Payday gets inside the underbelly of American celebrity as it destroys both the adorers and the adored. Torn plays Maury Dann, a boozing, pill-popping, womanizing country-western music star who has lost his moral compass, if he ever had one. The story tracks his last days and nights ripping across the Deep South in the back seat of a Cadillac, accompanied by his posse of hangers-on and assorted losers. (Michael Gwynne is outstanding as the star’s manager/enabler.)

The movie is bleak—possibly another reason it didn’t reach a wider audience—but fascinating as a period piece (early 1970s casual misogyny and drug use; directed with real-life pacing) and as a brilliant work of acting. You simply can’t take your eyes off Torn as he drives himself, and his entourage, straight into the jaws of hell.

Newcritics readers don’t need a review of Murdoch’s vile track record—if you read or listen to modern media, you feel his clammy touch.

This brief post is instead a eulogy to an outstanding newspaper and its reporters, who exemplified the best of a free press.

People who didn’t read the Journal often assumed it was a mouthpiece of corporate America. Far from it. With hands-off owners, the news section was run by professional journalists. The Journal was a paper—the paper—you had to read if you wanted to know who pulls the strings in business and politics. “Follow the money,” is well-worn advice to those in search of truth in our complex, sordid world. That’s what the Journal did for us. It followed the money trails, connected the dots, and explained who was profiting and how.

The Journal’s aggressive pursuit of the truth behind corporate spin began, ironically, in the Reagan era, when buyout kings like Henry Kravis and Michael Milken were running wild. The Journal gave us outstanding coverage of Iran /Contra, the S&L scandals, and perennially obscene CEO pay schemes. Since then, the Journal has dissected organizations like the Carlyle Group and other private money cartels that continue to buy up companies and throw workers in the street for the sake of enriching themselves beyond reason.

The Journal in its heyday was famous for long, in-depth stories (Murdoch says he intends to cut them), its willingness to let reporters pursue offbeat interests (Murdoch says he doesn’t see the purpose), and most of all, its dedication to excellent writing and editing.

Today the New York Times reported that the Journal’s reporters are moving uptown to join their Fox News counterparts in the News Corporation building. I have noticed the Journal stories are getting shorter—much shorter. I haven’t seen any obvious Murdoch agendas yet, but now I have to read each story with suspicion. This story in Slate touches on questionable Journal coverage of Pakistan, and invites readers to begin a Murdochification watch. I can’t participate—it’s too depressing. I think I’ll let my subscription lapse and try the Financial Times.

Tom Watson asked for a media moment that touched us in 2007. I am afraid that this media moment is going to touch, and keep touching, all of us.

Dybek’s artistic success and commercial obscurity say a lot about the American short story today. Dybek is unquestionably one of America’s best writers, but his stories are quiet, thoughtful, and parochial—three strikes against best-sellerdom.

I wonder if one has to be from Chicago to love Dybek’s stories. His three collections—Childhood and Other Neighborhoods; The Coast of Chicago; and I Sailed With Magellan—are neighborhood tales from the “Slaughterhouse to the Nation” aka the “City of Broad Shoulders,” mostly on the Southwest Side, where German, Polish, Slavic, Mexican, and Black families coexisted uneasily in the 1950s and ‘60s.

But is there anyone who, as a child, didn’t listen open-mouthed to older kids’ urban legends? Consider the opening to “Hot Ice” from The Coast of Chicago:

The saint, a virgin, was uncorrupted. She had been born frozen in a block of ice many years ago.

Her father found her half-naked body floating facedown among water lilies, her blond hair fanning at the marshy edge of the overgrown duck pond people still referred to as the Douglas Park Lagoon.

That’s how Eddie Kapusta had heard it.

And who hasn’t undergone the agonizing horniness of early adolescence? “We Didn’t”, from I Sailed With Magellan, is a story about two teenagers’ summer-long inability to consummate:

We didn’t in the light; we didn’t in darkness. We didn’t in the fresh-cut summer grass or in the mound of autumn leaves or on the snow where moonlight threw down our shadows. We didn’t in your room or the canopy bed you slept in, the bed you’d slept in as a child, or in the backseat of my father’s rusted Rambler, which smelled of the smoked chubs and kielbasa he delivered on weekends from my uncle Vincent’s meat market. We didn’t in your mother’s Buick Eight, where a rosary twined the rearview mirror like a beaded, black snake with silver, cruciform fangs.

Dybek’s stories are universal in their depiction of the sweetness and savagery of youth. He moves easily into the adult world as well, where hard reality has trampled young dreams. His recurrent theme is the passage of time, as seen in the metamorphosing neighborhoods of childhood—both real and imagined.

Dybek’s stories have been compared to James Joyce’s Dubliners. For me, they belong on the same shelf. But unlike the homogeneous world of Joyce’s Dublin, Dybek’s world is the American crazy quilt, the beautiful mosaic, or the mulligan stew that we live in. Award-winner or not, he is a great American writer.

Written, directed, and completed by John Turturro two years ago, the movie was held up in a legal dispute between Sony and MGM, and Turturro has finally released the movie with his own money. Romance & Cigarettes tells the story of Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), a middle-age crazy Queens steelworker who falls hard for red-headed Tula (Kate Winslet) a filthy-mouthed sexpot. Nick’s wife (Susan Sarandon) goes on the war path, assisted by her aging rockabilly cousin (Christopher Walken). Steve Buscemi is in there too, as Gandolfini’s buddy and font of sexual wisdom. This all-star troupe of actors is having a ball, needless to say.

But wait, there’s more! Romance & Cigarettes is a musical. An odd kind of musical, in the style of The Singing Detective or Pennies From Heaven, except that some songs are lip-synched, some aren’t, and sometimes the actors’ voices blend with the original version. From the opening version of Engelbert’s Humperdinck’s A Man without Love, you know you’re in unusual territory. The actors sing and dance their way through churning, burning versions of Tom Jones’ Delilah; Bruce Springsteen’s Red-Headed Woman; several versions of Take Another Little Piece of My Heart; and my personal favorite, James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.

Despite the mile-wide humor, the story takes a somber turn at the end. You could say it’s dissonant, but it’s not exactly a clunker. Romance & Cigarettes is a bawdy love song to the working class: the people who live next to airports but have never been on a jet; who live in faded pink and blue Cape Cod style homes because they can’t afford any better; whose teenage kids practice their angry punk rock in the backyard to the drone of cars on the turnpike.

Early reviews of Romance & Cigarettes have been mixed; people seem either to love it or hate it. I give it two thumbs up. If you have a healthy libido and the occasional desire to burst into cheesy song, complete with back-up singers and choreography, you will too. Look for Romance & Cigarettes on DVD soon.

Was the film as good as the movie that’s been playing in my head? Yes and no.
First, the negatives: Some bad writing; some poor acting; and crude editing and camera work.

Now the positives. Superfly is a great period piece of Manhattan 1972: the clothes; the hair; the attitude; the city falling into ruin. The coke dealer, not too subtly named Youngblood Priest, is resplendent in long hair, baroque sideburns and ’70s-style Edwardian suits. (The actor Ron O’Neal plays him with elegant cool.)

Even better: Some excellent surprise touches, like a mid-movie montage of still photography by Gordon Parks, Jr., that is seamlessly woven into the plot like a musical bridge. And while the plot is mostly predictable, the ending is surprising and crowd-pleasing.

But best of all: the music, the music, the music! Going in, I was worried that the soundtrack might serve only as background, or might rudely cut songs mid-track. Not so. The gritty lyrics, the funky old-school soul, Curtis Mayfield’s distinctive guitar chops and high tenor voice, are not only intact but drive the action. It is impossible to imagine this film without the soundtrack.

Curtis Mayfield died too young at age 57 in 1999, after a freak accident on stage left him paralyzed, and the greatest commercial success of his career was the Superfly soundtrack. (Old-timers and musicians know him more for his lasting work as a songwriter and as a leader of The Impressions.) The fact that Superfly was his biggest hit is ironic—even sad—because Mayfield spent most of his life using his extraordinary musical gifts to preach hope, love, hard work and devotion.

True, his Superfly lyrics are all about saying no to “the pusherman.” But the movie never shows the true horror of cocaine addiction. Priest is the consummate anti-hero. Most of all, Curtis Mayfield’s music is so lushly romantic that even though the lyrics are saying no, his soundtrack is seducing you all the while.

Seeing the movie for the first time in many years, I was struck by an aspect that had evaded me before. While the character of Hunsecker is clearly based on Walter Winchell, who late in his career became an avid supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy, the character is an allegory for the politics of McCarthyism: the cynicism, phony patriotism, and above all, the bullying. In short, the last time I saw this movie was before the rise of Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, and his ilk.

Hunsecker holds “65 million Americans” in his sway with his seeming omniscience. His access to power appears limitless. Lancaster plays him as a self-righteous bully, his every social encounter a chance to belittle others or aggrandize himself.

Naturally, a bully’s power requires his victims’ acquiescence. He treats Falco like a dog, tossing him the occasional scrap of a mention in his must-read column. But Sidney Falco is more his eager puppet than his victim. Hunsecker’s adored baby sister takes that role. Nineteen-year-old Susan Hunsecker lives in a gilded cage, her brother’s lavish Manhattan apartment, where he has kept her firmly under his thumb. When a Midwestern, corn-fed young suitor (the epitome of integrity), emerges to woo his sister away, Hunsecker snaps his mighty fingers, ordering the slavish, desperate Sidney Falco to execute his dirty work.

Hunsecker: Sidney, Conjugate me a verb. For instance, to promise. You promised to break up that romance.

The film works brilliantly on so many levels. The screenplay was reportedly cobbled together on-set by veteran writers Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets (who, significantly, was infamous as one of McCarthy’s namers of names). The dialogue is whip-crack smart and rapid-fire, alternating between hilarious and stunning.

Hunsecker: What’s this boy got that Susie likes?
Falco: Integrity - acute, like indigestion.
Hunsecker: What does that mean - integrity?

The atmosphere, from Chico Hamilton’s insistent hot jazz to the gritty black and white cinematography, is a beat-era love poem to New York City of the late 1950’s, shot almost exclusively at night around Times Square and in the swanky, clamorous nightclubs of the time: Toot Shor’s, 21, and The Elysian.

Hunsecker: I love this dirty town!

The few daylight shots are in the bleak hours when the sun is almost rising and the only people on the streets are drunks, crooked cops, and hustlers. Newspaper trucks barrel through the streets dumping bundles of today’s rag with the latest J.J. Hunsecker column.

The acting is stunning. Sweet Smell of Success is like an autopsy performed on living men: Tony Curtis, in what may be his greatest role, is a pretty boy, with “a face like ice cream” as a cop in Hunsecker’s pocket puts it. But Falco’s overweening ambition has made him less than a man, and he knows it. His soul-sickness shows when he thinks no one is watching. Remarkably beautiful Tony Curtis changes faces whenever Falco needs to curry favor.

Hunsecker: Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of forty faces, not one. None too pretty and all deceptive.

Yet Falco’s disease is mild compared to the illness consuming Hunsecker, who has achieved the pinnacle of success by destroying everyone in his path. Lancaster’s grim giant, still grasping even at the top, realizes he is falling only when it’s too late. (The movie is said to be Lancaster’s only flop. Perhaps his fans couldn’t stomach their matinee idol as a sociopath.)

Sweet Smell of Success’ director, Alexander Mackendrick, ends the movie on an up-note of sorts. In another of those bleak-hour shots, the city is silent as Susan finally gathers the courage to walk away. We can see that she won’t be the last. Seen in the light of the McCarthyism allegory, it is as if the cancer on America has been excised, and at last the American people, like Susan, will come to their senses.

That was 1957. Fifty years later, the cancer has returned.