The ritual of the Saturday clean-up around ours is invariably a prelude to going to the movies. This weekend was no exception though there wasn’t much to choose from. It came down to The Stones’ Gimme Shelter versus a noir festival at the Chauval in Oxford St. I favored the latter. The Girlie didn’t mind either way.
Noir it was.
So we went to see a new print of a unique 1957 number called Sweet Smell of Success, which if you have anything to do with journalism or PR you really should see. Tony Curtis plays slime-ball publicist Sidney Falco to Burt Lancaster’s egocentric and ruthless JJ Hunsucker, star New York columnist. Falco lives off his ability to place items in Hunsucker’s column. The film starts with Falco in desperation. He has been frozen out after failing to end a relationship between Hunsucker’s dependent sister and a very straight young jazz guitarist.
The performances of the two leads are pretty terrific. Apparently this is the film that showed Curtis was more than just a pretty boy.
About an hour into the film I realized the Girlie and I had our wires crossed: she leaned across and asked if this was about the Rolling Stones. I told her it wasn’t, no, Tony Curtis wasn’t playing Mick Jagger, but I thought Lancaster could do a passable Charlie Watts.
She slumped back in her seat, not seeming to know what I was on about.
Anyway, there are other stars in this film, not least 1950s New York and cinematographer James Wong Howe whose monochrome is sumptuous from start to finish. He concocts many great shots of the city, its bars, street and clubs and a wonderful title sequence.
Some of the dramatic scenes are stunners too, especially when Falco is playing off two columnists drinking in a classic deco bar to place a smear against the unfortunate musician and again at the end, where Hunsucker effectively destroys his victim. Here five characters take part in a brilliantly choreographed segment, with each in turn moving up into the foreground to speak and Falco circling permanently in the back, chipping away destructively.
Director Alexander Mackendrick and screenwriters Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, of course, demand a mention. Sweet Smell is a bit melodramatic, but in the best possible way. If you get a chance, see it.
Before going out that morning, I feel compelled to mention, I discovered the Girlie has a hobby. I’ve always thought she needed an interest outside school and sleeping, so this was a welcome discovery. While cleaning the house, I found about half a dozen “fluff rings”, you know, the things you pull out of the clothes-dryer filter, placed neatly on top of each other in the laundry to form one big “fluff ring” about a centimeter thick.
I was about to throw this out but she told me not to. She is collecting them.
Now I confess these rings have at times fascinated me as well. Why, for instance, are they always that funny mauve colour? No matter what you are drying, they always come out the same.
Also, when I do throw them away, it is always with a slight pang of regret. They look as if they should have some sort of use, we just can’t figure out what it is. To add further to their allure, these fuzz rings don’t appear to have a name. Yes they are fluff and they are lint, but neither of these terms is quite precise enough for something so, so … elemental.
If you have any suggestions for uses for dryer fluff or their proper name, drop me a line. And if there really is no name feel free to coin one. But in the meantime I’ve done some research and it looks as if the Girlie’s new hobby is fairly unique. The internet does reveal some activity in the navel fluff space, indeed there have been academic studies undertaken here in Australia and there is at least one avid collector.
However, fluff ring collecting looks like virgin territory, apart from this site that suggests it as an ingredient of an especially durable kind of home-made paper.
Sorry, I’m obsessing. I'll go now.