film

Mackendrick and Odets’ “Sweet Smell of Success”

by
The Sweet Smell of Success
The Sweet Smell of Success

By Paul Cronin | The Criterion Collection

In 1969, director Alexander Macken­drick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be taught, only learned, and each man or woman has to learn it through his or her own system of self-education”), he became one of the art form’s most legendary instructors. Aspirant filmmakers from around the world chose to study at CalArts because of Mackendrick’s presence, and even today, copies of his carefully composed classroom notes—which he called “my life’s work”—remain prized possessions among CalArts graduates, who speak of their mentor with veneration.

Though he was reluctant to use his own films in the classroom, one notable exception was Sweet Smell of Success, which served as the basis for one of his most penetrating handouts. In the extract that follows, Mackendrick describes how the original screenwriter on the project, Ernest Lehman, author of the short novel on which the film is based, fell ill and was replaced by Clifford Odets.Odets had been a leading Broadway playwright who, in the thirties, delivered to the progressive Group Theatre collective such works as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy (see Barton Fink, whose title character even looks a little like Odets). As a Hollywood screenwriter, he had worked on the script for Hitchcock’s Notorious and on early drafts of what became It’s a Wonderful Life. Handed Lehman’s script, Odets chose to rework it completely into one that, while structurally based on the original, is a much more densely packed affair, bursting at the seams with expressionistic dialogue.

 

 

Yet for all the genuine sparkle of Odets’s memorable dialogue and the structural reinforcements he made to the story, let’s not lose sight of the fact that Sweet Smell of Success can also be a thoroughly visual experience. Years after the film’s release, Mackendrick would tell students that “cinema is not so much nonverbal as preverbal. Though it is able to reproduce realms of dialogue, film can also tell stories purely in movement, in action and reaction.” When we turn off the sound and let the pictures of Sweet Smell of Success do the talking, we see just how much information is gleaned through the camera, the lighting, and the blocking of the actors. As former Mackendrick student and writer-­director James Mangold explains, “While Sweet Smell is a film brimming with rapid-fire dialogue, it is almost completely decipherable as a silent film.” Assisted in no small part by cinematographer James Wong Howe’s crisp, glistening, high-contrast location photography, his low-angled, smoke-filled framing and technique of washing the walls “with oil to get the glitter,” Mackendrick understood how much of the storytelling’s heavy lifting could be done with blocking, costumes, lighting, props, and the camera.

Read more

Hard Truths is a horror movie

by

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London. It’s also a tough watch.

By Jackson Weaver

I asked a group of film-lovers a question recently: what’s a movie you adored but never, ever want to watch again?

The responses, and the reasoning behind them, were fairly unsurprising. Requiem for a Dream, Come and See, Midsommar: powerful stories whose exploration of the extremes of human cruelty and suffering leave you strung out, squirming, taut and exhausted. And, most importantly, with no particular itch to return.

With Hard Truths, we may have another title for the pile. It’s a surprising addition given the subject matter — no war crimes, flyblown corpses or sewn-up bear carcasses are to be found in writer-director Mike Leigh’s newest effort. Instead, it’s an impressionistic portrait of scattered lives, a tragicomedy made from the perspective of various members of a Black family slowly rotting in London.

There’s Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), the stay-at-home adult son whose hidden life only rarely opens to show glimpses of repressed passion (a preoccupation with planes, pilots and all things flying) and suppressed rage (a middle finger pointed at a closed door).

There’s the father, Curtley (David Webber), a sad-eyed professional tradesman who spends more time being talked at by his surrogate work-son than talking with his actual offspring. There’s the gregarious but grieving aunt; the bubbly cousin stymied at work; and our central character, the mother, Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste).

 

Pansy is immured in a fortress of bitterness she can’t help but reinforce. She’s a scowling serial complainer, the kind of dependably cruel customer who prompts senior retail workers to tap new hires on the shoulder and say, “Don’t worry, I’ll take this one.”

Difficult character study

Pansy complains about never being invited to events, and complains when she’s asked to go. She furiously scrubs and cleans every inch of her home and body, then sleeps through the day out of exhaustion brought on by myriad non-specific health concerns.

She screams in wild terror when woken, reared-up and walleyed like a cornered animal — though why she would feel cornered in her aggressively beige, suburban home isn’t immediately clear. It’s not until she screams at a similarly cornered animal in her backyard — a terrified fox looking for a way out of the trap it willingly walked into — that the film’s conceit starts to crystallize. In both cases, they are backing away from Pansy’s husband.

As a character study, Hard Truths is painfully good. It might be the most accurate portrayal of borderline personality disorder ever put on screen, and could become as well-known for depicting that condition as No Country for Old Men is for representing psychopathy. In fact, Hard Truths ruminates so incessantly and incisively on the type of person whose irrational fear of abandonment leads to emotional explosions that it could find use as a shorthand. Instead of lengthy pamphlets or uncomfortable conversations, worried relatives could ask: “Just curious, have you seen Hard Truths?”

Michele Austin (right) with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Hard Truths.
Michele Austin, right, appears as Pansy’s sister Chantelle in Hard Truths. (Bleeker Street)

If it sounds sparse in terms of story, that’s because it is. Other than Pansy and her sister planning and re-planning a visit to their mother’s grave, Hard Truths is hard up for a plot. It instead rests on the power of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, and the authenticity of the backgrounds she and her surrounding cast represent.

The first, as a woman trapped in a domestic nightmare of her own making, is relentlessly compelling. Jean-Baptiste puts in the tireless work of bringing Pansy to life; not only as a curmudgeon, but one so ensnared by her patterns she can’t pull back from them — even as she watches them destroy her.

Read more

Michael Caine and working-class stories in British cinema

by

In the 1950s, the emergence of ‘angry young men’ writers and kitchen sink dramas like ‘Look Back in Anger’, led to an increase in working-class representation.

By Aimee Ferrier

For many years, the lives of working-class British people were invisible on screen. Not only that, but actors from working-class backgrounds were hard to come by, thus meaning that a large chunk of Britain’s screen icons were privately educated or well-connected figures. This imbalance within the industry prevented authentic stories from being told, silencing the voices and experiences of a massive group of the British population.

Posh actors dominated the screens with their received pronunciation accents that asserted them as well-educated figures. “The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral,” actor Rita Tushingham told The Independent. Indeed, there were hardly any working-class protagonists or stories about the plight of poverty, unemployment, governmental disillusionment, or abortion.

Then, in the 1950s, the ‘angry young men’ movement emerged within the world of literature, theatre, and film, changing everything. Post-war, a new generation of young people were feeling dismayed by the widespread levels of unemployment and dead-end jobs that forced people to work to the bone for little money. Many people were unable to afford nice places to live, and countless individuals were suffering from PTSD, grief, and a sense of malaise.

People’s childhood towns and cities were now destroyed by bombs, leaving what was once a community in ruins, and this physical representation of destruction and emptiness mirrored the emotions many were feeling at the time. This disillusionment came to a boiling point in the mid-1950s as people struggled to move forward and prosper in a country still ravished by the effects of war and economic disparity.

However, with John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, a voice finally cut through. Michael Caine once discussed the play with The Guardian, explaining: “When it changed, it was all down to the writers. They started writing for working-class people and it made all the difference. Playwrights like Noël Coward, someone I later knew very well, wrote middle-class parts for the stage. If you had a cockney accent you were going to play the butler. But John Osborne wrote Look Back in Anger in 1956, and that, I believe, was the first major piece of theatre that had a working-class hero.”

Things were beginning to change, with the stories of working-class people making more of a dent in popular culture than ever before. Other writers that were dubbed part of the ‘angry young men’ movement (although most hated this term) included Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, and John Braine, whose stories really changed the game in regards to the representation of normal British people and their struggles.

At the same time, the Free Cinema documentary movement helped to pave the way for depictions of British working-class issues on screen. These filmmakers—including Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz—used a cinema vérité style to cheaply chronicle elements of working-class life to great success.

Read more

How The 1968 Democratic Convention Almost Sank ‘Medium Cool’

by

‘Medium Cool’ won ardent support from critics and (briefly) ticket buyers but almost never saw the light of day at all, Peter Bart writes.

By Peter Bart | August 22, 2024

“I directed the best political movie never released.”

Filmmaker Haskell Wexler thus described Medium Cool, his violent feature set during Chicago’s riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention. His movie opened (sort of) exactly 55 years ago this week.

The Paramount release won ardent support from critics and (briefly) from ticket buyers but was renounced by leaders of the Democratic Party and the Chicago police. Their criticism was short-lived because the negative would quickly disappear. A Paramount spokesman was reluctant to confirm it had ever been made.

The mysteries of Medium Cool seemed relevant to cineastes this week as history threatened to repeat itself in Chicago. As in 1968, the chaos at the Democratic convention would be triggered by an overseas conflict – Gaza now, Vietnam then. But the police this week showed they’d learned from the bitter lessons of ’68 when violence jeopardized the political process and the election itself.

Despite forecasts of a turnout of 30,000 protesters and intense coverage by Fox News, the turnout was meager this week (perhaps 5,000 at most) as were the arrest totals. The convention itself won applause and strong ratings for its electric energy and star power.

But not in 1968.

Medium Cool was in fact a love story about a photojournalist who fell in love with a war widow, their affair disrupted by political violence – as was the movie itself.

Read more