Steve Fagin’s challenging and unorthodox work (The Machine that Killed Bad People, Zero Degrees Latitude) has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and described in the NY Times as “video art at its richest.” Tonight the Cinematheque screens his latest piece Memorial Day (Observed) which was commissioned by KCET public television as part of a creative project on notions of democracy. …Constructed to function as a short to be shown before the station’s broadcast of Sweet Smell of Success,…the video short is as moving as the feature film in its declension of a certain mode of American desperation.” —Bill Horrigan. With Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Alexander MacKendick’s kinetic tale of a shady press agent and a megalomanic New York columnist, script by Clifford Odets/Ernest Lehman and starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis.