Sep 151957
 
five reels

Sleazy press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) survives by getting cruel, dictatorial J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) to mention his clients in his column. Hunsecker makes and destroys lives and careers on a whim. Outside of his own power, the only thing Hunsecker cares about is his sister (Susan Harrison), and he wants to keep her to himself. She has fallen for musician Steve Dallas (Martin Milner) and he sets sycophantic Falco to break things up.

Poison has never been so well represented on screen. These are toxic people in a world of cancer and filth. It’s beautifully presented malignancy. Film Noir twists the world and shows the worst in people and society. Almost all Noirs involve thieves and killers. This Noir involves the press and politicians and entertainers and suddenly those thieves and killers look pure and wholesome. The normal Noir villains are after riches or revenge or they are just too stupid not to be brutal. But Falco and Hunsecker are poison by nature. They don’t do evil. They are evil. Falco lies more often than he tells the truth. He manipulates and blackmails. He stabs his uncle in the back and prostitutes his sometimes girlfriend, all the while fawning over Hunsecker who ridicules him. But then Hunsecker demeans everyone. He threatens as often as Falco lies, and always acting as a self-righteous paragon of virtue, wrapped in the flag.

And such Loathsome characters need top performances to be believed, and they got them, with career bests from Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster. It was a major shift for Curtis who had been known as a lightweight; he proved that he was a real actor. It was an upturn for Lancaster as well, who’d never had a roll even half as meaty. The rest of the cast are swamped in their wake. This is a two man film and they rule it.

But the key to the brilliance is not the actors, no matter how good they are. It is director Alexander Mackendrick. He’d been an Ealing Studio director, turning out some of the great comedies of the era: The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Ladykillers (1955). He’d learned through comedy the tricks to make a film move quickly and to make unbelievable dialog sound perfectly normal. With the help of cinematographer James Wong Howe, he turned up the contrast and twisted the cameras and edged a drama into Noir. When novelist and original screenwriter Ernest Lehman had to quit due to illness, Mackendrick brought in playwright Clifford Odets, and together they reworked every scene, creating memorable dialog that no human would say though you wish they would, but fit perfectly coming from Falco and Hunsecker:

  • “Match me, Sidney.”
  • “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried. ”
  • “Harvey, I often wish I were deaf and wore a hearing aid. With a simple flick of a switch, I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men. ”
  • “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”
  • “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river. ”
  • “Son, I don’t relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don’t you just shuffle along? ”
  • “I got nothing against women thinking with their hips. That’s their nature. ”

Mackendrick put those words into the right mouths, and brought a contorted New York to life around them, and made something astounding. Not that it was enough to sell tickets in 1957. The movie was a bomb, but history has judged it differently and it is now considered one of the greats. Hunsecker was inspired by columnist Walter Winchell, which also doesn’t matter any more. The film matters. See it.

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