Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

As dark and compelling a tale of a man losing his soul as I’ve ever seen told. Tony Curtis portrays Falco like a trapped animal, fast-moving, fast-talking, but vulnerable and constantly on the edge. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a moral struggle portrayed in a more brilliantly dramatic way, with Falco alternating between the lows of defeat and the highs of victory, able to ignore the destruction in his wake as long as he thinks he’s on the winning team. He’s brilliant and talented, but he’s a small fish in a big ocean of people more talented and brilliant than he, which keeps the danger and tension of his politicking in the red zone in nearly every scene.

And yet, it’s Burt Lancaster who walks away with the film. Lancaster gets one of the all-time great character introductions in a scene where he destroys a senator, Falco, an ingenue, her manager, and unseen people on the phone, all as casually as he was exhaling. That the film later can credibly subvert such a powerful character is a testament to the script which, along with featuring a classic line of dialogue every ten seconds, is a marvel of carefully constructed moving parts. Easily one of my new all-time favorite films. A+

Sabrina (1954)

Here is where I learned something about myself: I really hate Audrey Hepburn. I don’t think she’s cute, I don’t think she’s funny, and I find her emaciated form actually kind of unsettling. In the big moment when everyone at the party is oohing and awwing over her in that dress, I couldn’t stop staring at her mantis shoulders. She’s the original manic pixie dream girl (the way she plays her suicide attempt is almost excruciatingly adorable) but I find her even less tolerable than Zooey Deschanel. At least Zooey has that super-dark eye make-up I’m into because I’m dumb and like women who look like raccoons (shout out to that one shot of Sissy Spacek in Badlands). It doesn’t help that her character here is almost irredeemably stupid. I LOVE YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU is one of my least favorite conceits in films like this, and it’s her main driving force for a good majority of the film. It’s hard to root for someone to find happiness when you know that the root of their desire for the person is basically “I want to be rich, and they have money”.

Thank God for Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, who are pitch-perfect. Bogart in particular gives an astonishingly ambiguous performance, making you think he could either love or not care about Sabrina at any time. He’s a totally lovable character (with his childish glee over his new plastic formula, I might even say he’s adorkable?) and the film definitely gets better when it begins to shift perspective from Sabrina’s character to his. It’s minor Wilder, one I can’t see myself revisiting much, but it features one of Bogart’s greatest ever performances. B-