Tuesday 1 September 2015

Sweet Smell Of Success


Nobody makes films like this anymore.

Loud jazz by Elmer Bernstein and the cynical noise of New York, Sweet Smell Of Success has 50s written all over it. Idiomatic language, long dead but still as hard-hitting as it ever was.

‘You’re a cookie full of arsenic’.

‘Not even if you serve me Cleopatra on a plate’.

‘You have more twists than a barrel of pretzels’.

‘The man in jail is always for freedom’.

‘Your dear sounds like dagger’.

Beautiful. 

And oh the days when you couldn’t play a negative character because your name was Tony Curtis. Old-fashioned, insane, larger-than-life stuff.