030 - Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, United States. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick.

Monday, January 30, 2017

030 - Sweet Smell of Success, 1957, United States. Dir. Alexander Mackendrick.

Ah, the sweet smell of success.

Fecal.  Squalid.  Begrimed.

Those gangsters sure do know how to break people.

Not because you have crossed them.  Not because you are competing with them.

But just because you, my sister, are dating someone I do not want you to date.

Or because you, my minion, were supposed to break up my sister's relationship and you did not do it.

How dare you.

I will now destroy you.

Wait.

What did you say?

Gangsters?

These are not gangsters.  No, they are not gangsters.  He is not a gangster.

He is a writer.  A newspaper columnist.

A newspaper columnist?

A newspaper columnist.

The character of J. J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, loves his sister, a little too much maybe.  So he does not want her to be dating jazz musician Steve Dallas.

Sidney Falco is a press agent.  He needs Hunsecker to print items that support Falco's clients and help their careers.  So Hunsecker uses this need as leverage to maintain power over Falco.

He demands that Falco break up his sister Susan Hunsecker's relationship to Dallas.

But so far Falco has been unable to do it.  In fact, Dallas has now proposed to Susan, and they intend to inform J. J. tomorrow morning at breakfast.

So tonight Falco will run around New York City, from club to club, trying to work things out to save his career.

And he will go without an overcoat to keep from having to tip coat-check girls.

My how times have changed.

He will insinuate himself upon Hunsecker to try to get him to understand Falco's situation.

He will go to another newspaper columnist and try to bribe him with his wife to try to get him to print the items that Hunsecker will not print.  That man will call his bluff and tell his own wife the dirt in order to remove the leverage.

He will go to yet a third newspaper columnist to see what that will do.

Falco is desperate.

As the evening progresses, Falco will play everyone to set Dallas up in front of Hunsecker so that Susan herself will leave him.  He does a great job of it.

But then Susan will set Falco up so that Hunsecker will think ill of him and crush him.

Everyone depends on each other.  Everyone is trying to destroy one another.

The stakes seem so low to us--who is dating whom--but to them the stakes are life and death.  It is the politics of high school gossip in the hands of New York social climbers--who aspire to be power brokers.

This is starting to sound like an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story about life in the Jazz Age.

But it is a Clifford Odets screenplay about life in the 1950s.

Some things just seem to come back around.

This film is shot by the great cinematographer James Wong Howe.  The lights are light and the darks are dark, and the edges are as sharp as a paper cut.

Howe worked from the 1910s to the 1970s, beating out even Alfred Hitchcock for longevity.  He was born in 1899 in Canton (Guangzhou), China, and he grew up in Pasco, Washington.  At around 12 he bought a Kodak Brownie camera, and by the time he was 18 he was working for Cecil B. DeMille.  He solved the problem of getting blue eyes to register on film, so he became the photographer that all blue-eyed stars would flock to.  He would go on to shoot more than 130 movies and win two Oscars.  He was the embodiment of the Great American Dream.

Meanwhile, the film was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, whom you know for practically nothing else, except perhaps for The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit.  In all he directed maybe eight pictures.  He is now considered a great director with a sure hand, but Sweet Smell of Success was such a financial disaster that his career faded and he moved into teaching.

What makes this picture sing is the acting and chemistry of Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster.  Tony plays the high-strung, fast-talking, nervous-energy, pretty boy for which we already know him, but Burt Lancaster plays against type, restraining all the virile strength of his large athletic body into a bespectacled, buttoned-up time-bomb, slowly ticking and destined to blow.

Odets has given them delicious lines to say, long lines filled with the wit and cunning of a top playwright, which they speak quickly and effortlessly as if seated at the Algonquin.

The film moves at a fast pace and is driven by the look of the city lights and the sound of a hot jazz score.

When you see the name Hunsecker, you may think of the Coen Brothers' 1994 comedy The Hudsucker Proxy.  You can look up what influence this film may have had on their film.

This film was produced by Burt Lancaster with Harold Hecht (not Ben) and James Hill, with the unfortunate name Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions.  The goal seems to have been to do for newspaper columnist Walter Winchell what Orson Welles did for newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and others.

In an age without newspapers, it all now seems so historical to us.

My how times have changed.