Sweet Smell Of Success: Mackendrick Goes To Hollywood!

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Rating: 8 out of 10.

In 1955’s The Ladykillers, we’d seen Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick reach his best yet. But suddenly, Ealing Studios was closing. So what does a promising director do? He goes to Hollywood, boys and girls. He goes to Hollywood.

Sweet Smell of Success is the story of sleazy, fast talking, “cookie full of arsenic” press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who’s been shut out from powerful, possessive and egotistical J.J. Hunsecker’s (Burt Lancaster) newspaper column. But when he discovers that J.J.’s sister, Susan (Susan Harrison), has been proposed to by Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), a jazz guitarist, Sidney spots his opportunity to get back in the game.

Wow, how this dog bites. There aren’t many as dark, acerbic and poisonous as this. Don’t be mistaken by the title: the smell of success may be sweet, but the arduous burdens to get there can be as soul consuming and repugnant as murder. It’s worth remembering that dead bodies give off a distinctive, sickly-sweet odour – smell can be a very misleading thing.

The script is a triumph, and likely one of the best ever written. It matches the likes of Chinatown, not necessarily in plot, but with succulently unsavoury and bitter dialogue and captivatingly complex characters. It flows like garbage juices through an intricate synthesis of precarious mountain trails, all leading to the selling of souls and wrecking of lives. It’s beautiful to see this sort of dialogue when it’s so sparse in the modern day, special-effect illiterate age. Ernest Lehman deserves the praise for the hard-bitten script, simultaneously relishing and abhorring the murky underworld of immortality.

The cat’s in a bag and the bag’s in a river.

Sidney Falco

But let’s be honest: Sweet Smell of Success is about two men. Sidney Falco, the fawning, slobbering sycophant, who will duck to any lows to serve his empty ambition, and J.J. Hunsecker, the monstrous, ice-cold power-monger, who, with his unflinching posture and domineering wedge shape, is the closest man has ever come to creating a real life Frankenstein.

And it’s the destructive and oppressive maelstrom that these two characters create playing off each other which provides Sweet Smell with that blood lusting cynicism. In reality, the rest of the characters just feel like insensible pawns in a battle between these stark opponents – which is perhaps one of my main criticisms of this film: that the rest of the characters, particularly the lover relationship caught up in this very maelstrom, feel sufficiently weaker and underdeveloped.

But it’s worth coming back to this disturbed dynamic between the two bewitching characters. Despite being guiltless mercenaries out for themselves, I think they both, deep down, need each other. The charming street urchin, Sidney has a ravenous appetite for winning, and while licking J.J.’s shoes clean is humiliating, part of him seems to savour the dirty work – and, of course, he knows that just one well-executed, sly plan means he could have his own column. J.J., meanwhile, sees Sidney as not only a reminder of his superiority, but also a test of it. To him, Sidney is the garbage juices flowing down the mountain trail, and he relishes the challenge to evade the stench without ruining his suit. If Sidney’s the snake, J.J. is the snake charmer. Beneath its scabby surface, Sweet Smell of Success is a tragic, if unorthodox, love story. These are the savage conquistadors of 1950’s America who scoff together in the darkest corner of the room about “integrity” – the only two men who understand each other.

The gay subtext is undeniable. After all, both Curtis (six marriages, six children) and Lancaster (three marriages, five children) were frequently rumoured to be homosexual – Lancaster, more specifically, bisexual. Their toxic affinity is the very backbone of the film, and as we drift away from that after the first half an hour into a more complex plot, there’s no doubt the film feels like it loses that special something. When Sidney enters the 21 Club and takes an unsolicited seat next to J.J., we just want to spend the whole night listening to the grating bickering of an old married couple, exchanging insults and smears as the midnight oil burns.

The acting needs no introduction. Tony Curtis gives a career defining performance, and it’s refreshing to see – after all, he had just been playing pretty boys in the lead up to a role he fought tooth and nail to get against Universal Studios’ recommendation. Here, he shows his full quality as an unscrupulous antihero. Burt Lancaster was also in a vicious cycle of typecasting. Often the tough guy with a tender heart, he gives an incredible power performance only replicated 20 years later in A New Hope, by Darth Vader.

The portrayals of New York throughout cinema history have been nothing short of stellar. So it’s no surprise that Sweet Smell reeks of the city. People underestimate how important setting is to a film, but not this flick – it understands how inviting a tarnished and deeply rotten world can be. Swirling in Manhattan night life, buzzing night clubs are where the suckers are killed, and the rain swept streets are where they’re buried.

I love this dirty city.

J.J. Hunsecker

To think The Ladykillers came just two years before for Mackendrick is shocking. For a promising young director who had only done Ealing comedies, this must have been startling. It’s such a different type of film – misanthropic, analytical, almost gothic. He never made a film like it after. See what happens when you spend more than one week in New York?

But despite this all, Sweet Smell of Success crumbled in the box office. Losing money, people were disgusted and appalled by something so uncharacteristic of everyone involved. Curtis fans didn’t like it. Lancaster fans didn’t like it. It didn’t appear that many did. This didn’t help Mackendrick at all. While many may hail this as his best film, it certainly truncated his career at the time, and his eventual sacking from The Devil’s Disciple by the same producers here due to his overly painstaking methods did nothing to help either. Luckily, critics have been done much to help the film’s reputation since, and it’s mostly pinned as a classic. It speaks volumes that this is Vince Gilligan’s favourite film.

But dogs get old. And this one is now 64 years senior. There’s no doubt about, Sweet Smell of Success lacks the same punch that it used to hold in its golden yesteryear. Morally ambiguous characters, far more horrifying than anything that feature here, are commonplace nowadays. Unforgivable acts often seen in this film aren’t disgraced today, but glorified. It just doesn’t feel like it holds the same tension. Was I recoiling from the screen? No. And without that keyest of components, Sweet Smell of Success feels like it’s lacking the spice in the curry. If the cat’s in a bag, and the bag’s in a river, would it have been that disturbing to go all the way and let the cat out?

Perhaps you’re wondering: is this an Old Yeller situation, then? Should Sweet Smell of Success finally be put to sleep? No. There’s still a lot to like about this film, but it feels like it’s never really found it’s rightful place in history. If I was being merciful, I’d say it’s incredible that a film, which came before The Beatles, the closing of Alcatraz, the Civil Rights Act and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, still has that insatiable quality to entertain; but, if I was being cruel, I’d say this is a film you can only respect, rather than get to know any deeper in our modern age.

Sweet Smell of Success – 8 out of 10