Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) It can be a tough sell to make a movie about a pair of irredeemable villains, but Sweet Smell of Success takes up the challenge with vigour and delivers a compelling movie despite being unable to cheer for any of the two main characters. Tony Curtis has a welcome and somewhat atypical role (at the time; many more followed) as a morally bankrupt publicist who schemes to get in the good graces of an influential and just-as-terrible columnist played by Burt Lancaster. The casting here is a triumph—Curtis’s good looks being commented upon as a façade, and Lancaster being the incarnation of an “intellectual bully” towering over his co-star and glaring down on him through distinctive glasses. Both characters are profoundly immoral in their behaviour, and what saves the film from overwhelming darkness is the presence of a heroine to save (Susan Harrison, looking as cute as her character needs to be in order to earn our affections) and some terrific dialogue that still packs a punch even today. (This is where “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river” comes from!) The dialogue’s strength and the cohesion of the story are borderline miraculous in that Sweet Smell of Success was essentially being written as it was shot—but this is what happens when you have professionals working from a strong plan and keeping the polish to the end. While the film is light on murders, the noir atmosphere of the story is impossible to miss, what with corruption reigning and people making themselves worse in order to please the Great Corruptor. There’s a sombre atmosphere that makes the ending almost a relief. While the film does lose itself in a few tangents along the way, there’s a steady trickle of strong sequences even in the subplots (the attempt to blackmail another newspaper columnist being a highlight), and a sense of style in director Alexander Mackendrick’s approach that gives a modern urban grittiness to the result. It’s often subtle, but it’s there: The way “Now here you are, Harvey, out in the open where any hep person knows that this one… is toting THAT one… around for you” is handled is good stuff. You can quote that film for days, but what carries even longer is Curtis and Lancaster going at each other, with the audience rooting for no one in particular. Sweet Smell of Success often gets a mention as one of the top movies of the 1950s, and it’s not hard to see why.