SPOILERS....
What a bunch of skuzzbags. There is hardly a non-greedy guy in the movie, although the three women are all okay.
But here we have Burt Lancaster as the all-powerful columnist J. J. Hunsacker (read "Walter Winchell") and Tony Curtis as the slimy press agent Sidney Falco and Emil Meyer as the brutal and corrupt cop, supported by one columnist who cheats on his wife with a cigarette girl and another columnist who simply does the cigarette girl without cheating on any wife because he has none to cheat on. These are people who treat virtue with scant reverence.
There's a loud jazzy score to back up this energetic night-time flick. (There is no such thing as daylight here.) And Clifford Odets has lent his usual stamp to the script. Nobody says anything as simple as, "I don't believe you." They are made to say, "That fish is four days old. I won't buy it." And the sweating laugh-a-minute cop is given to misusing big words -- "Rectify me something, Sidney, did J. J. really say I was fat?" Even when the cop uses the word correctly it still SOUNDS wrong -- "Ha ha! Come back, Sidney, I want to CHASTISE you." The dialog is also studded with everyday phrases that are repeated as if part of a litany -- "credit where credit is due." And, "indulge me on this," and, "correct me if I'm wrong." The best of this dialog is given to the evildoers, meaning every guy except Curtis's uncle (Sam Levene, underused in my opinion) and Martin Milner as an innocent young jazz guitarist afloat in this sea of sharks. "You twist words around," he says, addressing another actor, not Odets. This movie is, by the way, some considerable distance from the director's (Alexander MacKendrick) usual stomping ground. (Cf., "Tight Little Island.")
Burt Lancaster gives a quiet, barely restrained performance as the gossip columnist and TV personality who tells presidents what to do. He's so tense with ego, power, anger, and an incestuous jealousy of any attention paid to his sister that he gives the impression of a boil about to burst. But he rarely loses it. Instead, if he shows any semblance of emotion at all, it's usually pleasure in the exercise of power accompanied by a reptilian, almost alligator-like smile of beneficence. It's a good performance, and so is Tony Curtis's. Nattily dressed in black suits, his hair flawlessly groomed, his expression alternating between a phony bonhomie and greasy anxiety, he seems always to be in motion, darting rather than walking, and talking almost always, usually lying. Barbara Nichols as the careless and exploited cigarette girl plays Barbara Nichols. I have no idea what she was like in person but on screen she's never been anyone else. And as someone once remarked about the adolescent AnnMargaret -- "Everything she does comes across as dirty." Martin Milner looks right but mumbles his way through the part without much conviction. Burt's sister is a washout.
What a splendid photographer James Wong Howe was. His blacks are really black, his highlights seem to glisten, and when Lancaster's mogul stands on his balcony staring down at his domain from on high, the streets of New York look like rivulets of glittering silver poured from a beaker. Compare this with the subtle, crisp grays of his Texas ranch in "Hud."
The movie gives us a glimpse of the sizzling New York City night life of the 1950s. It may have looked corrupt at the time but from our present perspective it was an age of innocence. Well-dressed people walk alone down deserted streets at night. You want to try that in today's New York? Maybe the greatest change since then is suggested by the puissance in the hands of a newspaper columnist -- a guy who writes words that people must then read. Read? Who gets their news from newspapers nowadays? Who would be shocked by the revelations Lancaster and his colleagues in gossip come up with -- an unknown musician who is said to have smoked marijuana and is fired because of the slur? Today it would lead to hemorrhage-inducing mirth.
So it might have been rotten then, true, but there are times when it seems to me that it would be nice to listen to the hoof beats of yesteryear and travel back in time to a period when people still read and when one of the worst lies you might run into in the news was that a musician did some grass.
What a bunch of skuzzbags. There is hardly a non-greedy guy in the movie, although the three women are all okay.
But here we have Burt Lancaster as the all-powerful columnist J. J. Hunsacker (read "Walter Winchell") and Tony Curtis as the slimy press agent Sidney Falco and Emil Meyer as the brutal and corrupt cop, supported by one columnist who cheats on his wife with a cigarette girl and another columnist who simply does the cigarette girl without cheating on any wife because he has none to cheat on. These are people who treat virtue with scant reverence.
There's a loud jazzy score to back up this energetic night-time flick. (There is no such thing as daylight here.) And Clifford Odets has lent his usual stamp to the script. Nobody says anything as simple as, "I don't believe you." They are made to say, "That fish is four days old. I won't buy it." And the sweating laugh-a-minute cop is given to misusing big words -- "Rectify me something, Sidney, did J. J. really say I was fat?" Even when the cop uses the word correctly it still SOUNDS wrong -- "Ha ha! Come back, Sidney, I want to CHASTISE you." The dialog is also studded with everyday phrases that are repeated as if part of a litany -- "credit where credit is due." And, "indulge me on this," and, "correct me if I'm wrong." The best of this dialog is given to the evildoers, meaning every guy except Curtis's uncle (Sam Levene, underused in my opinion) and Martin Milner as an innocent young jazz guitarist afloat in this sea of sharks. "You twist words around," he says, addressing another actor, not Odets. This movie is, by the way, some considerable distance from the director's (Alexander MacKendrick) usual stomping ground. (Cf., "Tight Little Island.")
Burt Lancaster gives a quiet, barely restrained performance as the gossip columnist and TV personality who tells presidents what to do. He's so tense with ego, power, anger, and an incestuous jealousy of any attention paid to his sister that he gives the impression of a boil about to burst. But he rarely loses it. Instead, if he shows any semblance of emotion at all, it's usually pleasure in the exercise of power accompanied by a reptilian, almost alligator-like smile of beneficence. It's a good performance, and so is Tony Curtis's. Nattily dressed in black suits, his hair flawlessly groomed, his expression alternating between a phony bonhomie and greasy anxiety, he seems always to be in motion, darting rather than walking, and talking almost always, usually lying. Barbara Nichols as the careless and exploited cigarette girl plays Barbara Nichols. I have no idea what she was like in person but on screen she's never been anyone else. And as someone once remarked about the adolescent AnnMargaret -- "Everything she does comes across as dirty." Martin Milner looks right but mumbles his way through the part without much conviction. Burt's sister is a washout.
What a splendid photographer James Wong Howe was. His blacks are really black, his highlights seem to glisten, and when Lancaster's mogul stands on his balcony staring down at his domain from on high, the streets of New York look like rivulets of glittering silver poured from a beaker. Compare this with the subtle, crisp grays of his Texas ranch in "Hud."
The movie gives us a glimpse of the sizzling New York City night life of the 1950s. It may have looked corrupt at the time but from our present perspective it was an age of innocence. Well-dressed people walk alone down deserted streets at night. You want to try that in today's New York? Maybe the greatest change since then is suggested by the puissance in the hands of a newspaper columnist -- a guy who writes words that people must then read. Read? Who gets their news from newspapers nowadays? Who would be shocked by the revelations Lancaster and his colleagues in gossip come up with -- an unknown musician who is said to have smoked marijuana and is fired because of the slur? Today it would lead to hemorrhage-inducing mirth.
So it might have been rotten then, true, but there are times when it seems to me that it would be nice to listen to the hoof beats of yesteryear and travel back in time to a period when people still read and when one of the worst lies you might run into in the news was that a musician did some grass.