Film review: The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

"I'd hate to take a bite out of you - you're a cookie full of arsenic." So says J.J. Hunsecker (a very chilly and buttoned-up Burt Lancaster) to Sidney Falco (a revelatory Tony Curtis), and this film itself fits that description nicely.  For some reason I've always got Ace in the Hole mixed up with this film, so having watched the former, I thought we should watch this. To my annoyance, despite being a Criterion Collection film, it's not on the Criterion Channel, so we had to rent it (thanks Amazon Prime!)  It's very different in look from Ace - that one's in sun-drenched small-town New Mexico, whereas this one is in nighttime New York - but the same black heart beats in both. Both seem quintessentially American but are directed by immigrants, this one by the Scot Alexander McKendrick (who directed The Ladykillers).  Like Ace (and the reason I got them mixed up) it's about the sleazier side of journalism, in this case because J.J. Hunsecker is a hugely influential gossip columnist, while Falco is a press agent who lives to get an item in Hunsecker's column.  At the time the film opens, however, Falco has been frozen out by Hunsecker all week because (Falco suspects) he has failed in a task Hunsecker set him.  This task was to separate Hunsecker's little sister Susan (she's 19, so it looks like there's a good 20 year difference between them) from her Jazz guitarist paramour.  Indeed, it turns out that they are still together and Susan wants to marry him.  Essentially the rest of the movie is Falco hatching a scheme to separate them for good.  Curtis is on-screen for essentially every minute of the film and makes you realize that underneath those pretty-boy looks (commented on by various characters in the film, although probably they do not survive the beating from a fat crooked crop he gets at the end when he realizes that, though he may be sleazy, he's not going to stoop to Hunsecker's twisted level and Hunsecker turns on him) he's a born character actor. Jami and I argued about whether or not this is a Film Noir.  She argues that it isn't because there are good people (Susan and her boyfriend, primarily) and the bad end unhappily.  But it certainly has the hardboiled dialogue and the cynicism of a good noir.  And Hunsecker is a truly loathsome creation, with a very creepy sister-obsession.  Apparently McKendrick smeared Vaseline on the lenses of Lancaster's glasses so you can never quite see his eyes.
As with Ace, I don't really see a wider message in this film, as the days of the power of the gossip columnist have waned, unless you want to stretch it and make it an analogy for fake news, so it just works as a good little character study.  It would work well paired up with Ace and perhaps His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night to show journalists in a better light.  Oh yes, and the music, by Elmer Bernstein, is fantastic.  Check it out!