Word: mackendrick
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DIED. ALEXANDER (''Sandy'') MACKENDRICK, 81, director; in Los Angeles. Joining England's Ealing Studios as a scriptwriter in 1946, Mackendrick went on to direct the nimble Alec Guinness satires The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). His major American credit: the biting Burt Lancaster- Tony Curtis show-biz expose Sweet Smell of Success...
...Sweet Smell of Success' destroyed us all," said Mackendrick, who would never again direct a major Hollywood film. But that's press-agent reverse-spin. In the projector lamp of history, no one cares whether the film's makers had a good time or whether the film was a commercial and critical flop. (TIME did put it on its 1957 Ten Best list.) What matters is the creepy, elevated pleasure it gives today. The movie proves how savory and nourishing a cookie full of arsenic...
...Sweet Smell" is noir, oui - but as brisk as the winter nights on which Sidney refuses to wear a topcoat. Mackendrick, whose aim was to play it "fast and high," wastes no time on dead spots for the audience to mull over what's just been said. The actors, servants of the superb dialogue, speak it quickly and crisply, without trying to find meaning in Method or profundities in pauses. Lancaster and Curtis never go outside their roles to remind us that they're really lovable scamps on a holiday in the sewers; that may have been what kept their...
...buzzing around J.J., like Moscone the fly around sly-fox Volpone, is Curtis' Sidney. Mackendrick mentioned the Ben Jonson play to the actors as they shot outside "21" late one night; but he might also have said that Sidney was the fly to J.J.'s taut, watchful spider, and 52nd Street was his web. Whatever Sidney's floating status as villain and victim, Curtis was the victor in the movie. I'll bet that when he first read the script he thought exultantly, "That's me all over!" Curtis may have spent the 50s playing pretty boys at Universal...
...indeed 19 when the movie was shot - and who slipped until anonymity until two years ago, when her daughter Darva Conger married a lummox on a TV millionaire show - carries the burden as smartly as she wears that mink. She stands up to Lancaster and Curtis, fully justifying Mackendrick's belief that the film, finally, is about Susie; in the last shot, when she walks out into the first morning sun we've seen, we can believe that J.J. the vampire has lost some of his power. Harrison helps make Susie one of the great crippled lovelies of late-period...