On this episode of The Video Store Podcast, I am recommending four movies about the people who get called when somebody has made a mess, crossed the wrong person, or needs a situation to go away quietly. The movies this week are Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Wise Guys (1986), La Femme Nikita (1990), and Pulp Fiction (1994). They all deal with that idea in different ways, from a press agent trying to stay useful, to mob errand boys trying to stay alive, to handlers working inside a government machine, to a man who arrives with a plan when everyone else is panicking.
I start with Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which may be the coldest movie on this list. Tony Curtis plays Sidney Falco, a press agent who is always working an angle and always trying to stay useful to Burt Lancaster’s J. J. Hunsecker. Hunsecker has the power, but Falco is the fixer. He is the one moving through restaurants, clubs, offices, and sidewalks trying to make things happen for people who would rather not get their own hands dirty. The film was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, with cinematography by James Wong Howe and music by Elmer Bernstein. It was shot partly on the streets of New York, and it still feels like a movie made out of cigarette smoke, bad favors, and late night anxiety.
Then I move to Wise Guys (1986), a Brian De Palma comedy that feels a little odd in his filmography, which is part of what makes it interesting. Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo play low level mob guys who are useful until they are not. They run errands, take orders, and try to read the room, but the room keeps changing on them. Harvey Keitel, Dan Hedaya, Ray Sharkey, Frank Vincent, and Captain Lou Albano are all in the cast, which gives the movie a nice mix of mob movie faces and broad comedy. It is not De Palma in thriller mode, but you can still see his interest in people trapped inside systems they do not fully control.
The third recommendation is La Femme Nikita (1990), Luc Besson’s French action thriller about a young woman pulled into a government program that turns her into an assassin. The fixer here is not only one person. It is the whole structure around her. Tchéky Karyo’s Bob is part handler and part threat, someone who can seem kind while reminding Nikita that her new life is not really hers. Jeanne Moreau also appears as Amande, who helps shape Nikita into someone who can move through polite society while carrying a completely different life underneath. Anne Parillaud won the César Award for Best Actress for the role, and you can see why. She has to play the violence, the fear, and the strange sadness of someone being rebuilt for other people’s purposes.
The last movie is Pulp Fiction (1994), where Harvey Keitel’s Winston Wolf may be the cleanest example of this week’s theme. He arrives, assesses the problem, gives instructions, and leaves before the movie can turn him into something bigger. That is part of why the character works so well. He does not need a long backstory. He is there because somebody called the right number. The movie is full of people talking themselves into and out of danger, but Mr. Wolf is different. He does not talk around the problem. He handles it.
So this week, the shelf has a bitter New York classic, an oddball mob comedy, a French thriller, and one of the defining crime films of the 1990s. Four very different rentals, all built around people who know what to do when the situation has gone bad.
