newcritics

Yesterday I took a day off work to see Sweet Smell of Success (1957), one of my all-time favorite movies. Starring Burt Lancaster as the virulent newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker and Tony Curtis as the lapdog press agent Sidney Falco, the film famously bombed at the box office but is now generally considered a masterpiece. Americans in the Eisenhower era found the story hard to take: Darker than dark, plus de noir, Sweet Smell of Success is about the sickness of ambition, specifically the ambition that afflicts people in the news, gossip, and publicity business.

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.