SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick
Starring Burt Lancaster & Tony Curtis

(1957) “Match me, Sidney” barks sanctimonious, Winchellesque gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (a bespectacled Burt Lancaster) to sycophantic publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who’ll do anything in pursuit of that ever-elusive ink, in the quintessential portrait of The Great White Way. The ultra-stylized dialogue by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (who wrote the original short story) is now legendary (and quoted wholesale in everything from Diner to The Simpsons), as are Elmer Bernstein’s jazz score and James Wong Howe’s glistening location-shot b&w cinematography, with midtown of the late 50s seen in the minutest detail, from a 46th Street hotdog stand, to the lights of Times Square (including the marquees of the since-demolished Loews State, Astor, and Rivoli theaters, to the Brill Building (doubling as Hunsecker’s swanky apartment building), to a shadowy street below the Queensboro Bridge. There isn’t a greater picture about this crazy burg. 35mm. Approx. 96 min.
12:30, 4:25, 8:20

“Extraordinary for its depiction of a now-vanished New York.”
– Stuart Klawans, New York Times

“Captures the smarmy texture of the world of Broadway.”
– Neil Gabler

“Paints New York as a jungle of glitz and devouring egos.”
– Godfrey Cheshire

NIGHT AND THE CITY

Directed by Jules Dassin
Starring Richard Widmark & Gene Tierney

(1950) “You’re a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man.” Small-time hustler Richard Widmark (“possibly his best role” – Pauline Kael) steers suckers to nightclub fatcat Francis L. Sullivan’s clip joint, but dreams of moving up – to be a big shot wrestling promoter. And so begins his headlong nocturnal run through a sleazy, decidedly non-touristy London, ignoring the advice of nice girlfriend Gene Tierney (cameoing abroad to get over a painful romance), slipping a fake nightclub license to Sullivan’s cheating wife Googie Withers, trying to outmaneuver domineering Greek promoters Herbert Lom (years before his worldwide fame as Chief Inspector Dreyfus in the “Pink Panther” comedies), until a sweatily brutal grudge match (“one of the most heart-pounding ever filmed” – The Movie Guide) between Lom’s idealistic father “Gregorius” (one-time world Greco/Roman wrestling champ Stanislaus Zbyszko) and animalistic Mike Mazurski seals his fate. Shuffled off to London by mogus Darryl Zanuck to avoid imminent blacklisting, director Dassin (The Naked City, Rififi, Topkapi, Never on Sunday) responded with an expressionist tour de force – a grinding tale of fate in which a moment of decency proves the final act. Similar in style, theme and structure to Sweet Smell of Success (made seven years later by a British director working in New York), Night and the City features quintessential b&w noir cinematography by Max “Mutsie” Greene and a pounding Franz Waxman score. DCP. Approx. 101 min.
2:25, 6:20, 10:15

“Turns all of London into a giant expressionist trap, in darkest of Noirs.”
– Elliott Stein, Village Voice

“In its hyperactive transmutations of London into a web of alleys and underground dens, its fevered chiaroscuro, its angular, fragmented images, and in Richard Widmark’s bravura performance of a born loser, Night and the City may well be the definitive film noir.”
– Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen