Noir-vember: Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

Burt Lancaster is a cinematic icon that I fear some find far too easy to forget. You can easily recall his powerful physique, which served him well as a circus acrobat for many years (a role he recreated for film in Trapeze). That perfect grin is also hard to forget. He was like a more muscular Gregory Peck, a perfect figure often instilled with a sense of quiet strength and nobility (arguably used to best effect in The Swimmer). Sweet Smell Of Success has Lancaster in a very atypical role, compared to every other performance from him that I can think of, and it easily sits alongside his best work.

Lancaster plays newspaper columnist J. J. Hunsecker, a man who finds out everything about everyone, and has no problem in deciding whether or not others should find out that information. He can make or break careers, he can make or break lives, and he knows it. He also has a very willing assistant in the form of press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis). Falco needs to get his clients mentioned by Hunsecker, which means he is willing to do numerous manipulative errands for him, and to hell with the consequences. But things get murkier and murkier as Hunsecker becomes obsessed with breaking up his sister (Susan Harrison) and the jazz guitarist she has fallen in love with (Martin Milner).

Based on a story written by Ernest Lehman, that drew from his own experiences as an assistant to an influential press agent and columnist, Sweet Smell Of Success is the kind of scabrous delight that has you appalled, has you grinning as you lap up the script and performances, and then has you wanting to jump in the shower after it, scrubbing the grime off your body that has been layered there while you have mingled in the company of Hunsecker and co. The script, co-written by Lehman and Clifford Odets, is a treat throughout, coating even the most spiteful exchanges in some honey that makes them go down all the easier. Or, to quote from the film itself, it's "a cookie full of arsenic".

Director Alexander Mackendrick was best known for his much lighter vehicles for the Ealing Studio, but does a great job here. I'm sure that Lancaster, who also had a producing role and a vested interest in the project, did what he could to shape and guide things, but Mackendrick was no malleable amateur, and he expertly weaves things together into a beautiful spiderweb made up of tiny nooses, all ready to tighten around the necks of different characters at any given point in the plot.

In case it wasn't obvious from the opening paragraph, Lancaster is superb in the role of Hunsecker. He may not have the greatest share of the screentime, but it is his presence and force of will that cast the longest shadow. Curtis gives a performance to rival it, although his manner is very different. Where Hunsecker is manipulative and smart, Falco is manipulative and also too desperate to play things as cool as they should be played, and Curtis portrays his character as someone constantly hopping from one foot to the other, desperately buying time with everyone around him (contacts, Hunsecker, people he is setting out to blackmail). Harrison does well in her role, and the brother-sister relationship at the heart of the story is one with disturbing undertones (considering how crazed Hunsecker becomes as he aims to constantly "protect" his sister), and Milner is perfectly cast as a good person undeserving of the attempted attacks upon his character.

As iconic as anything else that Curtis or Lancaster did, Sweet Smell Of Success is a pitch-black classic through and through. If you have yet to see it, do so immediately. If you see it and somehow don't like it, well . . . "That's fish four days old. I won't buy it!"

10/10

You can buy the movie here.