Lost in Yonkers (Martha Coolidge, 1993)

Mercedes Ruehl and Richard Dreyfuss in Lost in Yonkers

Cast: Mercedes Ruehl, Richard Dreyfuss, Irene Worth, Brad Stoll, Mark Damus, David Strathairn, Robert Miranda, Jack Laufer, Susan Merson, Illya Haase. Screenplay: Neil Simon, based on his play. Cinematography: Johnny E. Jensen. Production design: David Chapman. Film editing: Steven Cohen. Music: Elmer Bernstein. 

Hud (Martin Ritt, 1963)

Cast: Paul Newman, Melvyn Douglas, Patricia Neal, Brandon De Wilde, Whit Bissell, Crahan Denton, John Ashley, Val Avery, George Petrie. Screenplay: Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Tambi Larsen, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Frank Bracht. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Hud and Mud as back-to-back blog entries: Purely accidental, but I rather like it. It set me to thinking that if Hud were ever (god forbid!) remade, Matthew McConaughey would be a good substitute for Paul Newman. Or rather, would have been, since McConaughey is 50, where Newman was exactly the right age when he played Hud. But both actors have that innate charisma blended with a soupçon of something not quite trustworthy that makes them such fun to watch. And fun to watch is what Hud is, despite the title character's anti-heroicness and the story's serious overtones about the passing of a way of life. On the latter count, think of the hopefulness of the cattle drivers in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) as compared with the sour fate of the Bannons in Hud. The mantra of Red River was Dunson's "Good beef for hungry people. Beef to make 'em strong, make 'em grow." In Hud it might be Homer Bannon's "It don't take long to kill things, not like it does to grow." But mostly the pleasures of Hud are in the performances: Newman's obviously, and Patricia Neal's as Alma, but most especially Melvyn Douglas's as Homer, when you remember Douglas as the actor who wooed Irene Dunne in Theodora Goes Wild (Richard Boleslawski, 1936), Marlene Dietrich in Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937), and Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (Lubitsch, 1939). The movie won Oscars for Neal and Douglas, as it should have. Only Brandon De Wilde's performance didn't quite work for me: He seems a little too soft and well-scrubbed for someone who grew up in a landscape as lean and hard as the one James Wong Howe's (also Oscar-winning) images display. We have to think of the randy teenagers in The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971), also based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, to see what the character might really have been -- a young Jeff Bridges would have been wonderful as Lonnie Bannon. Hud is still hamstrung a little by the moribund Production Code: Characters in it say things like "crap" and "crud" instead of "shit." Like a lot of very good pictures, Hud sometimes has the feeling of having been made at the wrong time in film history.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates. Screenplay: John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman, based on a novel by James Jones. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: William A. Horning, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Like Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli had a special touch with the movie melodrama, taking its often objectively silly elements seriously enough that you can actually believe in them. The James Jones novel on which the screenplay for Some Came Running was based is one of those semi-autobiographical books that writers seem to need to get out of their systems, but adapting it meant challenging the Production Code strictures, particularly on sex, at almost every turn. So the characters in the film are only as believable as the actors can make them. There's a lot of shorthand in the film about the relationships between Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and the two women in his life, the "schoolteacher" Gwen French (Martha Hyer) and the "floozie" Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). It's not immediately clear why Dave falls in love so swiftly with Gwen, who seems to want to mentor him as a writer more than she does to sleep with him, or why he stays connected with the illiterate and rattle-brained Ginnie, to the extent of marrying her on the rebound from Gwen. Fortunately, all three actors are adept at pulling characters out of the script, where they don't seem to have been fully written. Dean Martin was just beginning to show that he could act -- Howard Hawks would complete the process the following year with Rio Bravo -- and Minnelli helped give his career a boost by casting him as the alcoholic gambler Bama Dillert. And Arthur Kennedy completes the ensemble as Dave's go-getter older brother, Frank. Minnelli makes the most of these colorful performers, to the extent that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer all received Oscar nominations. But he's also adept, as he would show in 1960 with Home From the Hill, at taking a real small town location and bringing it to full life, especially in the climactic scene that takes place in the carnival celebrating the town's centennial. The location gives the film a substance and reality that the script never quite supplies.

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang, Darren McGavin, John Conte, Doro Merande, George E. Stone, George Matthews, Leonid Kinskey, Emile Meyer. Screenplay: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Production design: Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Under the Production Code, alcohol flowed freely, and drunks were likely to be glamorous like the martini-swigging Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) or lovable like James Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950). But drug use was strictly taboo, even when it was depicted as a road to degradation, until Otto Preminger thumbed his nose at the Code with The Man With the Golden Arm. Preminger's film is very much about the degradation, but he deftly avoided making it into a "problem picture" with a "just say no" moral tacked on, mainly by focusing on the character of Frankie Machine, played superbly by Frank Sinatra. When we first meet Frankie he's just gotten out of prison rehab and is determined to go straight and get a job as a drummer with a band. But he's saddled with a clinging wife called Zosh, played (and sometimes overplayed) by Eleanor Parker. She wants him to resume his old underground life as a card dealer rather than risk it as a musician, and couldn't care less if that life involves resuming the drugs provided by Louie (Darren McGavin). Zosh is, or so it seems, confined to a wheelchair after an auto accident in which Frankie was the driver, and after which he married her out of pity. In fact, she's just milking the supposed disability for all it's worth, and when no one's around she gets out of the chair and walks. The marriage to Zosh also put an end to Frankie's involvement with Molly, a b-girl in a strip club. She's played by Kim Novak, an actress whose beautiful blankness always allows us to project whatever the script wants us to see in her. This doesn't make Novak a bad actress, I think, but simply a limited one who works best in films like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in which her role is all about the male gaze and its effects. She's perfectly fine here, though her preternatural beauty seems out of place in the drab urban setting of the film, like an orchid in a junkyard. Anyway, as you can guess, Frankie gets hooked again and has to go cold turkey with Molly's help. The Man With the Golden Arm sometimes feels dated: Sam Leavitt's camerawork is often too bright and flatly lighted, showing up the artificiality of the soundstage sets, and Parker and Novak are too glamorous for their roles. But the film works anyway, thanks to the solid dramatic effect produced by Sinatra's performance and the fine support from McGavin and character actor Arnold Stang, who gives a touching performance as Sparrow, a hanger-on devoted to Frankie. Elmer Bernstein's score is a classic, too, as is the  opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass.

My Left Foot (Jim Sheridan, 1989)

Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Benda Fricker, Ray McAnally, Fiona Shaw, Ruth McCabe, Hugh O'Conor, Cyril Cusack. Screenplay: Shane Connaughton, Jim Sheridan, based on a book by Christy Brown. Cinematography: Jack Conroy. Production design: Austen Spriggs. Film editing: J. Patrick Duffner. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Oscar for My Left Foot, with a tour-de-force performance that almost guaranteed him the award. As Christy Brown, limited by cerebral palsy to the creative and expressive use of only his left foot, he struggles for the kind of acceptance by the outer world that he finds in his large working-class Irish family, finding it finally through painting and writing. It's the kind of film that's usually called "inspiring," but Day-Lewis makes it clear that Brown was something of a handful to deal with -- a human figure, not an object of sentimental concern or pity. It's easy to overlook, in all the attention given to Day-Lewis, the performance of Hugh O'Conor as the young Christy.

Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952)

Jack Palance and Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear

Myra Hudson: Joan Crawford
Lester Blaine: Jack Palance
Irene Neves: Gloria Grahame
Steve Kearney: Bruce Bennett
Ann Taylor: Virginia Huston
Junior Kearney: Mike Connors

Director: David Miller
Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Robert Smith
Based on a story by Edna Sherry
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Boris Leven
Film editing: Leon Barsha
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Joan Crawford could play almost anything but soft, but then she never had to -- I suspect she saw to that. What she could do instead was play vulnerable, though you often felt a twinge of sympathy for the person who was attacking her, knowing that she had ways of getting more than even. David Miller's Sudden Fear is a revenge drama, and one of the best. Crawford's Myra Hudson is a playwright who uses her skills at contriving a plot to get even with her cheating, murderous husband, Lester Blaine. Her plot goes awry, but fate gives her a hand anyway. What Crawford knew how to do better than almost anyone was to play off her two most notable facial features, her enormous eyes and her strong mouth and jaw, in alternation. So when Myra is falling in love with Lester, the eyes tell us everything we need to know; when the truth about her husband is revealed, the eyes grow moist and anguished and the mouth and jaw tremble; and when she sets out to take her revenge, the mouth grows hard and the jaw firm. Crawford learned this kind of control in silent movies, of course, and used it effectively throughout her long career. Changing tastes in acting, abetted by parodies of Crawford's performances, have made recent generations see her performing style as mannered, though critics have begun to re-evaluate and praise her real acting gifts. Crawford and her costar, Jack Palance, received Oscar nominations. Palance, with his knobby, death's-head face and carnivorous grin, initially seems like an odd choice for a leading man -- as Myra Hudson herself acknowledges when she fires him from her play -- but he's hugely effective in the role of faux swain and greedy menace.

Animal House (John Landis, 1978)

Tom Hulce in Animal House

John "Bluto" Blutarsky: John Belushi
Eric "Otter" Stratton: Tim Matheson
Donald "Boon" Schoenstein: Peter Riegert
Lawrence "Pinto" Kroger: Tom Hulce
Kent "Flounder" Dorfman: Stephen Furst
Daniel Simpson "D-Day" Day: Bruce McGill
Chip Diller: Kevin Bacon
Dean Vernon Wormer: John Vernon
Marion Wormer: Verna Bloom
Prof. Dave Jennings: Donald Sutherland
Katy: Karen Allen
Clorette DePasto: Sarah Holcomb
Mayor Carmine DePasto: Cesare Danova

Director: John Landis
Screenplay: Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, Chris Miller
Cinematography: Charles Correll
Art direction: John J. Lloyd
Film editing: George Folsey Jr.
Music: Elmer Bernstein

The granddaddy of gross-out comedies, Animal House has a certain innocence to it 40 years later. For one thing, it goes lightly on the gross-outs, the most famous one being Bluto's zit joke. We don't even get to see Flounder throw up on Dean Wormer. For another, without their familiar lined faces and grayed, thinning hair, such veteran actors as Peter Riegert, Tom Hulce, and Kevin Bacon look almost naked. The film has maintained its reputation, even being inducted into the National Film Registry in 2001. There are things in it, however, that wouldn't pass muster today, including the blatant objectification of the young women, especially in the scene in which Bluto spies on them undressing. And would any reputable filmmaker today dare to include the scene in which Pinto debates whether to rape the unconscious Clorette, abetted by a roguish devil and a prissy-voiced angel? There are touches of unchecked homophobia throughout.  John Landis's direction, too, sometimes seems a bit stiff-limbed, as if waiting for the audience to laugh before proceeding with the next line. There are flashes of wit in the screenplay, as when Bluto refers to the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, and Boon tells Otter, "Forget it, he's rolling." But many of the sight gags, such as the climactic assault on the homecoming parade, weren't worked out enough in advance, the exception being the marching band that gets led into a blind alley and then can't extricate itself. Still there's a fine energy to the performances, and even Dean Wormer gets to make a good point: "Fat, drunk, and stupid" really "is no way to go through life." But mostly the film is a strong reminder of what we lost with the early death of John Belushi -- and, more recently, of Stephen Furst.

The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)

Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Geraldine Chaplin, and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Age of Innocence

Newland Archer: Daniel Day-Lewis
Ellen Olenska: Michelle Pfeiffer
May Welland: Winona Ryder
Larry Lefferts: Richard E. Grant
Sillerton Jackson: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Welland: Geraldine Chaplin
Regina Beaufort: Mary Beth Hurt
Julius Beaufort: Stuart Wilson
Mrs. Mingott: Miriam Margolyes
Mrs. Archer: Siân Phillips
Henry van der Luyden: Michael Gough
Louisa van der Luyden: Alexis Smith
Mr. Letterblair: Norman Lloyd
Rivière: Jonathan Pryce
Ted Archer: Robert Sean Leonard
Narrator: Joanne Woodward

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenplay: Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese
Based on a novel by Edith Wharton
Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus
Production design: Dante Ferretti
Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker
Costume design: Gabriella Pescucci
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Voiceover narrators in movies are usually to be avoided: They often serve as a crutch for screenwriters and directors who can't tell their stories through dialogue and action. But Joanne Woodward's cool, wry, witty narrator in The Age of Innocence is an essential element: She's really playing Edith Wharton, or more properly the "narrative voice," the storyteller who is there to comment on and clarify the characters and their motives and backstories. It's a device, and a performance, that brings us closer to the source of the movie. Whether that's a good thing or not is subject to debate: Many think that trying to squeeze one medium, literature, together with another, motion pictures, does a disservice to both art forms. Still, The Age of Innocence does it better than most literary movies, including much of the late flood of Jane Austen adaptations and even some of the Merchant Ivory oeuvre. The chief criticism of the film is that it's over-upholstered, that the attention devoted to period detail tends to overwhelm the story. But Martin Scorsese assembled a cast that could upstage all the fabric and cutlery and crockery, starting with Woodward, but of course including the three stars on screen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, and extending to one of the best supporting casts ever mustered. My criticism is that the film is overlong, coming in at 139 minutes. I don't begrudge the time spent watching that cast, but the film does Wharton's story a disservice by making it seem more portentous than it is. Epic length in movies is justified if the topic demands it, like the Russian stand against Napoleon in Sergey Bondarchuk's War and Peace (1966) or the struggle to unite Italy in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963), to name two of the more successful historical epics. But Wharton was working, like Austen on her "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory," in comparative miniature, with a thin slice of history in which manners and morals, not countries and continents, were undergoing revolutionary change. Fiction like Wharton's is meditative, film like Scorsese's is visceral, and while narration like Woodward's allows for some of the first, what lives with us after the film ends is likely to be the impact of Dante Ferretti's production design, Gabriella Pescucci's Oscar-winning costumes, Elmer Bernstein's score, and especially Michael Ballhaus's images, not to mention the pleasure of watching Day-Lewis, Pfeiffer, Ryder, et al. at peak performance. 

The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990)

John Cusack and Anjelica Huston in The Grifters

Lilly Dillon: Anjelica Huston
Roy Dillon: John Cusack
Myra Langtry: Annette Bening
Bobo Justus: Pat Hingle
Mr. Simms: Henry Jones
Cole: J.T. Walsh
Joe: Gailard Sartain
Gloucester Hebbing: Charles Napier
Jeweler: Stephen Tobolowsky

Director: Stephen Frears
Screenplay: Donald E. Westlake
Based on a novel by Jim Thompson
Cinematography: Oliver Stapleton
Production design: Dennis Gassner
Film editing: Mick Audsley
Music: Elmer Bernstein

Stephen Frears's ice-cold neo-noir The Grifters works as well as it does because of the trio of top-notch leads, a tough-minded screenplay based on a tough-minded novel, unsentimental direction, and a magnificent score by Elmer Bernstein. In short, it's an easy film to admire, but a harder film to like. If it has a message to convey it's that crime may pay, but at the expense of all humanity, including love and family. The most brutal moment comes not with bloodshed, but with Lilly Dillon's attempt to seduce her own son, a moment that has been foreshadowed earlier when Myra Langtry voices her suspicion that Roy Dillon has been sleeping with his mother. Anything goes, it seems, when you're on the grift. This was the film that made Annette Bening a star -- after a well-reviewed but little-seen performance in Frears's Valmont a year earlier -- and earned her the first of her four Oscar nominations. Adopting a Marilyn Monroe-ish little girl voice as Myra, she makes the character a near-equal to Anjelica Huston's Lilly, both of them trying to manipulate Roy to succeed in their respective grifts. But as good as Bening, Huston, and John Cusack are in their roles, the film also rides smoothly on its supporting actors, especially Pat Hingle as the brutal Bobo, Henry Jones as a kind of Greek-chorus hotelier, and the always marvelous J.T. Walsh as the cunning but ultimately fragile Cole. (Walsh's early death -- he was only 54 when he succumbed to a heart attack in 1998 -- deprived us of one of our most watchable supporting actors. Like Bill Paxton, whose death at 61 earlier this year recalls the premature departure of Walsh, he was one of those actors who made any film he appeared in just a little bit better.) 

Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

Jason Franklin, Bette Henritze, and Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven

Cathy Whitaker: Julianne Moore
Frank Whitaker: Dennis Quaid
Raymond Deagan: Dennis Haysbert
Eleanor Fine: Patricia Clarkson
Dr. Bowman: James Rebhorn
Sibyl: Viola Davis
Mona Lauder: Celia Weston

Director: Todd Haynes
Screenplay: Todd Haynes
Cinematography: Edward Lachman
Production design: Mark Friedberg
Music: Elmer Bernstein
Costume design: Sandy Powell

Homage never turns into parody in Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, a film whose very title alludes to Douglas Sirk's great 1955 melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Haynes's film is set in 1957, only two years after Sirk's was released, but the sensibility that controls it is very much of an era almost half a century later. Haynes has the liberty to deal with matters that were taboo for American filmmakers in 1955, specifically miscegenation and homosexuality -- two terms that now have an antique sound to them. But his film has the same resonance as Sirk's: Both expose the raw wounds inflicted on people by social conventions, by the desire to "fit in" with what a given community establishes as its values. We like to think of the 1950s as the nadir of American conformity, a society on the brink of having its repressive qualities exploded by the rebellious 1960s, but although Haynes's film is a "period piece," I think it also provokes us to evaluate what restricts us today. We can pat ourselves on the back that we -- or at least the liberal-minded people in the circles in which I travel -- no longer recoil in horror at an interracial couple or find ourselves shocked, shocked that there are people who love others of their own sex. But just as Cathy Whitaker and her circle of friends retreat into an exclusive community, we too often find ourselves falling into a similar trap of smug self-righteousness that won't withstand the cold shock of reality -- like, for example, a presidential election gone awry. Cathy's blithe intellectualized conviction that all people are created equal is tested when she crosses the invisible line between the races. Her frustration at not being able to have a friendship with a black man -- i.e., someone other than the dull suburbanites that surround her -- is mirrored by her husband's inability to make his way out of the closet. But Cathy naively thinks that there's a "cure" for his problem, making it a lesser trial than her own, which she can blame on society. In the end, the beauty of Haynes's film is that he never yields to the temptation to impose a false liberation on his characters, an ending in which everyone lives happily ever after. Cathy sees Raymond off at the station, knowing that she'll never visit him in Baltimore. Frank is holed up in a hotel room with his lover instead of his spacious suburban home, his family life and probably his job now at an end. They are real enough characters that we want to know what will happen to them, but we suspect that there are no stirring triumphs ahead, only a struggle to rebuild damaged lives. Haynes and his team of cinematographer Edward Lachman, production designer Mark Friedman, costumer Sandy Powell, and composer Elmer Bernstein have crafted a 1950s world that's familiar to us from countless movies, but because of the shrewdness of the screenplay, the depth of the characterization, and the brilliance of the performers the film succeeds in making it real. There are stereotypes in the film, like Celia Weston's malicious gossip, but they are balanced by roles that could have fallen too easily into stereotypes -- Patricia Clarkson's best friend, James Rebhorn's doctor, Viola Davis's maid -- yet manage to develop dimensions of actuality. Far From Heaven also does something that very few films inspired by older ones do: It illuminates its source, so that it's possible to watch All That Heaven Allows again with a new understanding of Sirk's achievement.

Starz

Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

What do Sweet Smell of Success, His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) have in common? They are all among the critically acclaimed films that, among other honors, have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. And none of them received a single nomination in any category for the Academy Awards. Sweet Smell is, of course, a wickedly cynical film about two of the most egregious anti-heroes, New York newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), ever to appear in a film. They make the gangsters of Francis Ford Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's films look like Boy Scouts. So given the inclination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stay on the good side of columnists and publicists, we might expect it to shy away from honoring the film with Oscars. But consider the categories in which it might have been nominated. The best picture Oscar for 1957 went to The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean), a respectable choice, and Sidney Lumet's tensely entertaining 12 Angry Men certainly deserved the nomination it received. But in what ways are the other nominees -- Peyton Place (Mark Robson), Sayonara (Joshua Logan), and Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder) -- superior to Sweet Smell?  The best actor Oscar winner was Alec Guinness for The Bridge on the River Kwai, another plausible choice. But Tony Curtis gave the performance of his career as Sidney Falco, overcoming his "pretty boy" image -- in fact, the film makes fun of it: One character refers to him as "Eyelashes" -- by digging deep into his roots growing up in The Bronx. Burt Lancaster would win an Oscar three years later for Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks), a more showy but less controlled performance than the one he gives here. Either or both of them would have been better nominees than Marlon Brando was for his lazy turn in Sayonara, Anthony Franciosa in A Hatful of Rain (Fred Zinnemann), Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, and Anthony Quinn in Wild Is the Wind (George Cukor). The dialogue provided by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman for the film crackles and stings -- there is probably no more quotable, or stolen from, screenplay, yet it went unnominated. So did James Wong Howe's eloquent black-and-white cinematography, showing off the neon-lighted Broadway in a sinister fashion, and Elmer Bernstein's atmospheric score mixed well with the jazz sequences featuring the Chico Hamilton Quintet. Even the performers in the film who probably didn't merit nominations make solid contributions: Martin Milner is miscast as the jazz musician who falls for Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison), but he hasn't yet fallen into the blandness of his famous TV roles on Route 66 and Adam-12, and Barbara Nichols, who had a long career playing floozies in movies and on TV, is surprisingly touching as Rita, one of the pawns Sidney uses to get ahead. As a director, Alexander Mackendrick is best known for the comedies he did at Britain's Ealing Studios with Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). His work on Sweet Smell was complicated by clashes with Lancaster, who was one of the film's executive producers, and after making a few more films he accepted a position as dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1967, where he spent the rest of his career as an instructor after resigning his administrative position. Sweet Smell currently has a 98% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes's Tomatometer and an 8.2 rating on the IMDb.