Sweet Smell of Success

November 5, 2014 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classic Film, Drama Film, FILM, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(dir. A MacKendrick) (1957) Great late melodrama, Lancaster rarely better, Tony Curtis never better. “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” The sparse camera direction would gladden David Stratton’s heart, only producing the odd flourish where it enhances the scene (e.g. in “21”, where the camera’s eye swings from Manny Davis to Miss James and cuts back to J.J. Hunsecker, who is saying that every hep person knows that “ This one is toting that one around for you.” ). [NB: Vale Martin Milner, R.I.P. 6/9/2015, who was stout but dull as Steve Dallas…

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Power Without Glory

(by Frank Hardy) Never mind that Hardy was an unreconstructed Commo; this is a great, great-big book, a scandalous roman-a-clef based on a Collingwood Mafioso, John Wren and his rise (and rise).  Blessed with no literary touches but a lot of narrative drive, the book has become, in its unpretentious way, a landmark of Australian literature.  Hardy had to overcome a myriad hurdles to get his work published and only then did his troubles really begin, in the form of various reprisals, including an almost ruinous trial for criminal libel.

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