There’s a jazz quintet featured in the credits before “Sweet Smell of Success” that makes a few appearances throughout this journalistic and cerebral noir. It’s fitting because the film’s dialogue is executed in such a devilishly playful dance as though it were trading off jazz riffs and improvisation, offering hints of beauty and sultry sex appeal the way any good jazz number should.
“Sweet Smell of Success” is a contender for best film dialogue ever written. Everything that’s said is punched out with such speed, vigor, bite and wit. No one ever says precisely what they mean and they all speak in clever and cynical analogies, metaphors and snarky back talk. The whole thing is so modern, so harsh and so intellectually biting.
And sometimes, the characters aren’t even talking directly to one another. The story was written by Clifford Odets, but the screenplay’s real tone and edge came from the legendary Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest,” “The Sound of Music,” “West Side Story”). The conversation style he invents in this film has arguably become the basis for modern screenwriting. And this film has been cited by all the great dialogue writers working today, including The Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee.
Allow me to describe it: There’s a pivotal scene between five different people, only one of whom we already met and just one more who will continue to be a key player later on. The speakers ask a question or give an answer to someone with a hidden inflection left for the other members of the party to pick up on, and a quiet tension slowly builds as each plays a skillful cat and mouse to work the other into a corner without lashing out or overreacting.
But I realize now that this film is perhaps not as well known as some of the others I write about. One reason is because the film was a massive flop when it was released in 1957. It starred Tony Curtis as a sleazy, tricky press agent digging up gossip for J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), the most powerful and influential gossip columnist in New York.
Curtis, who was one of the top male stars at the time, had a legion of teenage girl fans that hated seeing him in such an unlikeable role.
What’s more, the film was politically charged as a nearly direct attack on Walter Winchell, who was in reality the most powerful gossip columnist in all of New York, led the way for many of the gossip columns today and was later a leading Republican in Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. This didn’t quite go over well.
But today the film is an underrated and unheard of masterpiece. The performances by Curtis and Lancaster both are absolutely brilliant. These are complex, egotistical and intellectual characters each doing whatever they can to maintain power in an elaborate web of lies and gossip politics. The ability of Curtis and Lancaster to maintain villainous poise and whiplash chemistry with an equally strong supporting cast is remarkable.
And in ways, the film resembles “Citizen Kane,” which recently hit its 70th anniversary. Here is a journalist, media mogul rising and falling from power with a blind ego, all of it based on a real life public figure. And yet Charles Foster Kane never dealt with themes like prostitution and rape the way Sidney Falco (Curtis) does here.
It’s a powerful, remarkable film that is so fun in the way the script seduces you that you look past a convoluted plot and enjoy the ride.