I watched a fascinating movie last night that was being shown on Turner Classic Movies as part of “Noir Alley”: Sweet Smell of Success, a thoroughly acrid story centered around a desperate publicity agent, Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), whose entire livelihood depends on his ability to place items about his clients into the New York Globe column written by all-powerful arbiter, tastemaker and what would today be called an “influencer” J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster, who also produced this film with his business partners Harold Hecht and James Hill). The story began as a Collier’s magazine fiction piece by Ernest Lehman, though the magazine rejected Lehman’s original title and called it “Tell Me About It Tomorrow.” Lehman actually called the story “Sweet Smell of Success,” but the Collier’s editors didn’t like the idea of publishing something with the word “smell” in the title — but when Lehman republished the piece as a novel he reverted to his preferred title, and that’s the one that was used for the film. Lancaster originally considered other actors for the role of Hunsecker, including Frank Sinatra (whose still-diminutive frame would have come closer to the character’s real-life model, Walter Winchell) and Orson Welles (who would probably have wanted to direct the film as well, especially since the story deals with his favorite theme — the power of the media — that informed his most famous works, the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast and the 1941 film Citizen Kane), before deciding to play the part himself.
Lancaster got upset when he hired Ernest Lehman to adapt his own story for the screen but Lehman got sick and dropped out of the assignment; his replacement, Clifford Odets, if anything made the script even more acid and cynical — and Odets was forced to write in a terrible rush, sometimes sending pages by messenger to the set where the film was being shot and forcing the actors to learn them immediately. This is hardly the best way to make a film, and it pissed off the director Lancaster actually hired, Scottish filmmaker Alexander Mackendrick — who’d previously worked at Ealing Studios and made, among other things, the anti-capitalist satire The Man in the White Suit — but when the BBC bought Ealing’s physical plant and shuttered its production company in 1956 Mackendrick decided to try his luck in Hollywood. Mackendrick was reportedly a William Wyler-style perfectionist — the sort of director who maddened actors by calling for take after take of a scene without giving them a clue as to what he wanted done differently — but, aided by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe (just the right person to create noir atmospherics on actual locations — though some of the film was shot in Hollywood on the Samuel Goldwyn lot, much of it was actually filmed in New York City and incorporates some of the famous nightclubs and restaurants mentioned in the dialogue), Mackendrick turned in a marvelously paced, fast-moving film whose subject is power and corruption. What struck me most about this film in 2019 is how close the character of J. J. Hunsecker is to Donald Trump: egomaniacal, utterly without scruples, constantly dropping the word “favor” (in both its literal meaning of “I want you to do something for me … ” and the symbolic meaning, as in “royal favor,” since the story depicts Hunsecker as literally a person who can make or break people with a few words in his column and everyone around him continually begs him for the royal favor, the nod that will indicate they’re in his good graces and he will help them rather than destroy them) and also literally turning from someone’s fast friend to his bitter enemy. (The parallel between Hunsecker and Trump is even stronger when you consider that seven years after he made this film, Lancaster starred in Seven Days in May as an ambitious U.S. army general who attempts to overthrow the U.S.’s democratically elected government and install himself as the nation’s dictator.)
The plot kicks off when Falco picks up the latest copy of the New York Globe (whose delivery trucks advertise Hunsecker’s column as the main reason people should buy the paper) and notices that for the fifth day in a row an item Hunsecker promised to print for him hasn’t appeared. Approaching Hunsecker to find out why he’s being frozen out — he has to place a phone call from a booth in a restaurant to the phone at Hunsecker’s table, and you hear the chilling sound of Lancaster’s voice in the role even before we see him — Falco finds it’s because Hunsecker assigned him to break up the romance between Hunsecker’s sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), who’s shown on-screen leading the real-life Chico Hamilton Quintet, an unusual group that featured flute and cello as lead instruments along with a rhythm section of guitar, bass and drums. Just why J. J. is so anxious to break them up is unstated, though we get the hint that Hunsecker has an incestuous attraction to his sister (another Trump parallel: Trump once said his daughter Ivanka was so hot-looking that “if she weren’t my daughter, I would date her”), but it provides the plot line for the entire movie. To smear Steve in the press, Falco writes a “blind item” that doesn’t name him but accuses him of being both a drug user and a Communist (incidentally the filmmakers had the members of the Chico Hamilton Quintet followed for several weeks to ensure that none of them were using drugs, lest the real Winchell expose them in his column to discredit the film), and he shops it around to other columnists. He picks one because previously he had promised Rita (Barbara Nichols), a cigarette girl, an interview for a piece he was doing on the lives of cigarette girls — only the “interview” took place in the columnist’s hotel room and his interest in her was more physical than journalistic. (Just in case anyone thought that the shit Harvey Weinstein pulled on women to get sex was anything new … )
When the columnist not only fails to take the bait but confesses his indiscretion to his wife — who’s right there next to him — Falco tries again with another columnist, Otis Elwell (David White, who would later play a similarly slimy and unscrupulous character as ad boss Larry Tate on the TV series Bewitched), and this time offers Rita to him as a one-night sex toy if he’ll print the item. The item gets Steve and his band fired from their nightclub gig, but when Steve goes to the set of Hunsecker’s TV show to complain to the Great Man — and the Great Man says, “When you insult me, you insult all 65 million people who read my column and watch me on TV” (another Trump parallel: he recently told a rally audience in Mississippi that in attempting to impeach him the Democrats were not only attacking him, they were disenfranchising all 65 million people who voted for him[1] —just as elsewhere in the movie Hunsecker employs another of Trump’s favorite tricks, telling someone that “people are saying” something bad about them, when in fact it’s he who’s saying it and the “people” are figments of his imagination) — Hunsecker abruptly reverses course and decides to play White Knight and help Steve get his job back if he’ll just leave Susan alone. But the stress on Susan of being essentially the rope in a tug-of-war between her brother and her boyfriend leads her to attempt suicide by throwing herself off the balcony of J. J.’s high-rise apartment — and Falco grabs her to keep her from killing himself just as J. J. arrives, instantly comes to the conclusion that Falco was trying to rape Susan, and beats Falco up, leaving Falco back in the gutter just as he thought he had worked himself into J. J.’s good graces and would finally get to enjoy “the sweet smell of success.” Sweet Smell of Success was one of those movies (like The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane and Vertigo) that was a box-office bomb when initially released (though I suspect it wasn’t anywhere near as much a flop as imdb.com’s figures would indicate: they said the film cost $2.6 million, running way over an initial budget of $600,000, and listed a “Cumulative Worldwide Gross” of just $7,336, which must be a typo) but has since become regarded as a classic.
I think it’s a film that just misses greatness: the overall conception is wonderful if you regard it as entertaining to be told for 96 minutes that human beings are nothing but swine (which I do, since it’s awfully close to the truth); Mackendrick’s direction is effective and atmospheric; and Lancaster and Curtis deliver among the greatest performances of their careers, both fully relishing the evil they were called upon to portray — Lancaster the super-bully and Curtis the pathetic sycophant. Barbara Nichols is also excellent as the woman Falco rescues from being sexually exploited by one columnist and then himself “sells” her to another. One problem with this movie is we really don’t get a sense of how Hunsecker and Falco got that way — a bit of Citizen Hunsecker explaining how he started out, how he got so powerful and what is his relationship to the owners of the New York Globe might have made Sweet Smell of Success not only more effective social commentary but more powerful drama (though it’s arguable that we don’t want to see Hunsecker as fallen idealist because he, unlike Charles Foster Kane, never had any ideals to lose. We also don’t get much of a hint about Hunsecker’s sexuality; in the real world someone with as much power over others as we’re told he has uses it to force himself onto barely willing (or sometimes outright unwilling) partners to get his rocks off. We don’t see him do any of that — which reinforces the impression that he’s got an incestuous crush on his sister, either that or he’s totally asexual and power, in the Orwellian definition as “the ability to make others suffer,” is his real turn-on. But the biggest problem with Sweet Smell of Success is the incredibly weak casting of the only two people in the dramatis personae we’re actually supposed to like, Steve and Susan. About all Susan Harrison can do is pose for the camera looking pretty and pout her way through the big moments (based on her work in the similarly themed — and equally unsuccessful commercially — A Face in the Crowd, Lee Remick might have been a better choice for the role), and Martin Milner is simply one of the most boring actors of all time.
When Charles and I watched him a decade later in the film Valley of the Dolls I began to wonder if that film’s director, Mark Robson, ever had a stagehand put a mirror under Milner’s nose to see if he was still breathing after a particularly somnolent take from him, and while he’s not quite as inanimate a presence in this film, he’s awfully damned close. According to the imdb.com “Trivia” posters, Milner was cast at the last minute after the actor originally given the role, Robert Vaughn (later star of the TV James Bond knock-off The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), suddenly got drafted — but with the one actor who’d have been totally right for the role, James Dean, having been dead for two years the filmmakers would have been better advised going for one of the many young men around then trying for the Dean mantle, like Paul Newman, Steve McQueen or even Michael Landon, someone who could have given at least the appearance of trying to fight back against Hunsecker’s obscene power. While watching the film I had at least given Milner credit for putting in the effort to look right in the scenes in which he’s supposedly playing guitar with the Chico Hamilton Quintet — his left arm moved credibly across the guitar neck — but in his outro the TCM host said he really wasn’t doing it: the Hamilton Quintet’s actual guitarist, John Pisano, stood behind him off-screen, reached around him to the neck of the guitar, and fretted it for him. Despite the weaknesses in the casting, though, Sweet Smell of Success is a fascinating film, well worth watching and seeming quite modern in its unremitting cynicism — indeed, according to a brief mention in Steven Bach’s book Final Cut, in the late 1970’s Faye Dunaway approached United Artists about remaking it with her in the Burt Lancaster role of the all-powerful columnist (which would have been interesting) — and it would be interesting to imagine a modern version with Hunsecker a fabulously successful online “influencer” whose word on his Web site could make or break careers!
[1] — Actually only 62 million Americans voted for Trump.
The Electoral College and the distribution of voters throughout the country
effectively disenfranchised the 65 million of us who voted for Hillary Clinton to be our President.
