Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Sweet Smell of Success is an American film first released in 1957, directed by Alexander Mackendrick.  The film stars Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner and Jeff Donnell.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Sidney Falco is a hard-nosed press agent who scrapes a meagre living by garnering publicity for second rate showbiz acts.  To that end, he is dependent on J.J. Hunsecker, the most influential newspaper columnist in New York, if not America, who has acquired a reputation for making and breaking careers in the twinkling of his steely cold eye.  At present, Falco is hardly on the best of terms with Hunsecker, since he has so far failed to break up an undesirable romance between Hunsecker’s younger sister Susan and aspiring jazz musician Steve Dallas.  Desperate to get back into Hunsecker’s good books, Falco conceives a foolproof plan to discredit Dallas and then have Hunsecker come to his rescue.  Unfortunately, the plan backfires spectacularly when Hunsecker follows through with an ill-judged coup de grâce...

With the closure of Ealing Studios in the mid-1950s director Alexander Mackendrick found the lure of Hollywood irresistible and he began his post-Ealing career with what many consider to be one of the finest examples of American film noir.  Sweet Smell of Success is cinema’s most vivid screen portrayal of the murky world of tabloid journalism, a deliciously acerbic depiction of moral corruption in which self-interested power play and deceit strangle the life out of whatever decency remains in its dehumanised urban setting.  This is the flipside of the American Dream – where exploitation, cunning and manipulation are the tools that are ruthlessly used in the pursuit of success, at a price that society can barely afford.

On the face of it, this appears to be a massive departure from Mackendrick’s previous work for Ealing – gentle comedies such as Whisky Galore (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951)  and The Ladykillers (1955).  However, it should be noted that each of these earlier films, for all their whimsy, has a darker side to it, with human vice playing an important part in the story and Mackendrick happily indulging in his somewhat warped idea of black comedy.

Sweet Smell of Success is one of those rare films from the 1950s that remains fresh and has lost little, if any, of its initial impact.  Its stark neon-lit Manhattan location, where people rush about manically like steroid-dosed ants, gives the film a striking modernity and its subject remains just as relevant today as it did when the film was made.  This is fundamentally a film about the misuse of power – specifically the power that the media has to control, shape and ultimately wreck the lives of individuals.  The ease with which lives can be ruined by a few influential kingmakers inhabiting the stinking mire of tabloid journalism is brought home with shocking veracity in what is, by any standards, a stunningly realised film.

Although today it is almost universally acknowledged as one of the great classics of American cinema, Sweet Smell of Success performed badly at the box office when it was first released.  One of the reasons for the film’s unpopularity was the casting of Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis against type in unsympathetic roles.  Certainly, Curtis’s stomach-churningly slimy Sidney Falco was a far cry from the familiar nice guy roles through which the actor had initially found fame; but this was to be an important milestone in the actor’s career, allowing him to gravitate to more substantial and laudable film roles.  Equally surprising was Burt Lancaster’s chilling turn as the utterly venal Hunsecker, whose cold automaton way of dealing with people barely masks a complex inner web of secret perversions and neuroses, not least of which is an incestuous interest in his younger sister.   It is a film that shows both Curtis and Lancaster at their best, since both actors succeed in making their characters believable and strangely sympathetic.

Sweet Smell of Success originated from a short story written by Ernest Lehman, first published in Cosmopolitan magazine.  Lehman later went on to cut a successful career as a Hollywood screenwriter and was originally offered the job of directing the film adaptation of his story by the production team Hecht-Hill-Lancaster.  The latter soon had second thoughts over Lehman’s abilities and assigned Mackendrick to direct the film after an adaptation of a Bernard Shaw play (The Devil’s Disciple) was abandoned.  

When Lehman fell ill before completing the screenplay, he was replaced by Clifford Odets, who effectively redrafted the entire script, and was still working on it whilst the film was in production.  Odets’s sharp whiplash dialogue, which contains more venom than a pit of rattlesnakes and an entire series of the Jerry Springer Show combined, is one of the film’s great strengths.  It is this which defines the two main characters and shows us the extent of their depravity.  Hunsecker and Falco are not feeble caricatures, but real people who have gone horribly wrong, and that is why the film is so effective, and so shocking.  That sweet smell of success is one we all recognise.  It is the stench of putrefaction that pervades a world turned rotten by unscrupulous overlords and shameless bootlickers.

© James Travers 2008

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