A bespectacled, but still menacing, Burt Lancaster is walking down a New York City street at night. Tony Curtis is circling, alternating between behaviors sycophantic and needling. I could not help but recall Midnight Cowboy and watching Jon Voigt confidently walking down that city’s streets while Dustin Hoffman’s wannabe hustler nips at his heels.
Except this movie is 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, and Curtis is a publicist who gets paid to get his clients’ names into Lancaster’s wildly popular newspaper column. But Lancaster is a petty and vindictive man. He carries a grudge for a long time, especially whenever a potential romantic interest enters the life of his sister (Susan Harrison). If his overprotectiveness of his sister in that regard sounds icky, that’s because it is. He even has a picture of her on his desk. Yep, that.
The latest suitor is Martin Milner, the guitarist in jazz combo The Chico Hamilton Quintet. Lancaster has decided Curtis will take the man out of the picture through whatever means are required. He is a powerful puppeteer who enjoys controlling events from at least one step removed and untraceable back to him: “My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand for thirty years.” Curtis has failed once, and woe to him if he displeases Lancaster a second time: “Don’t be a two-time loser. The penalty could be severe.”
The relationship between the two made me think of those fish that clean the teeth of sharks. Lancaster and the other columnists fighting for control are exactly like sharks which engage in bloodletting not just for survival, but because they enjoy inflicting the pain.
It is obvious Curtis hates being under Lancaster’s thumb, but he is there just the same. As Harrison says to the harried publicist, “How could you love a man who makes you jump through flaming hoops like a trained poodle?” And Lancaster knows Curtis is dying to drive in the knife and twist: “He is a man of forty faces. None too pretty. And all deceptive.”
How right he is, as Curtis intends to plant false information with the right columnist to ruin Milner’s reputation so that the man can no longer play in the most desirable of the city’s clubs. He thinks he can blackmail columnist Lawrence Dobkins into running such a piece. The information Curtis has is Dobkins has knocked up cocktail waitress Barbara Nichols. The publicist is all ready to tell Lurene Tuttle, as Dobkin’s wife, about this indiscretion, except the man calls his bluff and tells her himself, right out in public.
Undeterred, Curtis approaches columnist David White, whom he knows has a weakness for the ladies. That Nichols is a friend doesn’t prevent Curtis from prostituting her out to White. Initially, she’s offended: “What am I? A bowl of fruit? A tangerine that peels in a minute?” White plays this game where he acts like he has been with her previously in another town, and the punchline comes when she capitulates and says, “It was Palm Beach.” She begs him not to tell Curtis.
This is a movie with little violence in it, but it feels like there is more, if only because of the nature of the dialogue. A senator asks Lancaster why everything he says sounds like a threat, and that’s because it is. For example, this line to Curtis: “You’re dead. Get yourself buried.”
It is no surprise Lancaster is also deeply selfish, as he also says this to Curtis: “You sound happy. Why should you be happy when I’m not?” He also has a messiah complex, such as the umbrage he takes when insulted by Milner: “It wasn’t me he criticized. It was my readers.” He goes on to say such an attack is an affront to all of America.
Other characters get some sharp lines, though few get as many as Lancaster. I guess that is a perk of being a producer on a film. Tuttle, in her brief time on screen, gets this line I’m still chewing on, explaining to husband Dobkin the reason for her gambling habit: “It is a small compensation for the marginal lives we lead.”
Still, there is the occasional line that hits a bum note. Ironically, one of these is when Milner is trying to persuade Harrison to not leave him: “Don’t leave me in a minor key.”
Lancaster and Curtis are so perfectly cast as to disappear completely into their roles. The former may look like an academic, but this is one of the most physically menacing roles of his career. Even all the character actors in minor roles bring their A-game.
Alas, the one bad apple is Susan Harrison. I’m not sure I have seen her in anything else before, and her IMDB page shows only eleven acting credits, and those are largely for television. Here, her character is supposed to be detached and emotionally drained, but something prevented me from believing even a single second of her performance. It is as difficult for me to articulate why that is as it is for most people to write about music. Expanding upon an old cliche, elaborating upon either would be like whistling about chickens.
The script is loosely based on Walter Winchell, a New York columnist who was one of the most powerful men in America at the time. It was a bold decision to make a picture like this, when the real-life inspiration once conspired with J. Edgar Hoover to have a musician thrown in prison for ten years because the man had the audacity to court Winchell’s daughter. The charge was tax evasion for years where, indeed, the man had not submitted returns, but that was because he didn’t make enough in income those years to have to file one.
Sweet Smell of Success is a powerful and bitter movie released in roughly the same period that brought us A Face in the Crowd and Ace in the Hole. It is clever, and rightly regarded as a great film, though it is one I doubt I will ever like as much as those other two. The dialogue here is fascinating in how cutting it often is, but then there are times when it is too sharp by half, and in danger of cutting itself.
Dir: Alexander Mackendrick
Starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis,