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.