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"My favorite new perfume," it can't conceal the sweat and the sulfur. Manhattan at night, "dirty town" and nerve center, just the spot for an American-Scottish director's homecoming. "A press agent eats a columnist's dirt and is expected to call it manna," thus bondage knots between a hopped-up jackal (Tony Curtis) and "The Eyes of Broadway" (Burt Lancaster). The gossip-peddler embodies cosmopolitan barbarism, his is the power to make or break careers from a 21 Club booth, churning in his mind is the romance between his younger sibling (Susan Harrison) and a jazz musician (Martin Milner). "A theology of making a fast buck" suits the marauding publicist, who ditches coats to avoid hat-check tips and eagerly pimps out a smitten cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) to a horny rival (David White). "I'd hate to take a bite out of you. You're a cookie full of arsenic." It proceeds from Polonsky's Force of Evil and Mankiewicz's All About Eve, Ernest Lehman's lacerating exposé punched up by Clifford Odets and visualized as a panorama of contaminated glitz by Alexander Mackendrick. "A real louse," "the boy with the ice cream face," Curtis like a pinball in a fantastic display of oily daring. By contrast, Lancaster trades his trademark kineticism for a charged stillness, specs lenses glaring for a litany of cultured venom that barely parts his lips. (The two together lend an unmistakable snapshot of McCarthy and Cohn.) A "moral twilight," a matchless James Wong Howe chiaroscuro of sharp-edged lounges and smeared headlights and glistening asphalt. Integrity ("Acute, like indigestion") struggles not to wither under the neon lights, venality meanwhile blossoms in Emile Meyer's boil-like performance as an obscenely crooked cop. The ingénue's swan dive is interrupted, the worm turns only to get stomped. "You're dead, son. Get yourself buried." Losey in The Servant takes the baton of erudite malice and runs with it. With Sam Levene, Jeff Donnell, Joe Frisco, Edith Atwater, William Forrest, Lawrence Dobkin, Lurene Tuttle, Jay Adler, and the Chico Hamilton Quintet. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |