ICE-Vision: Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
Thursday, September 1 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“A fizzingly clever big-city satire and deeply strange late noir classic from 1957, directed by one time Ealing comedy maestro Alexander Mackendrick with a superb script by Clifford Odets. Burt Lancaster is the creepy star columnist JJ Hunsecker, peddling celeb gossip and reactionary opinions, and convulsed with ambiguous protective concern for his sister; Tony Curtis gives the performance of a lifetime as Sidney Falco, the cringing, self-loathing press agent. Like vampires, Hunsecker and Falco only operate at night: in the clubs and bars around Broadway and Times Square, seeding the public prints with rumour, innuendo and paranoia. The all-knowing, all-hating Hunsecker is a hideous amalgam of Walter Winchell and J Edgar Hoover. Unmissable.” -The Guardian