Monthly Archives: January 2017

Alexander Mackendrick  (1957)

Although he’s not the main character in terms of screen time, the newspaper gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is the presiding evil genius of this famous film – a commercial failure on its original release but now widely considered a uniquely witty piece of New York noir.  Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a Manhattan press agent, isn’t getting his clients mentioned in Hunsecker’s daily dispatches.  The latter is displeased because Sidney – an acolyte-cum-whipping-boy – has failed to deliver on a promise to bring an end to the romance between Hunsecker’s younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and a jazz guitarist called Steve Dallas (Martin Milner).  The plot motor of Sweet Smell of Success is Sidney’s desperate attempts to get himself back in Hunsecker’s good books and his clients’ names to public notice.  The attempts start with persuading a rival columnist to print allegations that Steve is a card-carrying Communist and a dope-smoker.  J J Hunsecker is supposedly based on Walter Winchell, described in his Wikipedia entry as ‘famous for attempting to destroy the careers of people both private and public whom he disliked’.  Hunsecker’s abuse of journalistic power – pressuring informants to smear if they want to avoid being smeared themselves – has also been compared with the tactics of McCarthyism, whose influence was just beginning to decline around the time Alexander Mackendrick’s film went into production.

What’s immediately striking about this scenario is that it pivots on a family relationship that’s personally important to the professionally heartless Hunsecker.  This doesn’t fit easily into the film qua critique of a cultural ethos and it sends the narrative in an incongruously melodramatic direction in the closing stages.  Yet the clash of elements also helps make Sweet Smell of Success even more distinctive than its texture and dialogue have already ensured it will be.  James Wong Howe’s black-and-white chiaroscuro lighting and Elmer Bernstein’s sultry, dissonant score get across the corrupt crackle and hustle of the New York streets and bars in which much of the action takes place.  As an example of this electrified milieu, newspapers, as Manny Farber noted (disparagingly), ‘are read and flung away in a violently stylish way’.  The dialogue – by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman (who also wrote the novella on which the screenplay is based) – is as stylised as Damon Runyon’s but more brittle and tangy.  The subject matter of Sweet Smell of Success invites comparison with the earlier Ace in the Hole but Alexander Mackendrick is less coldly censorious than Billy Wilder:  Mackendrick lets you feel the attraction as well as observe the horrors of the venal power games and double-dealing that drive the story.

Sidney Falco is crucial to the film’s insinuating quality.  He’s not a thoroughly bad lot:  it’s rather, as Hunsecker’s secretary Mary (Edith Atwater) says to Sidney at one point, that he’s ‘immersed in the theology of making a fast buck’.  The picture’s poor box-office takings may have reflected the disappointment of Tony Curtis’s large, young fan base that their pin-up boy was playing a schmuck but Curtis is so vital and likeable that part of you roots for Sidney, even though you can’t want him to succeed.  (That you naturally refer to him as ‘Sidney’ rather than ‘Falco’ is an indicator of this appeal.)  Curtis is especially good at conveying Sidney’s ability to keep brushing off setbacks.  His high-speed playing matches the tempo of the film:  Sidney is almost the heartbeat of Sweet Smell of Success.   Burt Lancaster’s characteristically insistent, unvarying delivery is exploited very successfully here – it somehow throws into relief the wit in Odets’s and Lehman’s lines, as well as reinforcing a sense of J J Hunsecker’s stranglehold.  There is, from early on, something creepy about Hunsecker’s tone when he calls Susan ‘dear’: even if this is caused by the peculiar timbre of Lancaster’s voice, that ‘dear’ makes Hunsecker’s concern for his kid sister sound less paternalistic than would-be incestuous.

The women of Sweet Smell of Success are, in different ways, used – and each has a distinct register.  They include, as well as Susan and Mary, Sidney’s forlorn secretary (Jeff Donnell), a cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) and Mrs Laurie Bartha (Lurene Tuttle).  The last named, wife of the rival gossip columnist, spends her evenings in the bar, looking in the paper for aptly named horses to back next day.  Susan Harrison is conscientious verging on effortful; Martin Milner may be the most straight-arrow jazz guitarist in screen history.  Yet Hunsecker’s malign authority becomes so suffocating that the audience is anxious for Susan and Steve to escape from him – and to escape with them.  The increasing prominence of the odd brother-sister relationship blocks our view of Hunsecker as culturally representative and you don’t believe in the climactic melodrama.  Alexander Mackendrick makes you grateful for it, nevertheless – for the way out that it provides.

26 January 2017