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28 Feb, 2011 By: Mike Clark
Home Media Magazine
"Sweet Smell of Success" gets the Criterion Treatment

Criterion
Drama
$39.95 two-DVD set, $39.95 Blu-ray
Not rated.
Stars Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner.

Before the Internet — and, for that matter, before the onset of ‘70s repertory theaters, cable movie stations and VHS — it used to take years and years for the critical/popular fortunes of movies to change. But I can tell you this about 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success: By 1975, Exxon Corporation was funding new 35mm prints of black-and-white photographic masterworks to go out on a national tour to art institutions, and this onetime box office disaster (and even critical underperformer) was among the selections along with Shanghai Express, Gilda, The Night of the Hunter and other obvious worthies. By 1982, Sweet Smell became part of the DNA in Barry Levinson’s Diner (due to one character’s verbal fixation on it), and by 1993 the Library of Congress had put it on its annual National Film Registry list.

In any event, the new Criterion release makes the movie seem more vivid and immediate than ever — even though the trenchant Clifford Odets/Ernest Lehman script deals with a long-ago era and a central character based on the now rather amazingly forgotten gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Ironically, he is perhaps best known today because of this movie, the financial failure of which he trumpeted in his column — which by then had begun to wane in its formidable power to make or break careers. Of course, as long as Winchell’s staccato narration of “The Untouchables” continues to exist on DVD and reruns, he will always live for some (including the descendents of that crime show’s targeted hood extraordinaire Frank Nitti).

Sporting glasses and one of the screen decade’s severest haircuts, Burt Lancaster (as fictional New York Globe columnist J.J. Hunsecker) is nothing like Winchell in physicality or tonality. But what a foil he makes for Tony Curtis’s famously amoral press agent Sidney Falco — the performance of Curtis’s career along with his steamed-glasses comic jewel in Some Like It Hot. A good-looking slug who’s come up from the streets (and lives there as well, in a combo Manhattan apartment/office), sycophant Falco can’t find a way to extricate himself from a mess involving J.J.’s kid sister (Susan Harrison), on whom the columnist has a rather unhealthy fixation. Note the glossy 8-by-10 glamour shot of her on big brother’s desk, which director Alexander Mackendrick makes prominent in our line of vision from time to time. Too bad she has fallen for a jazz guitarist (Martin Milner in the movie’s sole instance of improbable casting).

So we have implied incest. Marijuana. The pimping out of cigarette girls. No wonder the subject matter didn’t catch on in a year when “Leave It to Beaver” premiered and Walter Brennan’s “The Real McCoys” was giving ABC-TV a rare ratings hit with even more than the overalls demographic. Yet in addition to its trenchant writing and incisive direction by Mackendrick, Sweet Smell has the most scintillating New York location photography of its era (better, even, than those street walks in Stanley Kubrick’s 1955 Killer’s Kiss, which are overwhelmingly evocative themselves).

The movie was shot by a master — James Wong Howe, back from a kind of “gray-list” that had stunted his career — and it was sandwiched between his Oscars for The Rose Tattoo and Hud. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the intimacy of Howe’s work here within a confined New York setting contributed to his being hired for John Frankenheimer’s Seconds nine years later, for which he responded with some fabulous Grand Central Station footage. This Criterion release would have pleased those onetime Exxon funders; it doesn’t overdo the grain but has just enough to evoke the grittiness of the material, which highlights hot dog joints, newsstands and flashing midtown movie marquees that ballyhoo Spencer Tracy in Paramount’s The Mountain (a coming DVD release from Olive Films, by the way) and Cinerama’s monster moneymaker of the day: Seven Wonders of the World.

You’ll have to go a long way this year to find a DVD/Blu-ray with more dead-on extras. The great Gary Giddins opens with a bookleted essay, followed by a remembrance from Lehman (who initiated the project before Odets took over his script). There’s also a Scottish TV featurette on the strange career of Mackendrick (how often did you ever see Lancaster interviewed?) that explains how an American-born Scot became a star of British cinema (The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers) before returning to the United States to direct one of this most definitively American of all movies. With Mackendrick himself relating much of the story, the documentary further explains how and why he left the business to become dean of and later professor at Cal Arts’ film school, where his students included director James Mangold (Walk the Line and the satisfying remake of 3:10 to Yuma). In another bonus, Mangold offers a concise on-camera appreciation of his mentor that runs about 25 minutes.

Relatively inferior to everything else is a short, color-faded filmed portrait of Howe (though even here, we get to see the legend light a shot). But it’s a supreme capping treat to see Winchell biographer Neal Gabler giving us a half hour on the differences between his own true-life subject (who did, he convinces, have a few un-Hunsecker-like good points) and the latter’s morally worthless screen counterpart. Though Gabler obviously loves the movie, he does opine that the columnist’s own family life (such as it was) was even more interesting. When Winchell’s daughter fell for a guy who wasn’t exactly a sure bet, he had her committed — then colluded with pal J. Edgar Hoover and his claque of Bureau flunkies to have the guy jailed disproportionately for a committed crime and then hounded out of the country. That smell wasn’t so sweet.

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer


By : Mike Clark | Posted: 31 Jan 2011
Home Media Magazine

Magnolia
Documentary
Box Office $0.2 million
$26.98 DVD, $29.98 Blu-ray
‘R’ for some sexual material, nudity and language.

Like that sitting president who was badly dented by his own sex scandal not too many years ago, New York’s onetime attorney general turned governor (if not for long) certainly had the right enemies, no matter what his own transgressions. Which is to say that if you think director Alex Gibney had a formidable rogue’s gallery to work with in 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, he all but outdoes himself this time in terms of shining glaring lights on smoothies who stink up the boardroom — to say nothing of their more gutter-fighting cronies and that transparent euphemism for sleaze-o's: “political operatives.”

Privileged all his life, full of hubris, driven by (it seems) his real estate tycoon father and then driven to purge white-collar chicanery, Spitzer was brought down by pricey call girl shenanigans he co-perpetrated with an establishment called the Emperors Club VIP — which catered to men with the cash and professional clout of say, an Elvis-caliber rock star (but not the Elvis who once drove a truck). While still being termed “the sheriff of Wall Street,” he did all this while married to a woman who, from her physical appearance and all character testimonials, looks as if she should have been serenaded nightly beneath her window with marimba backing. But this isn’t, after all, the first time a very smart man has done very stupid things when thinking with something other than his brains.

Unfortunately, the time Spitzer picked to do this was when his energy and moral outrage were especially needed to combat those practicing exactly the kind of fraud that began to sink the country in or around (to pick a representative time as good as any other) March 2008. This is when Spitzer’s story broke to the cheers of Wall Street traders who literally popped corks and (to steal an old Bing Crosby phrase) “broke out the bubbly” on the trading floor.

There isn’t anyone currently around who makes more visually arresting documentaries than Gibney, and as in the case of Enron, the Blu-ray makes a difference here. But on top of that, he gets amazing access. For starters, the filmmaker managed to get Spitzer himself on camera — as part of the latter’s self-perpetuated personal rehabilitation project that has since enabled him to become current co-host of a weeknight CNN show with Pulitzer winner Kathleen Parker. Spitzer is extremely forthcoming and articulate when talking about Wall Street ethics or CEO bonuses that are about 500 times what they ought to be. But when asked about sexual nitty-gritty, he gulps, looks for the exits and resembles a kid who’s been caught fabricating a book report.

In addition, Gibney landed a Murderer’s Row of powerful interviewees united in their Spitzer hatred. These merely include venture capitalist, philanthropist and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone — who, whatever else he is or isn’t, has the demeanor of a thug. There’s also equally pugnacious Joseph L. Bruno, the former majority leader of the famously corrupted New York State Senate that Spitzer tried to change. Ever brandishing the Central Casting look of the boxer he is, Bruno is currently on appeal for a two-count conviction of mail and wire fraud. Less outwardly malevolent is Maurice R. “Hank” Greenberg, whose board ousted him from the presidency of American International Group (AIG) under a cloud of securities fraud that never resulted in any conviction. And then there’s the skuzzy but hugely entertaining political consultant Roger Stone, a physically ship-shape maverick whose own sexual peccadilloes — swingers’ clubs, anyone? — got him bounced from Robert Dole’s presidential campaign. (He also has a Richard Nixon tattoo on his back, which may be the single kinkiest thing in this documentary.) Everyone in this crew, Greenberg possibly excepted, loves to jawbone. As with Spitzer when he’s being asked about his family or sexual preferences, Greenberg clams up whenever he’s asked a direct AIG question about a business he was supposed to be running.

As gabby as anyone here is former Emperor’s Club madam Cecil Sewal — who, at 24, had to have a certain kind of smarts to run such a complex international operation. Yet her demeanor is so giggly (and, to one’s immediate perception, even dizzy) that you have to believe she could parlay it into some sort of screen career playing the heroine’s wacky best friend. Another standout here is Wrenn Schmidt, a striking redheaded knockout who appears as Spitzer’s most frequent escort (an “Angelina”) because the real-life version didn’t want to be identifiable in the movie. So in an unusual move, Gibney hired Schmidt to play her using the real version’s verbatim testimony — an artistic gamble that works because Schmidt is so riveting to watch.

The documentary makes an implied but strong case that at least one of Spitzer’s many enemies (and likely someone on camera here) played fast and loose with the law to take him out, particularly in terms of how certain statutes were applied to him in ways they weren’t in other cases. But Spitzer has none of this, saying that he essentially brought the building down on himself. I liked Client 9 enough to put it on my 10-best list (2010 model) after a first viewing, but it clicked even more after a second. The deleted scenes and outtakes are substantial and as compulsively watchable as the movie. I raced to them the second the main event concluded and watched all in a single sitting.