Something I noticed with Sweet Smell of Success, a noir-ish sort of film involving the sort of clever dialogue that I am outright surprised Billy Wilder didn’t make it, is the professions involved. Sometimes with these older films, I see professions represented that, for one reason or another, just aren’t seen in films these days. I’m thinking of the theater folks from All About Eve (coming up in this countdown fairly soon) or the longshoremen of On the Waterfront. There’s an actual feeling to these classics that the audience can actually see what the world of these people are actually like. A lot of films I see these days, whatever job the characters work in often feels like a generic workplace where whatever they are doing in the office (and it’s almost always an office) doesn’t matter so much as they’re there doing…something. Workplaces are, well, just a place for characters to gather sometimes.
Then again, in Office Space, that’s actually the point.
The point is, Sweet Smell of Success takes a look at gossip columnists and press agents in a world where it seems like those professions actually matter.
Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is a publicity agent with a problem: powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) has essentially frozen him out. Hunsecker’s column is powerful enough that it can make or break a man like Falco. If Falco can get his clients covered by Hunsecker, they keep paying him as getting talked up by Hunsecker is good for anyone’s career. In fact, when Falco first sits down to talk to Hunsecker, following Hunsecker’s general avoidance of the man, he finds Hunsecker eating dinner with a United States Senator who could, theoretically, become President.
Granted, Hunsecker has a phenomenally low opinion of the Senator and his general intellect, but the point stands: Hunsecker is a very powerful man.
That said, there are limits to what Hunsecker can do. His sister Susie (Susan Harrison) is dating a jazz musician, one Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). She’s the only family Hunsecker has, and he doesn’t want to lose her. However, if he acted on his own, Susie would know. Best to bring in an outside agent to find some way to ruin Dallas and send Susie back to her brother. That’s where Falco comes in.
What follows is a lot of lowdown people working against each other in what looks like a highbrow background. With a jazzy soundtrack and a lot of clever dialogue–I am partial to Hunsecker telling Falco he is a “cookie full of arsenic”–the film has a sleazy feel to it that is both enticing and repulsive. It’s hard to say which of the two men is arguably a worse human being. Lancaster’s Hunsecker is a cold fish of a man, speaking in a monotone and in a high-handed way that suggests he’s better than everyone he deals with but without a shred of emotion or concern for others when, again, the man is a gossip columnist. Nothing he does is arguably worth that attitude.
Meanwhile, Curtis’s Falco is all sweaty desperation. He’s a sleazeball who doesn’t really hide that he’s a sleazeball, and he’s not above selling out a female friend for sexual favors to another columnist to spread the story that Hunsecker can’t to ruin Dallas and send Susie home to J.J.
OK, Falco would have been #MeToo’d for that, and he’d deserve it. He’s the worse human being. You know something is wrong when even a film made in 1957 knows it’s sexist and wrong.
Falco’s plan is a simple one: plant a story about Dallas being both a communist and a pothead in the gossip column by one of J.J.’s lesser rivals, and when necessary, plant some marijuana cigarettes on the jazz man. Cost the man (and his band) a job and ruin his future, and that’s bound to send Susie home to J.J. Yes, there are some complications like when Susie begs J.J. to get Dallas out of trouble, but by and large, the plan seems to work.
Except for one small detail: Susie isn’t an idiot.
There’s something satisfying about watching a young woman turn the tables on the two men who have been conspiring against her, presumably for their own good. The plot involves faking a suicide attempt in her nightgown, getting J.J. to catch Falco in a compromising position after “saving” Susie, and then watching her normally stoic brother beat up Falco. All this comes after Falco has basically confessed everything, getting Dallas out of prison and Falco beaten by a corrupt cop. As for Hunsecker, well, Susie just says she’ll never see him again before heading off to be with Dallas.
Yeah, that’s a satisfying ending. Both men had it coming, and while Hunsecker is probably above the law from the looks of things, he did lose the one thing he wanted, namely to keep his sister nearby. For a control freak like Hunsecker, it’s doubtful that there are worse punishments like having the one person he cares most about to be outside his circle of influence. For Falco, well, he had it coming for most of the film.
These are the sorts of films I am generally glad to see. It’s clever in plot and script, well-acted, and with a fantastically appropriate soundtrack. And somehow, I had to watch it off Tubi because none of the ad-free streaming services I actually pay for had it. That sort of thing makes no sense to me, but what do I know? Most films this old don’t really appear on streaming services outside the specialty ones, but then again, keeping it on a free service makes it more likely to be discovered by others later. All I know is, considering the sorts of films I usually watch on Tubi, this was just an odd one to find there.
NEXT: Men controlling things and coming to a bad end seems to be the theme this week. Be back soon for the 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
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