Tag: Burt Lancaster

REVIEW: Sweet Smell of Success [1957]

Jared Mobarak

No. You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried. The hook is simple: Steve Dallas (Martin Milner) and Susan Hunsecker (Susan Harrison) are in love, but big brother J.J. (Burt Lancaster) doesn’t approve. He hasn’t supported her with penthouses and fur coats to watch a young guitarist whisk her away, but he can’t be caught stopping them with his formidable clout to make and break people on a whim as New York’s premier lifestyle columnist either. Putting his name on the boy’s metaphorical death certificate would risk losing Susan further than it…

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REVIEW: The Killers [1946]

Jared Mobarak

“Stop listening to those golden harps, Swede” “The Killers” is a dialogue-driven short story by Ernest Hemingway that describes the melancholic criminal comeuppance of a man long-removed from the deeds that signed his death warrant. It reads like a fast-paced and stripped-down script whose intrigue is built out of that which we’ll never know. Context provides motivations rather than meaning, the underlying sorrow ingrained within its matter-of-fact, gangster machinations conjuring existential empathy rather than good versus evil justice. The men tasked with killing a Brentwood resident they’ve never met aren’t…

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