in Spain, France Mexico or the U.S., are as noir as they come.

8 p.m. (5 p.m.): “Belle de Jour” (1967, Luis Buñuel). The most beautiful movie actress alive directed by the world’s most brilliantly rebellious and surreal filmmaker. That was the incendiary match-up of star Catherine Deneuve and director Luis Buñuel, most notably in their classic 1967 French erotic noir drama “Belle de Jour.”

In that great film, Deneuve – so lovely and so classically, radiantly, sexily blonde – played Severine, the icy, ravishing Parisian wife, who becomes a prostitute during the day to escape her boring bourgeois life and her handsome but boring husband (Jean Sorel). Severine then falls into a mad world of crime, hypocrisy, dreamlike perversity and mad peril. “Belle de Jour,” adapted from the novel by Joseph Kessel, was the most popular, sensational and best-remembered film of Buñuel’s entire career. In French. with English subtitles.

Catherine Deneuve is unforgettable in 1967’s noir drama “Belle de Jour.”

Catherine Deneuve is unforgettable in 1967’s noir drama “Belle de Jour.”

10 p.m. (7 p.m.): “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972, Luis Buñuel). Buñuel’s sly, surreal Oscar-winner (for Best Foreign Language Picture of 1972), about a bourgeois dinner party that gets constantly interrupted and a world that is increasingly out of joint. The splendid cast includes Delphine Seyrig, Michel Piccoli, Fernando Rey, Stephane Audran, Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Cassel. Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carriere co-wrote the script. In French, with subtitles.

12 a.m. (9 p.m.): “Diary of a Chambermaid” (1964, Luis Buñuel). Jeanne Moreau is a sultry chambermaid in a perverse French household, surrounded by exploitation and erotic menace. Adapted by Buñuel and Carriere from the novel by Octave Mirbeau (previously filmed in 1946 by director Jean Renoir and star Paulette Goddard). In French, with subtitles.

2 a.m. (11 p.m.): “Viridiana” (1961, Luis Buñuel). A young convent woman returns to her wealthy and lascivious uncle’s elegant house and learns, unhappily, that the world of man and the will of God are often at odds. Buñuel’s return to Spanish filmmaking after decades of exile was then banned in Spain, but was otherwise a worldwide art house hit and a Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or winner. With Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey and Francisco (”Paco”) Rabal. In Spanish, with subtitles.

3:45 a.m. (12:45 a.m.): “The Exterminating Angel” (1962, Luis Buñuel). One of Buñuel’s greatest dark jokes: A Mexican upper-class family and their friends stage a posh dinner party, but then discover that they somehow, mysteriously, maddeningly, can’t leave the dining room. They must stay there, suffer, degenerate and perhaps die. An incredible piece of stylish nightmare : pure Buñuel. With Silvia Pinal and Enrique Rambal. In Spanish, with subtitles.

9:45 a.m. (6:45 a.m.): “Zazie dans le Metro” (1960, Louis Malle). Reviewed in FNB on June 24, 2011.

Tuesday, Jan. 27

12:30 a.m. (9:30 p.m.): “Three Days of the Condor” (1975, Sydney Pollack). Robert Redford is a U. S. government reader and analyst whose world suddenly opens under his feet one day, when most of his colleagues are killed and he becomes a wanted man on the run. The quintessential paranoid anti-C.I.A. thriller, this is a modern variant on the prototypical Hitchcockian “wrong man“ suspenser. Based on James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor,” it’s been copied endlessly, especially by novelist John Grisham. With Faye Dunaway, Max Von Sydow, Cliff Robertson and John Houseman. [Read more…]

‘Sweet Smell of Success’ beautifully captures the sour stink of moral decay

Sweet Smell of Success/ 1957/ United Artists/ 96 min.

Michael Wilmington

This month, I am giving away a copy of Criterion’s new two-disc edition of “Sweet Smell of Success” directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Just leave a comment on any post in March and you will be entered; the winner will be drawn at random. Here, critic Michael Wilmington reviews this unforgettable film.

“Sweet Smell of Success,” an American movie masterpiece and one of the best and gutsiest of all the classic film noirs, is a sleek killer comedy/drama about Broadway in the ’50s.

It centers around two influential New Yorkers: megalomaniac star gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and one of his more energetic publicist-sources, scummy but fashionable Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis).

Falco, who wears a suit black as night, a dazzling white shirt and a poisonous leer that implies he’s seen something dirty and knows something even filthier, lives and dies each day by whether he gets a story planted in Hunsecker’s hugely successful column. Hunsecker, meanwhile, mostly holds court in the night spots that are his fiefdom, condescending to all the people, from Falco and other flacks, to movie stars to a U.S. Senator, who come to sip, smoke and pay him homage.

Hunsecker and Falco are unashamed users, almost proudly amoral. Hunsecker thinks he’s above morality; Falco thinks he can’t afford it now. Falco treats his potential patron with a fawning but mean-eyed servility. Hunsecker, with his ominous spectacles masking eyes of ice, freezes out Falco dismissively. “Match me,” Hunsecker tells the weasely Falco, in one of this movie’s many famous lines. Though Falco doesn’t actually scramble to light his cigarette, he does far worse.

Both these monsters have need of each other in this dark night and smoky day, in this world bounded by the Stork Club, Twenty One, Broadway and 42nd Street. Falco wants to use Hunsecker to ascend higher, into the sweet, smelly heights of Broadway gossip success, to become another Hunsecker.

Meanwhile, Hunsecker has nominated Falco for one of the dirty jobs he can’t get too close to: sabotaging the romance between his younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and her straight-arrow musician lover Steve (Martin Milner).

“Sweet Smell” deliberately patterned Hunsecker after one of the country’s most famous and powerful newspapermen Walter Winchell (1897-1972). Winchell’s daughter Walda was the model for Hunsecker’s sister Susan.

When you watch Hunsecker and Falco do their routines – snazzy, cruel, funny – you’ll never forget them. You’ll hear Hunsecker telling Falco, “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” Or Falco circling cigarette girl Rita (Barbara Nichols) and answering her query about whether he’s listening to her by wisecracking, “Avidly, avidly.”

Falco and Hunsecker are classic American movie characters, written with knifelike wit, commanding craft and true street genius by Ernest Lehman (who worked in this world) and Clifford Odets (a one-time playwright king of Broadway). It is directed with stinging life, energy and flawless insight by Alexander Mackendrick, an American of Scottish descent, who was one of the comedy experts of that British treasure-house, the Ealing Studio.

“Sweet Smell” was a sometimes-chaotic production. But Lehman or Odets never produced a better script. Mackendrick never directed a better movie. Elmer Bernstein rarely wrote a jazzier, sharper score. The master cinematographer James Wong Howe (“Hangmen Also Die!” “Pursued,” “Body and Soul”) never shot a darker, more brilliant noir.

Lancaster was sometimes more impressive, more richly colored and dominating, in tonier classics like “Elmer Gantry,” “From Here to Eternity” and “The Leopard.” But Curtis never topped Falco, not even in “Some Like It Hot.”

Lancaster was not Mackendrick’s choice for Hunsecker. He wanted Orson Welles or Hume Cronyn. It’s a weird piece of casting that works and it makes this a stronger, sexier and more subversive film. [Read more…]

Free stuff from FNB: Win ‘Sweet Smell of Success’

Tony Curtis, left, and Burt Lancaster in "Sweet Smell"

Sarah K. has won February’s giveaway and will receive a copy of “The Night of the Hunter,” recently rereleased by Criterion. For the March giveaway, the lovely people at Criterion will provide a copy of 1957’s “Sweet Smell of Success,” a searing study of corruption, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. Midmonth I will run a review of the film by critic Michael Wilmington.

To enter, just leave a comment on any FNB post in March. The winner will be randomly selected at the end of the month and announced in early April. Include your email address in your comment so that I can notify you if you win. Your email will not be shared.

Good luck, sweet readers!

United Artists image