silver nitrate notes

James Wong Howe and the Cold Lights of Manhattan

2 jun 2017

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) was a financial disaster. Burt Lancaster's production company financed it. United Artists released it. The audience that loved Lancaster as a leading man stayed away from a film in which he plays a Broadway gossip columnist who breaks people for sport. The film disappeared, then quietly returned over the next two decades as one of the strangest American studio pictures of the 1950s.

The director was Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), brought over from Ealing where he had made The Ladykillers (1955). The script was by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on a novella Lehman had been unable to publish in any of the magazines he sent it to because he had based J.J. Hunsecker too transparently on Walter Winchell. The cinematographer was James Wong Howe (1899-1976), already an ASC veteran with a reputation for shooting whatever the location gave him.

The shoot was largely on location in Manhattan during the winter of 1957. Howe lit the streets to look like the streets, not like a studio's idea of streets. The 21 Club appears as itself. Toots Shor's restaurant appears as itself. The Brill Building, the Stork Club entrance, the cold corridors of the Mark Hellinger Theatre. Howe used the existing fluorescent and tungsten light wherever possible and supplemented sparingly. He rated his stock for shadow, not for highlight, so that the white of Lancaster's shirt cuff against the black of his suit becomes the brightest thing in the frame and pulls the eye.

Watch the conversations on the sidewalk outside the 21 Club. Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) approaches Hunsecker (Lancaster) with a request. Howe places the camera low, looking up. Lancaster, who is taller than Curtis to begin with, becomes monumental. The streetlights overhead burn out into white blobs. The wet pavement reflects the neon on Broadway as a blurred horizontal smear. Curtis is small, mobile, photographed at conversational height. The blocking does the work the dialogue would otherwise have to do.

The dialogue, when Odets gets going, is a separate marvel. "Match me, Sidney." "I'd hate to take a bite out of you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." Half the lines are insults dressed as praise. Mackendrick keeps the camera close enough to see the muscles around Lancaster's mouth not move when he speaks.

What makes the film hold up is that it commits. Hunsecker is not redeemed. Sidney is not redeemed. The sister subplot, which would be the moral centre of a more conventional film, ends without a tidy lesson. The last shot is of a defeated man walking away from the camera into the morning light over Times Square. The light is the only kind thing in the picture.

Howe was nominated for the cinematography Oscar in 1958 and lost to Jack Hildyard for The Bridge on the River Kwai. Kwai is a fine film. It is not the better-shot film.

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sources
[1] Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, 1998.
[2] Mackendrick, Alexander. On Film-Making, ed. Paul Cronin. Faber, 2004.
[3] Howe, James Wong. "Lighting on Location." American Cinematographer, August 1957.
[4] AFI Catalog of Feature Films, entry for Sweet Smell of Success.