"Alexander Mackendrick is probably the least well-known genius director to ever live. Nowhere is his brilliance more evident than in the down-and-dirty depiction of high-class gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker and lowlife press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. The great James Wong Howe films the gritty streets of New York in the style of the tabloid newspaper photographs that the protagonists traffic in. The movie was shot entirely on location, a rarity in 1957 but probably allowed due to the triumph of Kazan’s On the Waterfront just a few years prior. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis give career-best performances in this noir that depicts the fall of the mighty Hunsecker (Lancaster) and the sniveling, conniving Falco (Curtis) as the former tries to retain his crown and the latter tries to make it to the top of the heap of garbage he so aspires to reign over. The screenplay, by giants of the trade Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, crackles with what is commonly considered some of the best dialogue in the history of cinema. I just love every single thing about this gem of sleaze. Also featured on the disc is a great documentary, Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, about how the director, fed up with Hollywood, took a job teaching film at the then nascent CalArts and became a great influence on his students—among them James Mangold, who is featured in an interview here"

"Cool Hand Luke, to me, and I’m not a film historian, but what it feels like to me is it’s in this intersectional point between the glamorization of film and that golden era of Hollywood where everything was meant to look perfect, like all the old Cary Grant movies like His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace, where everything is supposed to look so nice and everybody’s always impeccably dressed and charming and all that. Cool Hand Luke comes after that, where it’s a more cinema verite realism kind of thing. But also, there are still elements of the older films that you don’t get anymore, like using imagery in a really cool way. Like, there’s one scene where, to inspire a feeling of tension and stress, there’s just a really slow push in on a whirling fan that just keeps whirling and whirling, and I feel like they don’t do that much anymore. Now they have to really pander to the audience, and make sure that they serve up to you exactly what’s going on, instead of using that kind of stuff. Also, Paul Newman is the f—ing best, and he’s so good in that movie, and it’s just cool, man. It’s just a guy who just won’t get beat by the system, and I really like that. There’s so many layers to that movie. It’s one of the few movies that I make sure I keep downloaded on my iPhone or my iPad, just so that I always have it available."