Sweet Smell of Success (PG.)
Directed by Alexander MacKendrick. 1957
Starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner and Emile Meyer. Black and white. 96 mins. Available on Blu-ray from Arrow Films.
Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most quotable films ever made, right up there with Casablanca, Spinal Tap, Life of Brian, Apocalypse Now and Heathers. In Barry Levinson's Diner, a film that has quite a way with word itself, there is a character who has memorised the entire script of Sweet Smell of Success and does nothing but quote from it. I always wondered how devoted he was to this lifestyle choice – whether he recites the whole script from beginning to the end or if he excluded lines like “There's a call for you,” and just stuck to the zingers. But seeing Sweet Smell again you realise that there is barely a mundane line in it. It's all zinger, no filler.
This tale of newspaper men and publicity agents skulking around in the sharp monochrome of fifties Broadway has other attributes than the script but that dialogue, those insanely crafted lines, do rather push everything else aside. They leap out of the actors' mouth, hammer down on the Test Your Strength machine and ring the bell every time. It's like Shakespeare, only you get the inferences. It's a gritty and realistic world, but a gritty and realistic world where every utterance has gone through ten drafts. (Actually, most of the dialogue was churned out the night before the scene was shot, but it feels like the result of endless craft.)
Like all good quote films, the lines are never exactly what you remember them to be. “You're dead son. Go get yourself buried,” is a seven word assemblage I thought I could just about carry in my head but it's actually six, the “go” turns out to be my own addition. And how about this one, “Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one – none too pretty, and all deceptive.” Brilliant. But why 40, and what's with that, “let it be said at once.”
The dialogue is courtesy of Clifford Odets, a left wing playwright who lost himself in Hollywood (he is fingered in the Extras as the basis of Barton Fink) and found an outlet in this film to spew out all his resentments at the world in one extraordinary concentrated blue streak. The original script was an autobiographical effort by Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music) but he had to leave the production due to a medical issue and Odets was churning out pages all the way through the production.
There is life in this film outside the words, but it is marginal. The plot is fifty shades of Max Clifford. A battle/ courtship between two monsters, one of whom knows himself to be a monster and one that has done such a thorough PR job on himself that he believes himself to be an evil for the greater good. Tony Curtis is the former, a slimy, shameless press agent paid by his clients to get snippets and mentions in the syndicated column of J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster.) “It's dirty work,” one of his frustrated clients complains, “but I pay clean money for it.”
The Hunsecker figure needs some explanation for contemporary audiences. He's based on Walter Winchell, a New York gossip columnist and propagandist who was read (and heard – he did radio too) across the country and who at his peak could make or break political and showbiz careers and who was happy to slide along in Senator McCarthy's slimy trail, labelling enemies as commies. Even knowing that, it's hard for contemporary audiences to really grasp what Hunsecker is all about: it's the same incomprehension your grandchildren will have when you try to explain to them what a Piers Morgan was.
The two performers excel. Curtis is always on the move, never still, forever furtive and looking for an angle. Lancaster though barely moves; he's a Statue of outrageous liberties. The film's weaknesses are when it ventures beyond them. The plot concerning Hunsecker's creepily protective concern for his sister Susan (Harrison) and his desire for Falco to break up her relationship with Jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Milner) never moves beyond the perfunctory. Harrison and Milner aren't bad actors but are out of their league here, facing up to two very big guns with much better munitions. The film really believes in their innocence but most viewers, nowadays at least, are so wrapped up in this gloriously seedy amoral world that these two goody goodies are a bit of a drag. We know Hunsecker and Falco are the pits, but they are entertaining and we resist seeing them get their comeuppance because we know they won't in real life. (Spoiler – the end of Sweet Smell of Success is uncannily similar to the uplifting climax of Barton fink's Broadway play.)
These two "clean" characters are further undermined because Odets writes all the characters in the same voice. So he has Dallas deliver lines like, “That's fish four days old. I won't buy it!” and it seems that his morally superiority to Hunsecker and Falco is based on him having less cutting lines
Arrow Films never send a film out underdressed and the Extras for this one come with an hour long documentary about director Mackendrick and an appreciation of the film by Mackendrick's biographer Philip Kemp, who also contributes a partial commentary for key scenes. These are all very good but mean the disc is rather slanted, viewing the film as Mackendrick's last masterpiece. American born Scot Mackendrick was probably the greatest of the Ealing Studio directors, making Whisky Galore, The Man in The White Suit, Mandy and The Ladykillers. When Ealing faded away he moved to Hollywood where Sweet Smell would be his first film. It wasn't a success and his career soon dried up.
Now I am in no way diminishing him, but I think it is unbalanced to make this all about the director. He was marvellous but Sweet Smell, like almost all great films, is the result of a happy accident of talent. Apart from the two stars and the two scriptwriters we need to mention the swaggering score by Elmer Bernstein and the sumptuous New York location photography of James Wong Howe. The film is shot like a classic film noir, but the switch is this isn't exploring the underbelly of society but it supposedly glamorous elite. It's film noir at the top table.
Directed by Alexander MacKendrick. 1957
Starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner and Emile Meyer. Black and white. 96 mins. Available on Blu-ray from Arrow Films.
Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most quotable films ever made, right up there with Casablanca, Spinal Tap, Life of Brian, Apocalypse Now and Heathers. In Barry Levinson's Diner, a film that has quite a way with word itself, there is a character who has memorised the entire script of Sweet Smell of Success and does nothing but quote from it. I always wondered how devoted he was to this lifestyle choice – whether he recites the whole script from beginning to the end or if he excluded lines like “There's a call for you,” and just stuck to the zingers. But seeing Sweet Smell again you realise that there is barely a mundane line in it. It's all zinger, no filler.
This tale of newspaper men and publicity agents skulking around in the sharp monochrome of fifties Broadway has other attributes than the script but that dialogue, those insanely crafted lines, do rather push everything else aside. They leap out of the actors' mouth, hammer down on the Test Your Strength machine and ring the bell every time. It's like Shakespeare, only you get the inferences. It's a gritty and realistic world, but a gritty and realistic world where every utterance has gone through ten drafts. (Actually, most of the dialogue was churned out the night before the scene was shot, but it feels like the result of endless craft.)
Like all good quote films, the lines are never exactly what you remember them to be. “You're dead son. Go get yourself buried,” is a seven word assemblage I thought I could just about carry in my head but it's actually six, the “go” turns out to be my own addition. And how about this one, “Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one – none too pretty, and all deceptive.” Brilliant. But why 40, and what's with that, “let it be said at once.”
The dialogue is courtesy of Clifford Odets, a left wing playwright who lost himself in Hollywood (he is fingered in the Extras as the basis of Barton Fink) and found an outlet in this film to spew out all his resentments at the world in one extraordinary concentrated blue streak. The original script was an autobiographical effort by Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music) but he had to leave the production due to a medical issue and Odets was churning out pages all the way through the production.
There is life in this film outside the words, but it is marginal. The plot is fifty shades of Max Clifford. A battle/ courtship between two monsters, one of whom knows himself to be a monster and one that has done such a thorough PR job on himself that he believes himself to be an evil for the greater good. Tony Curtis is the former, a slimy, shameless press agent paid by his clients to get snippets and mentions in the syndicated column of J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster.) “It's dirty work,” one of his frustrated clients complains, “but I pay clean money for it.”
The Hunsecker figure needs some explanation for contemporary audiences. He's based on Walter Winchell, a New York gossip columnist and propagandist who was read (and heard – he did radio too) across the country and who at his peak could make or break political and showbiz careers and who was happy to slide along in Senator McCarthy's slimy trail, labelling enemies as commies. Even knowing that, it's hard for contemporary audiences to really grasp what Hunsecker is all about: it's the same incomprehension your grandchildren will have when you try to explain to them what a Piers Morgan was.
The two performers excel. Curtis is always on the move, never still, forever furtive and looking for an angle. Lancaster though barely moves; he's a Statue of outrageous liberties. The film's weaknesses are when it ventures beyond them. The plot concerning Hunsecker's creepily protective concern for his sister Susan (Harrison) and his desire for Falco to break up her relationship with Jazz guitarist Steve Dallas (Milner) never moves beyond the perfunctory. Harrison and Milner aren't bad actors but are out of their league here, facing up to two very big guns with much better munitions. The film really believes in their innocence but most viewers, nowadays at least, are so wrapped up in this gloriously seedy amoral world that these two goody goodies are a bit of a drag. We know Hunsecker and Falco are the pits, but they are entertaining and we resist seeing them get their comeuppance because we know they won't in real life. (Spoiler – the end of Sweet Smell of Success is uncannily similar to the uplifting climax of Barton fink's Broadway play.)
These two "clean" characters are further undermined because Odets writes all the characters in the same voice. So he has Dallas deliver lines like, “That's fish four days old. I won't buy it!” and it seems that his morally superiority to Hunsecker and Falco is based on him having less cutting lines
Arrow Films never send a film out underdressed and the Extras for this one come with an hour long documentary about director Mackendrick and an appreciation of the film by Mackendrick's biographer Philip Kemp, who also contributes a partial commentary for key scenes. These are all very good but mean the disc is rather slanted, viewing the film as Mackendrick's last masterpiece. American born Scot Mackendrick was probably the greatest of the Ealing Studio directors, making Whisky Galore, The Man in The White Suit, Mandy and The Ladykillers. When Ealing faded away he moved to Hollywood where Sweet Smell would be his first film. It wasn't a success and his career soon dried up.
Now I am in no way diminishing him, but I think it is unbalanced to make this all about the director. He was marvellous but Sweet Smell, like almost all great films, is the result of a happy accident of talent. Apart from the two stars and the two scriptwriters we need to mention the swaggering score by Elmer Bernstein and the sumptuous New York location photography of James Wong Howe. The film is shot like a classic film noir, but the switch is this isn't exploring the underbelly of society but it supposedly glamorous elite. It's film noir at the top table.
