Movie Nation

Yes, “Barbie” spoiled everbody, with its blowout “previews,” blockbuster Friday and Saturday, $162 million opening and dash to $250 million+ on its opening week.

So when “Haunted Mansion” opened Wed. and Thursday to…$3.1 million. A modest but healthy $30 million weekend prediction went by the boards. Maybe $25 million, says Deadline.com.

Bad reviews aren’t helping. Fans of the Disney World/Disneyland/EuroDisney et al attraction may come, but nobody else.

The weekend belongs to “Barbie,” another $91 million, a $350 million or so take by midnight Sunday, $700 MILLION WORLDWIDE.

Wow.

A $14 million second Friday means “Oppenheimer” is skipping right past that three hour run time and thinking Christopher Nolan and “Event Picture” and a $46 million second weekend. Not “Barbie,” but a blockbuster by any measure. Add that to a $127.8 million from its first week, $200 million by the end of next week.

“Sound of Freedom” is heading for $13.8 million, better than “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning,” which is shedding screens. Lot of discussion in the internet about that Jim Caviezel plea for “Freedom” fans to “buy more tickets” in the closing credits and the movie apparently playing to empty houses, “astro-turfing” this fringe film’s popularity, several twitter accusers (with photo proof) called it.

Money is money. But that’s pathetic. Reminds me of the way various Trumps have bought their way onto the best seller lists. This time, it’s the easily-conned who are trying to game the system and make this movie appear more popular than it is.

The theater chains will probably indulge them, because they could use the cash. But you’re not fooling anybody, and there are better movies to actually buy tickets and see.

A24’s sharp edged horror tale “Talk to Me” is managing a decent $10 million first weekend.

The weekend’s all-in take/all-films — is nearly $220 million, pre-pandemic numbers and built on the back of two non-comic book/franchise pictures.

Jason Statham told me a few times in interviews over the years that he used to chose roles based on who the fight choreographer was. Whatever the quality of the film, if the fights made him look cool, that was an investment in his future.

Anybody working with stuntman and fight choreographer turned director Kensuke Sonomura would almost certainly second that bit of career advice. The guy knows what he’s doing in staging thrilling, alarming and gritty hand-to-hand combat.

He turned to directing with “Hydra,” a gangster thriller more notable for its epic throw-downs than the plot or (decent enough) acting between fights. His second feature, “Bad City” has a better script, a charismatic cast and some of the most blood-pumping/fist-bumping brawls I’ve ever seen.

It’s a star vehicle for wizened on-screen heavy and sometime director Hitoshi Ozawa, who scripted and stars in this story of Yakuza, the Korean mob and how their tentacles reach into most every corner of Kaito City.

White-haired and 60something Ozawa kicks ass and settles scores as a jailed cop released to help bring-down a mob-connected developer (Lily Franky of “Shoplifting”) who escapes justice in court one more time (Sound familiar, Amerikahitos?) and announces he’s running for mayor of this “Bad City.”

A prosecutor sets up a “team” to help disgraced Capt. Toroda mete out rough justice.

“Beating up a good guy is violence,” the captain remembers. “Beating up a bad guy is justice.”

Katsuya and Masanori Mimoto play two seasoned “violent crimes unit” cops assigned to Toroda. And inexplicably, “newby” Nohara (Akane Sakanoue), a petite slip of a thing who vomited at her first taste of Yakuza violence, is thrown in as well.

“Messages” are being sent around town, Yakuza fashion. A major gang has been decimated by the Koreans, led by Madame (Rino Kataste), who still seethes over the murder of her son and heir, overseen by a top lieutenant but carried out by the seemingly unkillable Han (Tak Sakaguchi, a big deal in action cinema and a towering presence here).

Madame “hates” the Japanese, even though she lives and makes her dirty living there. Hey, she’s Korean. They have their reasons.

How all this ties in to the mob-connected developer is never all that clear. But from the opening moments, when Han dons a disposable rain slicker so that he can slice and stab two mob guards so fast they never know what hits them, to the captain’s brassy march into a mob stronghold, weilding only a bullhorn — which he uses to berate and then beat the hell out of youthful, armed and DIY-armored (thick catalogs duct-taped to their chests) Yakuza wearing baseball uniforms, the action here is pulse-pounding and personal.

Yes, that’s kind of an homage to “The Warriors.”

The fights are savage but can feel survivable, as guns are often eschewed. If you know what you’re doing with a blade, your feet and fists and body positioning, you could do all right — even if you’re “too old for this s–t,” or a Japanese Junior Miss.

The struggles feel desperate, improvised and furious and they are a jaw-dropping marvel.

Pulpy as the plot is, with an ending that adds an anti-climax or two, “Bad City” is a definite step up from “Hydra.”

If there are aspiring Jason Stathams out there from Britain, Hollywood, Hong Kong, Hokaido, Jakarta or Mumbai, this Sonomura fellow is the Man of Action you want to find an excuse to work with. And if that means a paid vacay in Japan, battling tattoo-covered gangsters by the dozen. so much the better.

Rating: unrated, violent as all get-out

Cast: Hitoshi Ozawa, Akane Sakanoue, Katsuya, Masanori Mimoto, Lily Franky, Yoshiyuki Yamaguchi, Tak Sakaguchi and Rino Katase.

Credits: Directed by Kensuke Sonomura, scripted by Hitoshi Ozawa. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:57

Filmmakers want to get their foot in the door to a career, and actors? They’ve got to book work to eat, right?

That explains a lot of dismally dull and just “off” B, C and D-grade thrillers, especially “The Lurking Fear.”

Filmmakers Darren Dalton and Robert Gillings thought another monstrous tale set in a long-abandoned asylum was exactly what the world needed (I think I’ve seen two this week, maybe three). And they sold their finished film to the streamer Tubi, so good on them.

Granted, they had to shovel more porta-john droppings on the careers of veteran character actors Robert Davi and Michael Madsen to achieve this. But you what you’ve gotta.

The film is apparently inspired by an H.P. Lovecraft short story. But the resemblence is thin. It’s a picture whose narrative is so jumbled you wonder what they whacked out to get it down to 81 lean, semi-nonsensical minutes.

When Davi’s character, a mysterious “expert” in the long-abandoned Martense Mental Institute, mutters “I don’t know what’s going on here,” we can wonder A) if his character is lying and B) if Davi is actually delivering a line from the script.

The disheveled movie mess concerns what Crystal (Elisabetta Fantone) finds when she frantically searches for her missing-for-a-day fiance (Jonathan Camp), the host of an unpleasant places to visit reality TV program called “Inside History.”

Mike and his crew were led into the tunnels beneath this large mental hospital ruin underneath an interstate fly-over by Andrew Seville (Davi). We saw them start the shoot, there.

Whatever happened in Martense, way back when — suggestions of weird science, pedophilia and sadistic treatment of patients — Mike’s TV chat-grammar “You can’t begin to imagine” doesn’t do it justice.

Madsen plays another dyed, unkempt, gone-to-seed cop in yet another no-budget horror tale, using the same wardrobe he wore in “The Wraith Within.” Maybe even the same sunglasses. The photo I posted is from that film, because there’s not much difference between the characters or the quality of the movies.

Davi vamps around declaring “It’s time to pay the piper. Somebody has to pay the piper” before launching into a little Anthony Quinn in “Lawrence of Arabia.”

“I am a RIVER to my people!”

I hope he had fun. I hope the check cleared.

But “The Lurking Fear” isn’t particularly fearful, and often makes little to no sense at all. The “history” is all over the place, with dates as early as 1801, as late as the turn of the 20th century and flashbacks showing a 1920s car.

The less experienced actors have trouble with line-readings, the filmmakers jump around to try and accomodate their “big names” by introducing Madsen in a scene that has little to do with the rest of the story.

There are many cinematic sins on view here. Worst of all, it’s not bad enough to merit inventing a drinking game for watching it.

Still, at the end of the day, they got “Lurking” thing on Tubi. Boy, I hope those writers and actors strikes end soon.

Rating: unrated, graphic, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Elisabetta Fantone, Robert Davi, Jonathan Camp, Laticia Rolle and Michael Madsen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Darren Dalton and Robert Gillings. A Tubi original.

Running time: 1:22

“Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, the Movie,” also titled “Ladybug & Cat Noir: Awakening,” is an animated film film kids that falls on the wrong side of the “catering to/pandering to” line, in terms of children’s entertainment.

That should be no shock to anyone, considering that the movie is based on “Zag Heroez” branded French TV series dubbed for showing on The Disney Channel, with doll sales and all manner of merchandising is built into this exercise in entertainment “world building.”

The CGI animated characters and action sequences are sharp enough. The cutesy dialogue is cute-ish.

“Don’t be bemused. It’s just the news!”

The tunes our heroine, hero and villain sing are innocuous and pleasantly forgettable.

The messaging — “Stop worrying about what others think. You just have to believe in yourself” and “Who saves a life saves the world” (borrowed from Jewish and Islamic scriptures) — is generally positive.

But the prefabricated nature of it all feels focus-grouped, cut-and-paste “borrowed” from comic book and other “universes.”

Kids may find it a passable time-killer, but grownups should smell the cynicism of it all, despite the French settings, “bourgeois” jokes and baguette references.

There are these “Miraculous” gemstones, we’re told, which can be used or misused, and as one of them contains “the ultimate power,” guess which one falls into the hands of our villain, Gabriel (voiced by Keith Silverstein)?

“Chaos will REIGN today!”

Yes, he’s from that most evil tribe, most villainous profession among professions. He’s a fashion designer. Oh, and he’s mourning his dead wife, so all this evil is carried-out to bring her back.

Two of the other “miraculous” stones must fall into the hands of “heroez” fit to “work together” and save the world from this new menace.

That’s how Marinette, the baker’s daughter (Cristina Valenzuela) comes into possession of “Ladybug” earrings which transform her into a “water melon” suited (red, black polka dots like the bug, but you can see how people would make a mistake) super heroine, complete with “genie” advisor and a magical yo-yo that makes her into more of a Spider-Girl than Ladybug.

And that’s how the blond hunk from her school, Adrien (Bryce Papenbrook) puts on a cat gem ring and becomes Cat Noir, “the new hero in town.”

“All you have to do is follow my lead, sidekick!”

Sidekick? Who’re you calling SIDEkick?

Can two bickering teens foil the machinations of Hawkmoth, who just happens to be Adrien’s obsessed, grieving, neglecting-his-son Dad?

Jeremy Zag of “Zag Heroez, Inc” directed, composed the songs and co-wrote this, which is aimed both at fans of the TV series and at introducing new fans to the franchise.

Because that’s what “Ladybug & Cat Noir” and their movie really are, a franchise, just “content” conceived by marketers and executed by decent animators, voice-actors and crew.

Limp one-liners, derivitive characters and action set pieces remind us every minute or so just how little originality ever figured into it.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: The voices of Cristina Valenzuela, Bryce Papenbrook, Carrie Keranen and Keith Silverstein.

Credits: Directed by Jeremy Zag, scripted by Bettina Lopez Mendoza and Jeremy Zag. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

“Hidden Strike” is a bad movie that’s easy to endorse. A buddy comedy co-starring the master of the genre, Jackie Chan, here paired with that jock joker John Cena, it’s action for those who like their cheese paired with some fine…whines.

“Fasten your SEAT belt!”

“You let go!” “No, YOU let go!”

Yeah, it’s like that. But it doesn’t start out even that entertaining. This Chinese-financed XYZ Films actioner fills its first act with straight People’s Republic agitprop.

In the “oil wars” of the future, a Chinese refinery in the Middle East is under siege. “Volunteer” security forces led by Feng “Dragon” Luo (Chan) are efficiently dispatched, load a dozen buses with Chinese employees, their children and the refinery’s scientist/director, Professor Cheng (Jiang Wenli) for a dash down the Highway of Death to a “Green Zone” of safety.

But an American mercenary who lives among the locals (Cena) is persuaded to hit that convoy by a merc who turns out to be his brother (Amadeus Serafini, and much respect if that’s the stage name you came up with, my dude.). Chris wants revenge on some malefactor in that convoy. That might have something to with his dead dad.

“Quit,” the punk kid brother hisses. “Just like you did on our old man.”

Dragon promises to “protect” the young woman (Ma Chunrui) who rides in the front of his bus with him.

“You are here to be a hero,” she fumes, in Chinese with subtitles. “But not for me. For THEM.”

Yup. She’s his estranged daughter.

For over half an hour, we’re caught up in that bit of soap opera amidst a “Mad Max” raid on the convoy, mid-sandstorm — bloody shoot-outs between helicopters and desert warcraft. And then the leading couple finally has its “meet cute.”

Things really pick-up after that, with bro-to-bro throwdowns as one guy shouts “You killed my people!” and the other protesting “It wasn’t ME.”

Yes, they must work together to take down the real villain. I”ll pull the pin, YOU throw the grenade. And yes, they make a LOT of wisecracks as they do.

“You keep a MACHINE GUN under your seat?”

“I’m American…guns everywhere.”

Chan gets in a soap bubble brawl. Cena leads Arab kids in “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” Chan interrupts to correct his impersonation of a monkey.

Cena’s Chris speaks just enough Chinese to flirt with the old Chinese man’s daughter and sound like an idiot to a native Mandarin speaker. Chan lands his one-liners like a pro.

Movies about fighting over future oil in the first “Global Broiling” summer of 2023 seem seriously passe.

Jackie Chan is using stunt doubles these days, along with CGI. Some funny stuff, some outrageous stuff, little of it believable — especially the amusing bits — results.

But his ability to generate rapport with any buddy pic co-star, Chris Tucker to Owen Wilson to Cena, is undiminished. He still plays the “safety first” straight arrow to whatever joker’s sharing the frame with him.

And for all this film’s failings, something this international star has stressed in interviews with me and others over the years about East and West “getting along” eventually underscores this big budget Chinese-made B-movie and makes it at least tolerable.

Sure, the U.S. and China cooperate to shoot up a big part of the Middle East and a lot of Arabs in this movie. But the villain (Pilou Asbæk) is a Dane playing an amoral, pan-national Brit, who hires bad guys from all over the world.

So maybe we’ll “get along,” as many Chinese stars and filmmakers I have interviewed have stressed, as if repeating some national or at least show-biz career-preservation talking point. And maybe we’ll do that before the “real” shooting starts.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cena, Ma Chunrui, Pilou Asbæk, Chunrui Ma, Tim Ma and Jian Wenli,

Credits: Directed by Scott Waugh, scripted by Aresh Amel. An XYZ release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:43

Seth Rogen’s take on the franchise, lots of animation styles, endorsements from the usual low-rent quote whores of criticism.

Could be good. Might be the same-old/same-old in a new CGI/stop-motion etc. wrapper.

“TMNT: Mutant Mayhem” opens Wed. — Aug. 2.

File “Natty Knocks” under that broad horror film rubric “I’ve seen worse.”

It’s basically a screenwriting exercise, “Write another ‘Halloween’ without inviting a copyright infringement claim.” That makes for an unsurprising trek through suburbia in a Town With a Dark History, a burning witch’s threat, a mass murderer who prefers makeup to masks and a baby-sitter.

Decent production values, a couple of horror icons in the cast, a couple of decent jolts, and you’re in the black — or barely in the red. I haven’t had a look at Vertical’s books.

The opening shot is the scariest one in the movie — a female figure hanging like a scarecrow.

A blonde witch is interrupted, mid-coitus, by a lynch mob. Natty Knocks (Joey Bothwell) is given a stark choice by the lady-folks — “HYPOCRITES!” she screams — of Fillmore.

“She’ll talk or she’ll burn.”

The mob shouts “Burn the witch, burn the witch” until the flames comes for Natty, screaming “I’ll wait for you in hell! as she expires.

That was back in ’76…1976. The ’70s, man. You had to be there.

Cut to 2022, Halloween’s a’coming, and a stalker is on the loose. A trio of kids “ditching” school for the day (Thomas Robie, Noen Perez and Channah Zeitung) play the “Natty Knocks” game on the wrong house. You know how it goes. Knock nine times, repeat a long chant that ends with “Hide under your bed or she’ll take off your head.”

They see the brutish killer (Bill Moseley, whose 134-credits-and-counting career includes “Repo: The Genetic Opera” and “House of 1000 Corpses”) pummeling a girl. They flee, and as they ponder telling the cops, we see that our murderer loves face-painting and movies on real celluloid (Who doesn’t?) projecting drive-in B-horror movies via an ancient Bell & Howell.

They can’t tell Mom, or let her boss (Robert Englund sans Freddy Kruger hat and gloves) know. And the baby-sitter (relative newcomer Charlotte Foountain-Jardim) is just mad that they skipped school.

How will they ensure this creep doesn’t catch-and-kill again?

The mundane complications are just as generic as the basic plot. The two siblings, played by Robie and Zeitung, are coping with a break-up of the family, the other kid (Perez) has a mother who’s been married four times and a sketchy new beau (Amit Sarin, not bad).

And the baby sitter is anxiously awaiting college acceptance, using that as an excuse to fend off her douche-bro beau just a little bit longer.

The story, after that prologue, takes too long to get going and the pacing throughout is gassed, even though it’s 12 minutes shorter than the listed IMDb running time, suggesting a longer cut existed at some point.

The violence is jarring enough. And Moseley’s as creepy as ever.

But if you’ve literally EVER seen a horror movie, you’ve seen the plot-points “Natty Knocks” borrows — all of them from 366 versions of the same film.

Still, as I said at the outset, “I’ve seen worse.”

Rating: unrated, violence, f-bombs

Cast: Bill Moseley, Charlotte Fountain-Jardim, Thomas Robie, Noen Perez, Channah Zeitung, Amit Sain, Joey Bothwell and Robert Englund.

Credits: Directed by Dwight H. Little, scripted by
Benjamin Olson. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

Many of us dream of making that “escape to the country,” finding a pastoral piece of rural wherever to get away from it all, get back to the land and experience a little peace.

But what did Sartre warn us? “Hell is other people.” No, he wasn’t talking about Jason Aldean’s idea of “small towns.” But he could’ve been. No matter where you are in the world, that “get away from it all” move is wholly dependent on how friendly or unfriendly the locals are where you move.

Set aside your Hollywood preconceptions about psychological thrillers when you take in “The Beasts” (“As Bestas”), a Spanish tale with a hint of “Straw Dogs” about it, although “Jean de Florette” was an obvious inspiration, above and beyond a true story told in a 2016 documentary.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen serves up a tense, suspenseful tale of French “outsiders” facing rising intimidation, taunts and worse from hostile locals when they move to a remote mountain village in the north of Spain.

The long opening scene, in the bar in this tiny “ghost town,” introduces bullying blowhard Xan (Luis Zahera), and it quickly becomes obvious why he’s always dominating the conversation over drinks dominoes. If he lets anybody else get in a word edgewise, his intellectual limitations will stand out all the more.

He lords over his simpler brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) and buries one and all in BS and abuse.

But the guy he really hates is the burly farmer he nicknames “Frenchy.” Antonoine (Denis Ménochet) is a bear of a man who avoids confrontation with this big mouth as he sips his drink. But he can’t even leave in peace. The Francophobic Xan finishes off his dimwitted insults about the French and Spanish history with an “In this country, we say hello” and “goodbye” when entering or leaving a bar (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Antoine gives the impression he could pound this Okie-lean 50something lout into the tiled floor. But he was a school teacher. He’s just mastered the language. He and his wife run an organic farm and sell their wares at the farmer’s market and at street fairs. They need to get along.

So Antoine takes it.

There’s bad blood, we learn. Wife Olga (Marina Foïs) isn’t all that committed to this place where “We break our backs and empty our savings.” And those Anta brothers aren’t going to leave them in peace and aren’t going to ever accept them, no matter how many abandoned, ruined old houses they restore to livable in a dirt road village where no one else would ever move.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience. Antoine can’t get the local cops interested in the various violations the Antas visit upon. So he starts secretly recording them.

The brutish brothers may not be sophisticated, but they know how to mess with a fellow farmer.

And on and on it goes.

When Claude Berri told this sort of story, he made it a two-film saga of ancient grudges coming home to roost — “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” two of the great French films of the ’80s.

Sorogoyen boils this saga down to a single story, with subtle twists and steadily rising suspense. You think you’re guessing where it’s going, but you don’t. This may have hints of “Straw Dogs,” but the real world isn’t a Sam Peckinpah movie. This may lean on Berri’s films, but it diverges from those in fascinating ways.

Zahera loses himself in Xan, a fuming jerk who is just smart enough to know that his fury is all he can count on when he’s looking for someone else to blame for his life.

Ménochet gives Antoine a delusional trust in his instincts, in common sense, reason and his ability to read people and especially his trust in Spain’s version of “useless rural cops'” concept of right and wrong.

Foïs keeps Olga’s deepest thoughts secret even if her deepest fears are something she isn’t shy about expressing to her husband.

The scenery, the seasons, even the worn and emptied-out mountain village have a hypnotic beauty in “The Beasts.” But Sorogoyen’s film reminds us that scenery and the nature walks it invites aren’t everything, and that “escape” is illusory. Out in the country, you’re on your own, and you’re at the mercy of other people and other people’s values and limits of how far they’ll go in a feud.

If you don’t know that grudge isn’t going away, and that neither are they, you’re smart as you think.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marina Foïs, Denis Ménochet, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido and Marie Colomb.

Credits:Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, scripted by Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen . A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:17

Dublin’s North Circular Road isn’t anything the casual tourist might pick up on, even upon glancing at a map when visiting the city. It’s not a North American idea of what such a name might imply — an interstate loop or pre-interstate U.S. highway bypass.

But in Dublin, it’s a dividing line between “downtown,” the historical, touristy part of the city, and the northern suburbs. It’s very old, dating from when British engineers conceived it in the mid-18th century. And it’s historic, a way of telling the story of the city, the people and their struggles and the music they made to preserve that history.

“North Circular” is an elegaic black and white documentary that has singers and assorted locals remember that history through ballads and laments, and who tell of what is here and what used to be here — from Mountjoy Prison and St. Brendan’s asylum in Grangegorman, to long-gone O’Devaney Gardens housing estates, the famed Cobblestone folk club and a football (soccer) pitch where the “Bohs” (Bohemians) face off with their hated rivals, the (Shamrock) Rovers to this day.

Writer-director Luke McManus takes us from Phoenix Park and its monuments all the way east to “the docks,” which terminate the road (more or less) at Dublin Bay.

The music is simple and unadorned with studio refinements — a capella singers, pipers, tin whistle players reviving ancient ballads and more modern tunes recalling the ways the authorities (the Brits) in their historic zeal for “institutionalizing” the Irish, trumped up charges against women to imprison and then ship them to “Van Dieman’s Land” (Australia) because the new British colony “needed women,” other hardships and love stories and history.

“North Circular” is geographically and emotionally evocative, just gorgeous to see, to hear and to immerse yourself in, enveloped in an ancient city’s lore via its music.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa O’Neil, Gemma Dunleavy, John Francis Flynn, Johnny Flynn, Ian Lynch, Eoghan O’Ceannabháin and Séan Ó Túama

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luke McManus. A Lightdox release.

Running time: 1:25

The look is as lurid as black and white cinematography ever got, New York after dark “Photographed,” the title tells us, in a novel way of giving credit, by the great “James Wong Howe.”

The music is jazz at its sleaziest — brassy, brazen, squawking in protest to be heard over the din of the dialogue. And those words pure poetry, straight from pens dipped in poison.

 “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one. None too pretty, and all deceptive.”

And then there’s the best dismissal in the history of the movies — “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Maybe “Sweet Smell of Success” isn’t Hollywood’s highfalutin version of Shakespeare in 1950s New York. It’s more Moliere — cruel, quippy, lacerating with characters as venal as any the screen ever served up, one and all as mean as hell, and quotable in the bargain.

“Stop tinkering pal, that horseradish won’t jump a fence.” “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Based on a novella by famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest,” “Sabrina”), it was turned into purple-in-the-face prose — 1950s Broadway-ese — by Lehman and revolutionary playwright Clifford Odets (“Waiting for Lefty,” “Golden Boy,” “The Country Girl”).

“Match me, Sidney.” “Come back, Sidney! I wanna chastise you!”

Lehman, a former assistant to a columnist and press agent, ensured that “Success” is a sizzling Cabaret Life portrait of Manhattan when it sizzled, when Broadway/showbiz newspaper gossips like Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons and Dorthy Kilgallen published daily accounts of who was stepping out with whom, was at this play or that concert, dining at The Stork Club or tying one on at Toots Shor’s.

Ethically slippery, morally amoral, these high-and-mighties would sit in said nightclubs at their own booth and have singers, comics, actors, politicians and boot-lickers pay homage and fealty and hope to get noticed and “in the column.”

And lot of this intel and club owner promotion and bon mots attributed to the famous and want-to-be-famous was served up to those columnists as “tips” from press agents. If the columnists were “monsters,” willing to do anything for a scoop, to build this unknown up or knock that famous personage down, press agents were the monsters’ minions, paid to “place” attention-garnering tidbits in the columns by clients who hoped that it’d lead to a bigger crowd, a better gig or a new role.

“It’s a dirty job,” one disgruntled comic grips,” but I pay clean money for it.”

Tony Curtis, in one of his finest performances, plays nervous, nail-biting eager-beaver press agent Sidney Falco, a guy with an office that has his bedroom right behind it, handy for a night owl prowling the clubs for clients and working the phones and the club booths to get something “in the column.”

Sidney’s “so pretty” that you’d think he was a star. But he’s a hustler on the margins. He skips wearing a hat and coat out to save “tips” to every hat-check in every club that’s part of his rounds. Sidney needs the attention of a “monster” he calls his “friend,” J.J. Hunesecker.

Burt Lancaster, the ostensible lead and producer of this film, gets a real “star entrance” over 20 minutes into the picture, photographed from below, his glasses adding a sinister shadow to his eyes, his voice a pitiless, unfiltered insult of brusque dismissal. Senator or showgirl or groveling Sidney, J.J. makes no distinction.

“I love this dirty town,” he growls. It’s people he’s not crazy about.

But his MUCH younger sister (Susan Harrison), 19 and living in his big apartment, has taken up with the guitarist (Martin Milner) of The Chico Hamilton Quintet. And J.J. isn’t having it. Sidney’s been given the task of busting them up, and he’s failing.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is about what Sidney will do for the all-powerful/grudge-holding J.J. to bust up this “innocent” girl and this jazz man of “integrity, and what it will cost everybody involved.

The great Scottish director Alexander MacKendrick keeps the picture on the move and the banter, monologues and debates push it towards a sprint at times, with the legendary cinematographer Howe empashizing the darkness of the street scenes and shadowy tight-quarters of the clubs, with every conversation rendered more violent by the close-ups and dense compositions.

You don’t have to meet the dirty cops, get lectured on the unsavory connection between “lying” press agents and compromised columnists to smell and feel the corruption.

Curtis and Lancaster set off sparks, and all by himself Curtis keeps a bright sheen on smiling and backbiting Sidney, who always finds new depths of sleazy, self-serving narcissism to get him closer to his goal, a life of ease and being “Somebody.”

Pimping out that cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) and regular booty call? He doesn’t give it a second thought.

“Sweet Smell of Success” sounds as modern as a 1950s drama can while still being very much a time capsule — newspapers and typwriters and cigarettes and “high balls” at “my regular table” where a phone is brought each time someone who knows how to reach J.J. or Sidney makes a call.

MacKendrick is best known for his classic British (Ealing) comedies “The Man in the White Suit” and “The Ladykillers.” Delightful as they are, this American outing his has to be his best film.

Lancster and Lehman and Burt’s producing partner James Hill knew what they were doing when they enticed MacKendrick and DP Howe, Lehman and Odets and Curtis and The Chico Hamilton Quintet into taking this on, and talked club owners into letting them into the legendary locations that this masterpiece preserved forever on film.

There never was a better portrait of “this dirty town” in this, one of its many gilded ages, than the movie that gives us just a whiff of the “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Rating: approved

Cast: Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, David White, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater, Martin Milner and The Chico Hamilton Quintet.

Credits: Directed by Alexander MacKendrick, script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, based on the novella by Lehman. An MGM/United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube. etc. .

Running time: 1:36