Sweet Smell of Success
3:30 p.m. Sunday, March 8
TCM
A
In Sweet Smell of Success, gossip columnist extraordinaire J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) finds the perfect metaphor to sum up craven creep Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), an obsequious press agent willing to do almost anything to land a client’s name in Hunsecker’s widely read column: “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” The line also nicely describes this 1957 noir masterpiece, which film critic Pauline Kael hailed as “a slice of perversity — a study of dollar and power worship.”
Cynical with a capitol C and a savagely clever takedown of a particularly sociopathic strain of American success, the picture was directed by Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick (his first U.S. effort after several hit comedies for London’s Ealing Studios) and scripted by heavy-hitters Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (on whose novelette the film is based). The group fashioned a screenplay sharp enough to clip the jugular and fleet enough on its feet to catch the blood before spattering the pavement.
That sort of dexterity called for an ace cinematographer, and Sweet Smell of Success boasted one in the esteemed James Wong Howe (The Thin Man, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Seconds), whose atmospheric work showcased New York City’s seamier side. From always-bustling sidewalks to the smoke-filled environs of the 21 Club, where Hunsecker makes humiliation a parlor game, New York is a formidable supporting cast member. “I love this dirty town,” J.J. observes at one point, and it’s easy to see why.
In the same way that Citizen Kane was Orson Welles’ kick in the Rosebuds to newspaper scion William Randolph Hearst, Sweet Smell of Success’ J.J. Hunsecker was a thinly fictionalized Walter Winchell, one of the leading communist-baiting demagogues of his time. Lancaster, sporting thick glasses and a drop-dead glare, is chilling in a performance of icy rage, a man far too comfortable destroying lives and a wee bit too jealous of kid sister Susie’s romance with Martin Milner (here playing the world’s whitest, most clean-cut jazz player).
If Lancaster — whose Hecht-Hill-Lancaster production company made the film — is chilling, then Curtis is pure volatility as the sleazily ingratiating Falco. Until that point, Curtis had been just another nondescript Hollywood pretty-boy traipsing through sword-and-sandals epics and inflaming the sexual fantasies of Eisenhower-era teen girls (and boys, let’s be real). Sweet Smell of Success changed that. It proved that the real-life Bernie Schwartz could act even without a toga, and that he could be one mean bastard, at that.
With perfectly cast leads like that, cinematic brilliance was assured. As Falco says of his nasty little scheme to break up the Susie Hunsecker romance and thereby demonstrate his allegiance to J.J.: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” Sweet Smell of Success is a seemingly bottomless flask of hardboiled patter. Three decades later, Barry Levinson’s Diner found room for a minor character who has memorized, and repeatedly recites, every line of dialogue in Sweet Smell of Success. It would not be an unworthy pursuit.
That’s my take on it, anyway. And now, as J.J. Hunsecker would say, “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”
