+ info: Literary Hub
What were we meant to be feeling at the movies in the 1950s on hearing a line like this? What do we feel now? What is this insinuating rumor about the cat, the bag, and the river getting at? How did movies make such magic out of masked meanings?
We looked at the screen, and things there seemed so real or emphatic—the men, the women, the sky, the night, and New York. In Sweet Smell of Success (1957) you believed you could sniff the black-and-white stink of the city. Wasn’t that in the contract as light ate into film’s silver salts? But the things depicted were also elements in a dream—nothing else looks like black-and-white. And because we believe dreams have inner meanings, not meant to be understood so much as lived with, we guessed there might be a secret within the facts. Was it just a gorgeous, repellent mood in Sweet Smell, or was a larger odor hanging over the film? […]
