Wars of Ink and Drinks

Somewhere in a squirming tide of nighttime neurotics, two despised men wage an interminable contest for control of the elusively defined everything. 1957's Sweet Smell of Success is a gorgeously shot noir of New York. Director Alexander Mackendrick and cinematographer James Wong Howe create a world of busy streets and claustrophobic nightclubs crammed with anxious souls. Stewing in this pot we find Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis as a gossip columnist and a press agent, respectively. The screenplay for this film is highly regarded but I found it to be by far the weakest element. Nonetheless, there's plenty to admire here.

Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, a man who can make or break anyone in the entertainment industry with his newspaper column. But in this story, he's primarily interested in making sure his sister (Susan Harrison) stops dating a jazz musician called Steve Dallas (Martin Milner).

Readers of columns like Hunsecker's don't hear anything about this. They do hear about Steve, they also hear about the people Sidney Falco (Curtis) represents, never guessing what truly motivates the claims presented in print. Or so we're meant to assume. My main problem with this film is that Hunsecker and Falco are presented as these relentless spin doctors who maliciously manufacture impressions but we never actually see them convince anyone of anything. No-one trusts them, ever, except Falco manages to trick an aged comedian in one scene, though he doesn't seem to notice his success.

The frustrating thing is how improbable Falco and Hunsecker's failures are. When Falco tries to blackmail a man who cheated on his wife with a cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols), the man decides to take that moment to come clean with his wife. When Hunsecker swoops in to rescue Dallas from another columnist's smear, both Dallas and Hunsecker's sister seem to see through the whole thing immediately. All this makes the film seem less like a realistic examination of the crooked souls crafting fraudulent narratives and more like the depiction of two men trapped in some kind of ironic, Twilight Zone-ish hell. Presented for your approval, two professional liars caught in a nightmare where no-one believes them.

So it's not so much a depiction of two scary men. It just feels like two people busy at hating themselves and all the characters around them are really their own demons, dragging them down. If you look at it that way, it's a pretty handsome damnation.

Sweet Smell of Success is available on The Criterion Channel.