Sweet Smell of Success

viewed July 30, 2000 on VHS   Full Details

This 1957 box office bomb turned cult classic shares a lot with A Face in the Crowd ­ a full frontal attack on the corruptive effects on the muckraking media ­ though the world depicted here is exponentially sleazier.  It seems that no one in this film has a soul, no one is to be trusted, (except for sheltered women and jazz musicians).  As I head out to New York, how can I not expect this film to speak something of what kind of people I'm about to face?

Though New York is the setting, L.A. Confidential, which captures the same period, owes much to this film, the incindiery impact of its dialogue and the pungent effects of smoky nightclub interiors and street scenes piled with sewage.  The script was penned by poet Clifford Odets, who must have taken much malicious delight in cruel contrived phrases such as the immortal "Match me, Sidney." 

This film single-handedly derailed Tony Curtis' matinee idol career by casting him as Sidney Falco, machiavellian sleazeball gossipmonger, a story broker between struggling, conniving news writers and the people their columns prey on.  It is probably his best performance ever ­ his exploits the natural likability of his persona to every effect.  Unfortunately, his character's fate is unworthy of the development it receives for most of the film -- and he gets a little too preachy at the end (the same self-conscious moralizing that undermined the finale of A Face in the Crowd); the misogyny he expresses at the end is too forced to be convincing. 

Perhaps the real person to study -- since his performance is so understatedly commanding -- is Burt Lancaster as Curtis' boss, J.J. Hunsecker.  Sort of a riff on Walter Winchell (a news columnist who everyone read and feared in the 50s but no-one knows today), Hunsecker as played by Lancaster has a rigid, totem-like presence. Unlike Curtis, who is running around on a manic mission to outrace the other rats, Lancaster doesn't sweat a single salty drop.  There is no greater evidence of his command than in when he sits back and dissects the unsavory relationship between a senator, a budding starlet and the agent that's pimping her for influence.   He always looks about to explode with that frenzied Lancasterian energy, but this is a performance of tremendous restraint and control.  A killer script based on a prophetic concept are put into excellent execution thanks to lighting, music and career performances by Lancaster and Curtis.

One final note: the film also features, as Hunsecker's sheltered sister, the virtuous Barbara Harrison, who would in real life give birth to Darva Conger, who some would call one of the biggest opportunists of all. 

Home