Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)

Film: Sweet Smell Of Success

Director: Alexander Mackendrick

Country: UK / USA

Released: June 1957

Runtime: 96 minutes

Genre: Film Noir

Studio: Hecht-Hill-Lancaster

Influenced: Sidney Lumet, Barry Levinson, Scorsese, Coen Brothers, John Woo, Vince Gilligan

Born in Boston to Scottish parents, Sandy Mackendrick had an upbringing in both Scotland and America, and left art school in Glasgow to join an advertising agency. During WWII, he made propaganda films, and then after the war became part of Ealing Studios, starting out as as an assistant and then making his own features, most notably Whisky Galore!, a wonderful comedy shot on location on the Isle of Barra on a low budget. His other successes at Ealing Studios were The Man In The White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), both starring Alec Guinness. But by the mid-50s, Ealing Studios was winding down operations and would live a sad final coda under the stewardship of the BBC. So Mackendrick crossed the pond to start a new phase of his directorial career.

This is where he fell into the orbit of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, one of several new actor-led production companies in the post-WWII period trying to wrestle power away from Hollywood. Mackendrick was originally due to direct The Devil's Disciple, but this project was shelved temporarily, so he was asked instead to take on Sweet Smell of Success. The film was based on a short novel by Ernest Lehman, who was originally slated as director, but who later got ousted in favour of Mackendrick, with Clifford Odets also drafted in to rework the script. If anyone's seen the Coen Brothers film Barton Fink, you'll know the difficulties faced by Broadway playwrights like Odets asked to work in Hollywood.

Sweet Smell of Success is probably the last of the great film noirs. Over half of the movie takes place at night among a cast of venal, ambitious characters, telling the scabrous tale of a press agent Sidney Falco (played by Tony Curtis) and a powerful newspaper columnist JJ Hunsecker (played by Burt Lancaster). The most striking, and obvious, thing to say about the movie is how well Mackendrick films New York, capturing the sense of a modern Babylon. Both the exterior and interior shots, notably in the restaurants and nightclubs, give the claustrophobic sense of a city teeming with people, skyscrapers and danger. 

At the time, very few directors had actually shot films on the busy streets of a city like New York – this later became easier to do as film equipment became more lightweight and portable – so one of the film's main achievements is a technical one, with James Wong Howe the cinematography co-mastermind. While Odets was busy rewriting the script, Mackendrink was out taking photos of New York and selecting the shots that would work best in the film. 

The script is the other key achievement of Sweet Smell of Success, along with the acting, especially by Tony Curtis. His legions of young fans were expecting Curtis to play a typical nice guy but instead got Falco, a slimy and scheming press agent. Mackendrick remembered seeing audiences "curling up, crossing their arms and legs, recoiling from the screen in disgust" at the sight of Curtis. As for Lancaster, there's a stillness to him in the film, as though he's a deadly coiled spring ready to unleash his vast power as a columnist to destroy or make careers. Nobody may actually talk like the characters in the film, but the dialogue is still convincing – it's hyperreal, witty and pungent, with a flavour of the gutter. "I'd like to take a bite out of you, you're a cookie full of arsenic", says Lancaster to Curtis. 

There's a political angle to the film too. Hunsecker uses the tactic of framing his sister's suitor out of a sense of personal vendetta, in an echo of the smearing of various artists during the McCarthyite period. The film's only (small) flaw is the casting of the two young actors who lack star power, Susan Harrison and Martin Milner, with the Dallas character looking nothing like a New York jazz musician. Sweet Smell of Success was one of the most pessimistic films ever to be made in America up to that point, and inevitably was a box office failure, but its cult status has grown ever since.