Review: Sweet Smell of Success

Slimy, desperate press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is threatened with being shut out of all-powerful news columnist J.J. Hunsecker’s (Burt Lancaster) all-important gossip column if he can’t manage to break up the relationship between Hunsecker’s beloved sister (Susan Harrison) and her jazz musician nice guy boyfriend (Martin Milner), whom J.J. feels isn’t worthy of his sister. Sidney is desperate, willing to do anything and use anyone to get back in J.J.’s good graces- and column. Enter ditsy cigarette girl Barbara Nichols (who for my money was the best of the Marilyn Monroe knock-offs by far), for whom Sidney has an important (and frankly degrading) use. Emile Meyer plays the thuggish cop on J.J.’s payroll, who doesn’t take kindly to Falco’s constant verbal jabs.

 

Easily the sleaziest film about the press and agents you’ll ever see, amazingly this 1957 flick was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, best known for Ealing comedies from England (Including the brilliant “The Ladykillers” from 1955). Darker and more twisted than any noir you could name, it’s amazing this thing got released back in 1957. You could see it having an easier time in say ’67, but ’57? Boy is this dark, twisted and cynical for the late 50s (Possibly a reason for its tepid box-office performance at the time). This thing is so sleazy you’ll almost feel like taking ten long showers afterwards. The creepiest thing about it is that it hasn’t really dated all that much. There’s little differences, but it’s largely the same fucking dirty cesspool of celebrity and bottom feeders.

 

At the centre are two amazing performances from top stars Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster. Easily Curtis’ best-ever screen work (“The Defiant Ones” being the only other performance I’d consider even close to contention), his slimy, arse-kissing, manipulative press agent Sidney Falco is a real piece of work. He’d be completely irredeemable if he weren’t so weak and pathetic and played so well by Curtis. And because the desperate Falco is opposite a character who is even worse than he is. Curtis was never a great actor, but here he really showed he could deliver greatness.

 

While Curtis has the showier and more immediately impressive role and performance here, I’ve actually come to be more impressed with Burt Lancaster’s work here over time. The fact that he restricts his movement to a bare minimum in most scenes is perfect for the role of a man who doesn’t have to turn around and acknowledge someone’s presence if he doesn’t want to. It’s called power, and J.J. Hunsecker (loosely based on real-life columnist Walter Winchell) wields a helluva lot of it. When he delivers the classic ‘Match me, Sidney’ he’s not just using a hip line of dialogue, it’s J.J. putting Falco in his place. A lot of other actors would try and fail to do what Lancaster does here. He’s not wooden or immobile or half-arsing his performance. The sometimes dynamic and acrobatic star is perfectly embodying a guy who has so much power and influence that he doesn’t even have to raise his voice very often. It’s one of Lancaster’s finest and most controlled performances ever.

 

Somewhat less impressive is the supporting cast, chiefly Martin Milner as the object of J.J.’s sister’s affections, a nice guy jazz musician. As the sister, Susan Harrison is no world-beater though certainly sweet and sensitive (she decently conveys a slight fear of her powerful brother), but Milner just isn’t the right fit for the part of her boyfriend. Too clean-cut and nice, he’s just miscast. I get that J.J. is meant to be overly protective (to say the least), but they should’ve cast someone with a slight edge to them so that there’s at least the possibility that J.J. has his sister’s best interests at heart (You see, there’s a little something ‘off’ about J.J.’s protectiveness of his sister. It’d be wrong to play up the idea of incestuous longing, it’s more that J.J. is a total control freak, and that means he has to control his sister’s life, too, as he sees it as a reflection on him). By making Milner’s character so clean-cut, it just robs the whole thing of some shades of grey there. As is, it’s too predictable because Harrison is dating the Wally friggin’ Cleaver of the jazz scene. He’s the one flaw in an otherwise brilliant film. On the plus side, the underrated and late Barbara Nichols (who sadly died at age 48 a decade or two later) has an excellent, sad supporting role as a dumb blonde who gets used by Falco in the cruellest of ways. You’ll feel really sorry for the poor girl, who clearly has feelings for Falco, and the slimeball probably knows it. Edith Atwater is also quite good as J.J.’s P.A., and the hulking Emile Meyer is certainly memorable as Harry, the dumb but strong and brutal cop.

 

I said earlier that this was an extremely cynical film, and that’s very much represented in the dialogue, which is brilliant (At one point J.J. remarks ‘I love this dirty town’). It’s mostly hard-boiled dialogue that stops just short of being silly or a parody. In fact, the one line that doesn’t work is far less the fault of screenwriters Clifford Odets (“Clash By Night”) and Ernest Lehman (“North By Northwest”, “The Prize”, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”), and almost entirely due to the fact that it comes from the inappropriate and ill-equipped lips of Milner: ‘That’s fish four days old. I won’t buy it!’. Every other cynical, cutting line in the film works perfectly, my favourites being J.J.’s ‘You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried’, and particularly Falco’s ‘The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river’. That one certainly conjures up horrible images, doesn’t it? J.J.’s ‘cookie full of arsenic’ line is a pearler, but I have to credit Lancaster with really selling it leading up to it with his look of contempt for Falco. The look is even more effective than the line.

 

This time around I found myself really noticing the excellent cinematography of James Wong Howe (“Hud”, “On the Waterfront”). Just like that ‘I love this dirty town’ line from J.J., Howe makes the streets look both beautiful and ugly at the same time, bizarre as that may seem. There’s lots of lights and glitz, but perhaps because of the B&W, it somehow manages to look dirty and sleazy at the same time. Colour would destroy this film completely. Sitting perfectly side by side with the cinematography is the jazzy score by Elmer Bernstein (“The Magnificent Seven”, “The Great Escape”). Bernstein and The Chico Hamilton Quintet (who perform on-screen in the film) offers up music that sometimes sounds rather cheap in the most appropriate way possible. There’s something rather sleazy about it that fits right in here with the seedy look and tone of the film.

 

Terrific, hard-boiled dialogue, cynical tone, top-notch star performances, ugly-pretty cinematography and a memorable jazz score combine for one of the darker films to have come out of the Golden Years of Hollywood. This one’s a cookie full of arsenic, alright, and it still manages to both fascinate and repel today. It’s a travesty that not a single Oscar nomination went its way, let alone any wins. Shameful.

 

Rating: A