TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Sam Levene, Barbara Nichols, Jeff Donnell and Emile Meyer, written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehmann

By David in TN
Friday, November 1, 2019 at 6:06:00 P.M. EDT

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner, Sam Levene, Barbara Nichols, Jeff Donnell, Emile Meyer, written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehmann, directed by Alexander Mackendrick.

The phrase “the sweet smell of success” came from this movie. Several years ago, your old friend John Podhoretz wrote a lengthy article on this film in The Weekly Standard. He had rhapsodic praise for Tony Curtis’ performance.

“Every Hollywood lightweight who proves himself a box-office draw gets a chance or two or three to stretch in a part no one would think him capable of. These experiments are all too often risible…

“Curtis’s turn in Sweet Smell of Success is the Platonic ideal of this gimmick—the greatest turnaround moment for an actor in movie history. His performance as Sidney Falco is not only amazing because Curtis is the one delivering it; it’s a performance any actor at any time would have been proud to claim. Curtis not only had to embody a tricky, dishonest, motor-mouthed louse, but a small-souled and cowardly weasel besides. There is nothing remotely grand or elevated about Falco’s villainy; he is the cinema’s foremost EveryHeel.”

Film Noir Guide: “Curtis, an unethical press agent, will do ANYTHING to curry favor with an important New York columnist (Lancaster), who’s even more repulsive than Curtis. When Lancaster’s sister (Harrison) starts seeing jazz guitarist Milner (star of TV’s Route 66 and Adam 12), the perversely jealous Lancaster convinces Curtis to break up the relationship by refusing to give Curtis’ clients any space in his all-important column, ‘The Eyes of Broadway.’ With his bread and butter at stake, Curtis invents a slanderous story about Milner and entices a libidinous columnist to run it by fixing him up with his girlfriend, the unwilling Nichols.

“When the obstinate young musician refuses to buckle under Lancaster’s sadistic attempts to ruin his career and his relationship with Harrison, the unholy alliance comes up with yet another plan, only this time they go too far.

“Levene plays Milner’s loyal manager, Donnell is Curtis’ secretary, and Meyer is a vicious cop who owes Lancaster a big favor. Lancaster is terrific as the arrogant columnist who makes and breaks careers on a whim, and Curtis is equally good as the press agent ‘immersed in the theology of making a fast buck.’ This is a sordid but highly entertaining film. James Wong Howe’s outstanding cinematography and the hot jazz score by the Chico Hamilton Quarter are the icing on this delicious noir cake.”

David in TN: Lancaster plays a negative character here, which is ironic because he created one of film’s phoniest tropes—“Look what nice people prison inmates are”—in Brute Force (1947) and the “true story” The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962). The latter, Robert Stroud, was described by fellow inmates (and prison administrators) who knew him as a “psychopath.” To say the least, unlike Lancaster’s characterization.

Lancaster got his start playing a Nice Guy-Sap enticed into crime by a femme fatale in The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949).

N.S.: This was Lancaster’s first “fascist” performance, in a story that was a thinly veiled attack on anti-Communist gossip columnist Walter Winchell. If the picture hadn’t flopped at the box office, Winchell would surely have sued.

Lancaster repeated the performance playing other “Goldsteins” in Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), as a mutinous submarine officer under skipper Clark Gable, and in Seven Days in May (1964), as a mutinous four-star Air Force general, the top officer in the branch (read: Gen. Curtis LeMay), under liberal president Fredric March (read: Adlai Stevenson II). Lefties habitually project their own seditious inclinations onto patriots.