This Dirty Town: ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ (1957)
Times Square never does look so colorful as when it’s in black-and-white. You can thank Sweet Smell of Success for that. No cultural artifact has done more to codify Broadway as a tabloid-newspaper asphalt jungle, natural habitat to hustlers of all manner on the make. Sweet Smell isolates a good section of this territory to focus on two particular mid-20th-century species: the gossip columnist and the publicity agent. The latter will engage in all sorts of scheming to land in the good graces of the former, in the hope that he may get his clients’ names in print.
The first thing to understand about Sweet Smell of Success is that it’s an inside job. Ernest Lehman had himself worked as a press agent before writing the short fiction that would serve as the spine for Sweet Smell, and so he knew personally the desperate avidity that haunted those who, like Tony Curtis’s Sindey Falco, subjected themselves to this most undignified profession.
Lehman had also known Walter Winchell. This is significant when you consider that the movie’s newspaper columnist, J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), is without a doubt based on Winchell, by far the most powerful columnist of his day and a man not at all averse to ruining the careers of those who crossed him. This is Hunsecker’s modus operandi too. More pointedly, Lehman gave his gossip columnist a quasi-incestuous attachment to his younger sister — clearly an allusion to Winchell’s protectiveness of his daughter, Walda, who was hot to trot for this fella named Bill Cahn. Winchell did everything he could to deter the relationship, even threatening Walda at gunpoint and eventually pulling strings with J. Edgar Hoover to have Cahn convicted of tax evasion.
In Sweet Smell, Hunsecker is no happier about his sister’s engagement to one Steve Dallas (Martin Milner). But where Cahn was a genuine criminal and a certified headcase, Dallas seems nothing more than an innocent dweeb — the squarest jazz musician ever allowed on screen.
Nevertheless, everyone knew where Lehman had gone for his raw material. Winchell was far from amused, but by then his power had already waned. The closest he got to revenge was when the movie tanked at the box office and he was able to have a bitter laugh about it in his column. “Hecht, Hill & Lancaster, the sponsors,” he gloated, “will lose a half million dollars on [the movie]…They’ve had many shocks over their initial defeat at the box- office. One of the most agonizing is that co-partner Burt Lancaster plus star Tony Curtis are not strong enough to ‘bring them in.’”
“I love this dirty town.” — J.J. Hunsecker
As a cynical 1950s movie about the perverted motives of big-city journalists, Sweet Smell of Success is full brother to Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), which had appeared earlier that decade to equal distaste. Audiences didn’t want to reside in such a cynical domain, no matter how exquisitely appointed, and so Sweet Smell’s black-velvet voluptuousness went largely wasted on a public that didn’t yet deserve it.
There’s an acute clarity to every sensual aspect of the film, its aural and visual worlds fully realized. This begins with the marvelous cinematography of James Wong Howe, who’d earned the nickname Low-Key Howe for the unusual quality of light and shadow he brought to his photography — a quality conducive to the moods and intentions of film noir, of which Sweet Smell is an archetypal if late exemplar.
By the time of the film, Howe was already well-established, his many technical innovations having made him a legend in the business. (Two years earlier he’d won an Oscar for his work on The Rose Tattoo (1955).) When in 2018 Google gave him the honor of his very own Google Doodle, the image they came up with seemed deliberately redolent of Sweet Smell of Success, wherein Howe had done more than any other cinematographer to show how simultaneously bright and benighted the big city can be.
One of Howe’s great ideas in Sweet Smell was to smear Lancaster’s glasses with vaseline, forcing him when he looked through them to give that stare of soulless vacancy. Howe also typically shot at low angles, and so, when foregrounded, Hunsecker is able to loom larger than Falco even when seated before him, while his eyeglasses, lit from above, cast an ominous shadow across his face.
It’s Elmer Bernstein and his orchestra who give the film its iconic jazz sounds, with its famous theme song — “The Streets” — the very quintessence of the subgenre known as crime jazz, all urban menace and skyline grandiosity. It’s the sound that shakes our soul when Hunsecker stands out on the penthouse balcony and from his privileged perch surveys the dirty town he loves so much.
Ernest Lehman created the characters of J.J. Hunsecker and Sidney Falco when he was writing short fiction for the slicks. They appeared in a novella and two short stories, for Cosmopolitan and Collier’s, in 1950. The novella was published under the name “Tell Me About It Tomorrow,” but “Sweet Smell of Success” is what he’d wanted to call it all along. “When I got my new office,” the striving Sidney Falco tells himself in the original story, “it would have thick carpeting and rich, bleached oak furniture, and the air would be scented with the sweet smell of success.”
When Lancaster picked up the movie for his production company HL (later HHL, for Hecht, Hill and Lancaster), he invited Lehman to come out to Hollywood to work on the screenplay, with the promise that he would also be able to direct. Working for Lancaster proved so stressful, however, that Lehman came down with a spastic colon and was ordered by his doctor to not only leave the picture but to leave the country. That’s what he did, and playwright Clifford Odets was brought onboard to do the script. (Odets had also known Winchell personally.) To direct this most American of films, they hired Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick, who had, he writes, always “hankered” to make a film noir, “and felt this was a chance to get out of a reputation I had for small, cute British comedies.”
The film is famous for the way it talks, the characters cracking wise in a stylized, exaggerated kind of columnese that pop culture has long had fun paying homage to. Most of these lines emerged from Odets’ pen and yet, strangely, are somehow perfectly consistent with the tone of Lehman’s stories. None of these lines is particularly clever, yet most of them are pungent and memorable and fun to say:
The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.
I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.
Maybe I left my sense of humor in my other suit.
You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.
Odets, sensing that Mackendrick was uncomfortable with this mannered way of speaking, told him (as Mackendrick remembers it), “My dialogue may seem somewhat overwritten, too wordy, too contrived. Don’t let it worry you. You’ll find that it works if you don’t bother too much about the lines themselves. Play the situations, not the words. And play them fast.” He made a true believer out of Mackendrick, who eventually came to the following conclusion: “A line that reads quite implausibly on the printed page can be quite convincing and effective when spoken in a throwaway or incidental fashion by the actor.”
These observations come from On Film-Making, a compilation of the lectures Mackendrick late in life gave his film students at CalArts. There’s a whole chapter on Sweet Smell of Success, in which he details the work he and Odets did on Lehman’s basic material: “What Clifford did, in effect, was to dismantle the structure of every single sequence in order to rebuild situations and relationships into scenes that were more complex and had much greater tension and dramatic energy….[W]ithout this work done by Odets, [the film] would have had none of the vitality you see up on the screen.”
There’s a cynical irony in all this, altogether worthy of the world of Sweet Smell of Success: Ernest Lehman was the biggest winner of the whole fiasco. James Hill (the second H of HHL) and Odets both went on to attenuated careers that ended unhappily. Mackendrick, frustrated, soon washed out of Hollywood. Lancaster survived, certainly, but Sweet Smell abruptly halted whatever momentum his company had been enjoying since the success of Marty (winner of both the Best Picture Oscar and the Palm d’Or). Meanwhile, the man who’d been chased away from his own creation just as it was being given new life is the one who cashed in his experience for career gold. Lehman’s next picture would be North by Northwest (1959), followed in the years to come by West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), among so many others.
One other winner was Tony Curtis, and that too is a kind of irony, when you consider how his Sidney Falco makes out by the end of the picture. Like Mackendrick, he’d seen Sweet Smell as a chance to alter his reputation — to become known for more serious roles than those he’d been playing. Sweet Smell of Success allowed him to do that.
His character was simplified considerably from Lehman’s stories, but that’s for the best. Lehman had drawn someone too easy to sympathize with, up from a tough family and still responsible for its care. In the film, he’s allowed to be as ruthless and merciless as Hunsecker himself, no explanations given, no sympathy asked for. Gone are his self-justifying interior monologues, along with any leading man worth rooting for.
The movie’s exteriors were shot in a bitter-chilled Times Square, making it easier for Curtis to take the inspired direction of Odets, who told him, as Curtis remembered, “Don’t be still with Sidney. Don’t ever let Sidney sit down comfortably. I want Sidney constantly moving, like an animal, never quite sure who’s behind him or where he is.”
The great critic David Thomson contends that the role of Susie Hunsecker, J.J.’s sister, is “played badly by Susan Harrison,” but I think a distinction needs to be made between playing a role badly and playing a role skillessly. The truth is, Harrison is perfectly effective as Susie, an uncertain, docile creature, in love with the least-cool person to ever play with Chico Hamilton (Dallas actually gigs with the quartet in the movie), and under the thumb of her domineering brother. “I heard the whispers that I was neurotic, difficult — an oddball…,” she recalled of her time on the movie (one of only two she would ever play in). “I didn’t know what I was doing when I was in front of the camera but it looked good.”
It did look good, and what she wore in most of her scenes is the fur coat given her by J.J., symbol of her status as a kept woman. And when she sheds the coat, finally, is when she sheds her subservience to J.J.
Finally, at the movie’s end, she’s wearing a coat of sturdy wool, much more modest but capable of keeping her warm. Her final act of liberation is what ends the film, and her success the only success worthy of the name.
Sweet Smell of Success was an unspoken attempt to show that film noir had not yet faded to white — that there was plenty of nighttime left for playing and plotting and scheming in that iconic American manner. One of Howe’s many brilliant moves was to elevate the set for the 21 club two feet off the soundstage floor, with pots smoking underneath and giving the instruction to “light the smoke.” Howe also insisted on shooting certain scenes only at peak dusk or peak dawn, each lasting only 15 minutes. “A twelve-to-fourteen-hour day, and you got two scenes,” Curtis remembered. “You can see the pressure that was put on that movie.” For the nightclub scenes, the walls were slicked with oil, to suggest the sliminess of the milieu.
Mackendrick never made another movie like Sweet Smell, before or after, which is why it’s weird that it’s the one movie many people know him for. Although he was not a career noir-ist, he was, like many other noir dilettantes, more than up to the task. To disguise the script’s talky, theatrical nature, he had the bright idea of beginning scenes out on the city streets and then bringing them inside. “A tricky matter this was,” he writes, “since it meant very careful matching between material shot on night location in New York and studio-built sets on the sound stages of Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood.”
Mackendrick was perfectionist enough to make the trick work, though it must be said that not everyone found his perfectionism endearing. “Even if everything went perfectly,” Curtis recalled, “he would still want to reshoot.” These reshoots were costing money, and Lancaster, in his twin roles as actor and producer, was becoming doubly impatient. That scene where the drunk gets thrown out of the club and Lancaster says fondly, famously, “I love this dirty town” — that scene was shot countless times, and yet takes one and two are the ones Mackendrick finally decided to print. “I love this dirty town” is what Lancaster said in front of the camera, but what he said behind it afterward was “Remind me to pay somebody to take the little Limey’s legs off.”
