Sweet Smell of Success 9781838713324, 9781844572885

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Naremore Prelims

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Acknowledgments Rebecca Barden, Sophia Contento and the manuscript readers and editorial staff of the British Film Institute gave me valuable help in the production of this volume; Rebecca Cape of the Lilly Library in Bloomington and Barbara Hall of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles assisted my research; and Brenda Weber and her graduate students at Indiana University read parts of the manuscript in progress and provided me with useful comments and reactions, while also feeding me an excellent dinner. As usual, Darlene J. Sadlier was a supportive companion and an important source of suggestions for improving what I had written.

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‘Sweet Smell of Success’ Sweet Smell of Success has many virtues, beginning with its title, which displays a satiric wit and awareness of connotation rare in Hollywood. The adjective ‘sweet’, modifying the vulgar ‘smell’, plus the sibilant alliteration, makes one associate the American ideal of success with the cloying, nauseating odour emanating from a pile of shit. (Many later appropriations seem unaware of this association: for example, a recent online guide to running ‘a successful perfume oil and aromatherapy business’ is called ‘Sweet Smell of Success’.) The slyly alliterative phrase was originally intended as the title of a novella by Ernest Lehman, published in Cosmopolitan magazine in April 1950 alongside stories by John Hersey, Max Shulman and Ernest Hemingway; but because Cosmopolitan’s editor didn’t want ‘smell’ to appear in such bold fashion, Lehman agreed to change it to ‘Tell Me about It Tomorrow!’. (The protagonist of the novella evades unpleasant truths by repeatedly shouting these words.) The earlier title was restored for a 1957 collection of Lehman’s stories and for the motion-picture adaptation of the novella that same year, which transformed a clever but relatively minor fiction into the highest artistic achievement and, to some degree, the economic downfall of Hecht–Hill–Lancaster, an innovative production company that emerged in Hollywood during the last years of the Fordist studio system. Sweet Smell portended the collapse of Breen Office censorship and was the first Hollywood movie to depict McCarthy-style exploitation of the press. It also gave audiences an unusually dark view of the culture of celebrity, presaging developments of an even darker kind in our own day. Often mentioned alongside Touch of Evil and Vertigo (both 1958) as one of the last great examples of historical film noir, Sweet Smell appears on several lists of the

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cinema’s all-time classics, including those of the BFI, the Library of Congress and Time magazine. Its frightening portrayal of a newspaperman loosely based on Walter Winchell and its unstinting depiction of corruption and sleaze in the world of Broadway theatres and nightclubs invite comparison with such acid literary satires as What Makes Sammy Run?; and, despite its initial box-office failure and mixed critical reception, its reputation has grown steadily. Paul Thomas Anderson, Peter Bogdanovich, the Coen brothers, Cameron Crowe, Stephen Frears, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Martin Scorsese and Steven Soderburgh have all paid tribute to it; John Cusack once tried to remake it, and Ernest Lehman was involved with a badly conceived attempt to adapt it as a Broadway musical. Later critics have often praised the stylised dialogue of Clifford Odets, the seductive location photography of James Wong Howe, the suave direction of Alexander Mackendrick and, above all, the disturbing performance of Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, whom David Thomson has nicely described as ‘a man on all fours some years before America really noticed the posture’ (1994, p. 163). This is a picture that owes its distinction not to an auteur but to a group of talented artists working under high tension in an atmosphere sometimes as malodorous as the world depicted on screen. Most of the tension had to do with the fact that the screenplay underwent significant revision before and after filming began; even so, the plot remained reasonably faithful to Ernest Lehman’s novella, which should be described at the outset.

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1 Roman à Clef ‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow!’ centres on New York press agent Sidney Wallace’s attempts to curry favour with entertainment columnist Harvey Hunsecker, a man who, ‘merely by adding new and scabrous meanings to the word rumor’, has become one of the most influential personalities in America. (The novella was derived from an unfinished 1946 novel entitled You Scratch My Back …, from which Lehman had previously gleaned two short stories, ‘Hunsecker Against the World’ and ‘It’s the Little Things that Count’.) Sidney, who narrates, is more successful than his counterpart in the film and more troubled by guilt. He has a mother in Forest Hills and a younger brother, to whom he sends money for college; but the brother returns the money and the mother describes Sidney’s job as ‘dirt’. A good-looking fellow who often gets what he wants by manipulating women, Sidney feels pains in his stomach and is almost afraid to look at the lies he plants in the newspapers. What he most fears is ‘the evidence in black and white that there was nothing I was not prepared to do, no new level to which I would not descend, in order to sew up Hunsecker’s power for me and my clients’ (quotes from Lehman, 1950, p. 170). The story concerns a couple of sweltering summer days in Manhattan, during which Sidney tries to destroy a romance between Susan Hunsecker, Harvey’s attractive young sister, with whom Sidney has had a previous flirtation, and nightclub singer Steve Dallas, a boyish-looking fellow with ‘soft blue eyes’ (Lehman, 1950, p. 170). Harvey Hunsecker is pathologically jealous of any man who lays a hand on Susan, and Sidney hopes to earn the columnist’s gratitude – perhaps even a chance to become a guest writer of his column – by spreading nasty rumours about the singer. As the story opens, he has already planted an item with two lesser columnists suggesting that

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Dallas is a pot-smoking communist, but this only hardens Susan’s determination to marry. In response, Sidney meets with Hunsecker at one of the columnist’s favoured Broadway restaurants and promises to go further. Later that day he sneaks a package of marijuana-laced cigarettes into Dallas’s pocket and arranges to have Sergeant Harry Kello, a corrupt cop and one of Hunsecker’s minions, arrest Dallas and beat him to a pulp. Kello performs the deed, but the story ends with a twist: Susan, wracked with grief and anger, tricks Sidney into coming to the penthouse where she lives with her brother and, just as Harvey arrives home, she makes it look as if Sidney is trying to rape her. ‘Harvey … Listen to me,’ Sidney cries when the columnist enters and sees Susan with her dress torn off. ‘Harvey … For God’s sake! … Harvey! … Don’t!’ The novella stops at this point, making some readers wonder if, à la Sunset Boulevard, it has been narrated by a dead man.

Ernest Lehman

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Where Broadway was concerned, Ernest Lehman knew whereof he wrote. As a young man he had worked in New York for Irving Hoffman, the most important press agent in America and a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter. (The column was entitled ‘Tales of Hoffman’ and Lehman often contributed a ghost-written special section called ‘Last Night on Broadway’.) It may help to put his work in historical context. The job of press agent is relatively new, having first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century as the direct result of the entertainment star system. From the beginning its purpose was to generate free publicity for show people by means of jokes or gimmicks that could get a client’s name in the newspaper – a purpose that tended to generate self-loathing and profound cynicism in all but inveterate hustlers and con men. In 1913, a bill was introduced in the US Congress that unsuccessfully sought to ban press agents, and in 1920 the state of New York managed to pass a law restricting their activity. But press agents proliferated, swarming around entertainment reporters like pilot fish around sharks. Irving Hoffman, Ernest Lehman’s boss, was different from most of them, if only because he was highly successful and employed a small army of underlings to create stories. A dishevelled, compulsively womanising, somewhat Damon Runyon-like character, his office was equipped with an adjoining bedroom of a more luxurious kind than the one in Sweet Smell of Success, and he never had to search for celebrities to promote. So great was his power that when Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, a notorious control-freak, offered criticism of an item Hoffman planted about him in a newspaper, Hoffman took offence and ‘fired’ Selznick as a client. Part of Hoffman’s ability to behave in such fashion derived from the fact that he was one of the few friends of the king of gossip columnists, Walter Winchell, the inspiration for Lehman’s fictional Harvey Hunsecker. During the 1930s and 1940s, Winchell, known universally as ‘W. W.’, was a personality whose radio ‘news’ broadcasts exceeded even the popularity of Jack Benny or Bob Hope. Both his radio show and his syndicated Broadway column were

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Walter Winchell

famous for their telegraphic style and Broadway slang (‘pushover’ and ‘scram’ were said to be his inventions). One of the highest-paid figures in US show business, he could make or break entertainers merely by mentioning them. He also had a good deal of political clout. A supporter of FDR and an opponent of Hitler at a time when opposition to the Nazis wasn’t universally regarded as patriotic, in the postwar era he morphed into a rabid anti-communist and vicious rumour monger. Winchell was one of the creators of the celebrity culture that inundates us today in tabloids and cable television, and a precursor of such populist radio and TV demagogues as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge. At the peak of his fame he enjoyed riding around during the evenings with the highly cooperative New York

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police in search of action on the streets. Every press agent in New York sent him material and developed what was known as ‘seven o’clock stomach’ waiting for his column to appear in the evening editions. ‘We … fought with each other to see who was in Winchell’s favor,’ Ernest Lehman recalled (quoted in Gabler, 1994, p. 244). For his part, Winchell often made press agents bow, scrape and do humiliating things; sometimes he put them on what he called his ‘DDL’ or ‘Drop Dead List’, never speaking to them again. Winchell’s principal conduit to gossip about Hollywood entertainers was Irving Hoffman, just as J. Edgar Hoover was one of his important conduits to stories about gangsters and spies. His more general rise to stardom, however, was aided by two social phenomena of the 1920s and 1930s: tabloid journalism and the growth of New York’s ‘café society’. He had begun his career in 1910 as a sixth-grade dropout who performed as a vaudeville hoofer under his birth name, Walter Winschel. He was hired to provide chatty items for Vaudeville News, where he began signing himself Walter Winchell, and shortly thereafter he became a columnist at the New York Evening Graphic, which was among the most scandalous tabloids ever published. There were several such newspapers in the city, filled with photographs of lurid crime scenes, horrible accidents and local beauty contests; strangely, however, they at first refused to print gossip. Legend has it that Winchell ended that practice in a single day by inserting an item into his column about the rumoured marriage of a Broadway actor. Whether or not he actually invented the gossip column, he was one of its earliest and most effective practitioners, becoming a celebrity and appearing in several movies. In 1929 he moved to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Mirror and made further publicity for himself by covering the Lindbergh kidnapping case. By 1932 he was such a famous figure that MGM invited him to star in Okay America, a movie about a crusading reporter; a well-paid advisor to the movie, he declined the offer to act, and the leading role went to Lew Ayres.

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Prohibition ended at about this time and wealthy Manhattan socialites, who previously shunned publicity and entertained at home, began to enjoy rubbing elbows and being photographed with movie and theatre stars in fashionable cafés and nightclubs. This was the moment when having your picture in the papers and your name in the gossip columns – under the right circumstances – became at least as valuable as money or social position. In 1939, a moderately pretty, unaccomplished, but extremely wealthy debutante named Brenda Frasier became the ‘it’ girl of a generation, as famous in her own day as Paris Hilton in the early twenty-first century, merely because New York columnists praised her beauty and photographers snapped her picture in sexy dresses at glamorous nightspots. Café society was at its apogee, and Winchell, now a radio star and a reporter who hobnobbed with gangsters, police and Hollywood celebrities, was its Boswell. Winchell’s base of operation was the Stork Club, one of the two nightclubs (the other was El Morocco) at the epicentre of café-society action. Through his column and radio show, he made the Stork nationally famous, and the club’s owner, ex-bootlegger Sherman Billingsley, treated him royally. Winchell’s meals were personally supervised by the Stork’s head waiter, a dish on the menu was named after him, he was given a personal telephone and a glass partition was built at his special table in order to shield his conversations from the noise of the band. In the relatively small and semi-private Cub Room, an area inside the Stork accessible only to the privileged few, Winchell was given Table 50, to the left of the entrance. Any patron, no matter how famous, who dared approach the six-seat table without first being waved at by Winchell, was treated with appalling rudeness. As Neal Gabler puts it, ‘if the Stork Club was the grand palace of café society and the Cub Room the sanctum sanctorum of the Stork, Table 50 was its throne and hence the seat of café society itself’ (1994, p. 266). Many readers of Cosmopolitan in 1950 would have noticed connections between Winchell and Lehman’s Harvey Hunsecker, even

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though Lehman did certain things to make the two seem different. Hunsecker is a big, pudgy man of no sartorial elegance who has a special table at a well-known restaurant named Dinty Moore’s, whereas Winchell was a bantamweight with sharp, almost handsome features and dapper clothing who was associated with the Stork Club. At one point Sidney tells us that Hunsecker has ‘pushed his way close to the pinnacle on which the Winchells … perched’, but that he has no particular interest in politics. ‘Hunsecker is not interested in making over the world,’ Harvey says, speaking of himself in the third person. ‘Let the others worry about the Hitlers and Francos and Stalins. Hunsecker is interested in Hunsecker.’ (Quotes from Lehman, 1950, p. 184.) These lines are roughly equivalent to the moment in Citizen Kane (1941) when the editor of ‘News on the March’ asks, ‘How is [Charles Foster Kane] different from Ford? Or Hearst, for that matter? Or Rockefeller – or John Doe?’ Lehman’s plot was in fact inspired by sensational events in Winchell’s private life – events known to Broadway insiders, if not to the general public. Winchell was obsessively and some believed unnaturally attached to his daughter Walda, who in 1945 attempted to establish an acting career under the name of Tony Eden. For her eighteenth birthday, he gave her a fabulous mink coat. He once threatened to shoot any man who became sexually involved with her and was apoplectic when she became engaged to William Cahn, a would-be Broadway producer with a somewhat chequered past. Winchell went after Cahn in his column and used his influence on Broadway to destroy Cahn’s career and stop Walda’s work in the theatre. In 1947, when the relationship between Cahn and Walda persisted, he arranged to have Walda examined by a psychiatrist, who recommended to a court that she be treated with shock therapy and perhaps lobotomised. As late as the mid-1950s, after Walda’s involvement with Cahn had ended, Winchell continued to hound Cahn. According to Neal Gabler (1994), Winchell probably used his friendship with J. Edgar Hoover to have Cahn apprehended by the

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FBI and prosecuted for a relatively minor tax evasion charge. In the end, Cahn was able to escape Winchell’s wrath only by emigrating to Israel. Just when Lehman’s novella was published, life began to imitate art. Winchell was drawn into a dispute between the famous black cabaret performer Josephine Baker and the management of the Stork Club, which allegedly denied Baker service. Although Winchell had a strong previous record as a liberal proponent of equal rights for blacks, he publicly accused Baker of being both a fascist and a communist. He also entered into a vicious campaign against Barry Gray, a late-night radio host in New York, who allowed Baker to tell her side of the story. Gray’s ‘crime’ was doubled when he gave time to columnist Ed Sullivan, one of Winchell’s competitors and longstanding enemies, who defended Baker and openly attacked Winchell. Ernest Lehman heard the radio broadcast: ‘I remember that Walter and Walda Winchell at the Stork Club (c. 1946) (courtesy of Photofest)

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memorable night. Everybody was calling everybody all over New York. “Turn your radio on.” It was an incredible event. … Nobody had ever dared to say that the man blackballed people, kept people from employment’ (quoted in Gabler, 1994, p. 421). Over the next few years in his newspaper column, Winchell repeatedly referred to Gray as ‘Borey’, also describing him as ‘pink’ and ‘yellow’. When Gray was twice beaten in the streets by unknown assailants, Winchell became hysterically happy: ‘Headline: Borey Pink Lemon Yellow Lavender Gray Beaten Up’, he announced. ‘Police Suspect Fair Play’ (quoted in Gabler, 1994, p. 452). By this time Winchell had become acquainted with Senator Joseph McCarthy and closely attached to McCarthy’s creepy stage manager, Roy Cohen. As McCarthy’s fame and influence grew, he and Winchell, who were already pals with J. Edgar Hoover, seemed to be using similar techniques for their public appearances. In his early television broadcasts Winchell liked to hold up photos of alleged communists as if they were courtroom evidence, calling attention to anyone he disliked who might have been involved with left organisations in the 1940s and justifying his tactics in the name of militant anti-communism. This was at least in part his way of getting revenge on the New York intellectuals and literati who had moved in the same circles as he had during the Roosevelt administration, but always condescended to him. Winchell was still a powerful figure when Lehman’s novella appeared and was especially feared in Hollywood. He never retaliated directly against Lehman, but his friend Irving Hoffman was mightily offended, for logical reasons. If some readers thought that Harvey Hunsecker resembled Winchell, wouldn’t those in the know tend to conclude that Sidney Wallace was based on Hoffman? Lehman argued that he was simply drawing on a scene he knew and was ‘fascinated with that underworld of nightclubs and columnists and press agents – how some people killed others with words instead of bullets’ (Brady, 1981, p. 193). At Hoffman’s request, he made a few changes in the novella before it was published, but Hoffman

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continued to regard the publication as a betrayal and refused to speak to Lehman for a year and a half. Lehman later recalled that a ‘mutual friend’ (press agent Sid Garfield) interceded in the quarrel and persuaded Hoffman to relent (Brady, 1981, p. 192). In 1952, as a peace offering, Hoffman used one of his columns for The Hollywood Reporter to praise Lehman’s fiction and point out what a great screenwriter he would make. That particular column was, in fact, ghost written by Lehman himself, who gave lavish compliments to his own stories about press agents and New York nightlife: ‘The world I want to see on film is the world of Toots Shor’s at lunch-hour, Sardi’s at 11 of an opening night, Lindy’s at 2 o’clock of any morning … the world of Winchell and Wilson, Sullivan and Sobal … of columnists on the prowl for items, press agents on the prowl for columnists. … Now I may be wrong (and I don’t think I am), but just off his past performances I would say that Ernest Lehman is the guy who can write that kind of picture’ (Kashner, 2000, p. 423).

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2 Twilight of the Gods As a direct result of the Hoffman column, Lehman was invited to Hollywood, where he soon established a screenwriting career with an impressive list of adaptations: Executive Suite (1954), Sabrina (1954, co-written with Billy Wilder), The King and I (1956) and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). By the middle of the decade he had become one of the most versatile and respected writers in the business, and within a few years would cap his achievements by authoring the original screenplay for Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). Nevertheless, he wasn’t inclined to adapt ‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow!’. ‘I was quite leery of having anybody make a movie of the novelette,’ he later told an interviewer. ‘I didn’t feel at all safe. In fact, once I was going to make the columnist a woman. But I never did’ (quoted in Brady, 1981, p. 193). Despite Lehman’s anxiety, his agent, George Wilner, circulated the manuscript of the novella among Hollywood producers even before it appeared in print. On 16 May 1949, Joseph I. Breen of the Production Code Administration (PCA), the studio-appointed censorship agency for the US movie industry, sent a letter to three producers – Robert Lord of Santana Pictures (Humphrey Bogart’s company), Robert Vogel of MGM and Samuel Bischoff of Regal Films – explaining that Lehman’s work was unacceptable for three reasons: 1) ‘the suggestion of an incestuous love between the columnist, Hunsecker, and his sister, Susan’; 2) ‘the use of a marijuana cigarette planted on an innocent party’; and 3) ‘the final scene in which the girl strips herself, accuses the lead of attempted rape and (apparently) brings about his murder at the hands of her enraged brother – which constitutes murder without any indicated punishment’ (PCA files, Margaret Herrick Library).

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On 14 April 1950, the same month when the novella appeared in Cosmopolitan, Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons (an employee of the Hearst news organisation, which was also the publisher of Cosmopolitan), announced that ‘Bidding is going like mad for the screen rights to the Cosmopolitan story, “Tell Me About It Tomorrow!” ’ (Parsons, 1950). But Parsons was exaggerating. When Lehman arrived in California there had been no attempt to purchase the novella and Hollywood was at the beginning of a tumultuous decade. In 1948 the US Supreme Court had divested the major film studios of their theatre chains, ending the practice of ‘vertical integration’. At the same moment, television became a growth industry and new forms of leisure activity took root in an increasingly suburban, automotive USA. Between 1946 (the peak year of US movie attendance) and 1962, the film audience shrank by over 70 per cent and roughly 2,000 theatres closed. The price of movie tickets barely changed during the 1950s, but the average percentage of income spent on movies by US families declined by 40 per cent. In the same period, the estimated total box-office receipts in the USA dropped by almost $400 million (Steinberg, 1978, pp. 372–3). The so-called Golden Age of Hollywood was ending, and the studio chiefs, who had long ruled like the gods on Mount Olympus, were entering the twilight of their power. In desperation, they cut their overheads, eliminated long-term contracts and attempted to lure viewers back with colour, 3-D, CinemaScope and biblical spectaculars. The decade also marked the end of the Popular Front idealism of the Roosevelt years. In 1946, Republicans captured both houses of the US Congress and the ‘red scare’ sweeping the country played into their hands when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its 1947–52 investigations into Hollywood communists. Celebrities of the left and right appeared before the well-publicised committee hearings and, by the time the dust settled, a group of ten ‘unfriendly’ witnesses, composed of writers, producers and directors, were jailed on charges of Contempt of Congress. In the

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months afterwards, roughly 300 Hollywood professionals were fired or blacklisted by studio bosses. Many of those who continued working in film and television lived in a climate of fear, intensified by right-wing publications such as Counterattack and Red Channels, which listed the names of show-business personalities who were critical of HUAC and insufficiently contrite about their left political activities in the 1930s and 1940s. The blacklist had a chilling effect on film-makers associated with dark social problem pictures, and for several other reasons the period between 1950 and 1955 was not a propitious time for producers to adapt a novella such as ‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow!’. Walter Winchell was not only a powerful figure associated with the right wing, but also the star of a new television show modelled after his hugely popular radio broadcasts. (The fifteen-minute ABCTelevision programme, begun in 1952, would turn out to be unsuccessful; ironically, Winchell was eclipsed by Ed Sullivan, his rival gossip columnist and bitter enemy, who in 1948 began to appear as the stolid host of a CBS variety show that became one of the longest-running hits in TV history.) The film industry was experiencing a financial crisis and was in no mood for unhappy endings. Furthermore, the conservative standards of film censorship that had been in effect since the early 1930s were still largely in place. Partly as a result of the box-office success of imported European art films, the PCA was gradually being liberalised, but it did not undergo dissolution until 1968. On the other hand, the decline of the studio system and the new, more flexible types of film distribution and exhibition created an opportunity for independent productions, especially when they were powered by major Hollywood stars. This was an era when many of the most popular names from the big studios were being released from contracts and were free to negotiate their own terms or to become their own producers. The most significant example of their new economic power was James Stewart, who, in 1949, with the aid of talent agent Lew Wasserman of Music Corporation of America

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(MCA), arrived at an agreement that gave him 50 per cent of the profits from his pictures at Universal Pictures. Wasserman became a king-maker in Hollywood – the inventor of the ‘package deal’, whereby a star, working with a studio or an independent producer, could not only share profits but also choose properties, writers and directors, just as the old-style moguls had done. The studio best organised to take advantage of such packages was United Artists (UA), which had been formed in the silent era as the home for independently produced films by Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith. Rescued from bankruptcy and headed by New Yorkers Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin, UA, in the 1950s, pioneered an arrangement whereby it would sometimes offer production facilities but more often share expenses and take charge of distribution for independently produced pictures. At the beginning of the decade the company made significant profits by distributing The African Queen (1951) and High Noon (1952), and it began to look for major stars with whom it could sign multi-picture deals for independent productions. The situation was perfectly suited for the Adonis-like, broadly grinning Burt Lancaster, who leaped to stardom almost overnight in 1947 on the strength of his performance as ‘Swede’, the doomed prize-fighter in the Universal Pictures–Mark Hellinger production of The Killers. This picture was such a success that Hellinger soon assigned Lancaster a similar role in Criss Cross (1949), a film in which the young Tony Curtis has a bit role as the dancing partner of Yvonne De Carlo. Lancaster briefly became an icon of noir, specialising in characters that, despite their physical power, were masochistically attached to femme fatales. From the beginning, however, he chafed against the studio system. A native New Yorker and former circus acrobat and stage actor, he had come to Hollywood with the dream of making his own films – a dream encouraged by small-time theatrical agent Harold Hecht, who was able to sign Lancaster as a client on the strength of a promise that they would someday become producing partners.

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Burt Lancaster

Immediately after achieving stardom, Lancaster established his own company, Norma Productions, named after his wife. Between 1948 and 1954, he continued to appear in big-studio vehicles, but at the same time, in partnership with Hecht, his organisation made five films, including two charming and witty swashbucklers, The Flame and the Arrow (1950, directed by Jacques Tourneur) and The Crimson Pirate (1952, directed by Robert Siodmak), which gave him the opportunity to exhibit his acrobatic skill and trademark flashing smile. Then, in 1953, he signed with Lew Wasserman and MCA, obtaining the starring role in one of the most important pictures of the year, Paramount’s From Here to Eternity (1953). Wasserman also negotiated a contract with United Artists giving ‘Hecht–Lancaster Productions’ $12 million and significantly reduced distribution costs to make seven independently produced pictures, five of which would star Lancaster.

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Not everything went so smoothly. Lancaster had grown up in working-class New York during the Roosevelt era and was sympathetic with the Popular Front leftists who were being targeted by HUAC and McCarthy; furthermore, his partner, Harold Hecht, had once belonged to the US Communist Party. From the onset of the postwar ‘red scare’, Lancaster was at the forefront of celebrities who spoke out in defence of accused and blacklisted artists. As a result, the anti-communist newsletter Counterattack began a campaign against him, urging its readers to tell the movie studios ‘AT ONCE’ of their objections to having him appear at what the newsletter described as ‘communist-front meetings’ (quoted in Buford, 2000, p. 97). Lancaster and Hecht’s 1952 production of The Crimson Pirate, scripted in part by the blacklisted and uncredited Waldo Salt, contains such lines as, ‘All my life I’ve watched injustice and dishonesty fly the flag of decency. I don’t trust it.’ The right wing was not amused. American Legion magazine responded by publishing an article that listed Lancaster as a communist sympathiser, along with John Garfield, Judy Holliday, Jose Ferrer, Shelly Winters, Arthur Miller and Clifford Odets; it also singled out the Hecht–Lancaster swashbucklers as key examples of pictures that offered work to ‘recently exposed communists and collaborators with communist fronts’ (quoted in Buford, 2000, p. 120). The film industry was thrown into a panic by these charges. It devised a strategy whereby any star who appeared on the American Legion’s list of purported subversives could write a confidential letter to the Legion, explaining his or her past political associations, offering repentance if necessary and avowing patriotism. Lancaster may have written such a letter (Buford, 2000, pp. 120–2). Harold Hecht did not get off so easily. In 1953 he was called before HUAC chairman Harold H. Velde in Los Angeles Federal Court, where he saved himself by naming former communists. Forever afterwards, he was labelled a ‘stool pigeon’ by the blacklisted Hollywood left and ‘the Mole’ by Lancaster (Buford, 2000, p. 131). Despite the political storms, the partnership between Hecht and Lancaster survived and their first three films made their company the

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talk of the business: Apache (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Lancaster) was both a colourful Western and a sombre commentary on racism; Vera Cruz (1955, again directed by Aldrich and co-starring Lancaster and Gary Cooper) was a blockbuster cowboy adventure and a prototypical buddy movie that became one of the most profitable pictures of the decade; and Marty (1955, directed by Delbert Mann from a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky), was a low-budget, realist drama about ‘little’ people that achieved remarkable success with both critics and audiences. Lacking glamorous stars and photographed in black and white on New York streets, Marty became a ‘sleeper’ hit, establishing a model for how small, unorthodox productions could cross over to the mass audience. It was the first US film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and it beat all the big studio productions at the Academy Awards, winning Oscars for screenplay, actor, director and best picture. It seemed to demonstrate that the old studio system could no longer dominate the industry and it raised hopes in some quarters that Hollywood movies could experiment more often with original, realistic dramas of the kind that were garnering critical praise on 1950s television. Flush with profits, Hecht–Lancaster earned even more money in 1956 with Trapeze, a wide-screen spectacular about circus acrobats in Paris, directed by Carol Reed and starring Lancaster, Gina Lollobrigida and Tony Curtis. Harold Hecht took advantage of the production’s international nature, employing a ‘global’ marketing strategy that paid huge dividends. The film was popular with audiences everywhere, recouping its costs in Japan alone. It now seemed that Hecht–Lancaster could do no wrong. The company moved into plush offices on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills (the former location of the William Morris Agency), decorating the place with modern-master paintings, an aviary and an indoor waterfall, and began paying huge sums for options on literary properties. But there were tensions in the air. The company had gained a reputation for profligate spending and chaotic production on some of its films, and

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Confidential, the most notorious scandal-sheet of the era, was carrying stories about Lancaster’s alleged drunken parties in Paris and tendency to beat up women. An aura of violence had always surrounded the star, if only because of his imposing physique; but now it seemed intensified by his success and it spilled over into angry confrontations with Hecht. One consequence was that Lancaster took on a third partner, James Hill, a former writer at MGM, who worked as a producer on Trapeze and who, much to the displeasure of Hecht, was placed in charge of story and script development. In early 1957, the newly formed Hecht–Hill–Lancaster (HHL) announced that it was planning to make nine films. Among these were adaptations of A. B. Guthrie’s The Way West, scripted by Clifford Odets, and George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Another project, long of interest to Hecht, was more akin to the dramatic realism of Marty: entitled Sweet Smell of Success, it was scheduled to be written and directed by Ernest Lehman. Harold Hecht and James Hill (1 May 1957) ([Allen Grant]/[Time & Life Pictures]/Getty Images)

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3 A Pain in the Stomach ‘[Hecht–Hill–Lancaster] felt a great affinity for Sweet Smell,’ Lehman told an interviewer in 2000. ‘They dug it. Nobody else did, really. The film could only have been made by Hecht–Hill–Lancaster’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, p. 426). The company’s interest was no doubt strengthened by the fact that in 1956–7 the US cultural and political climate was changing. Walter Winchell had recently lost his radio and television programmes because of poor ratings, and, after a public feud with NBC TV’s Tonight Show host Jack Parr, his popularity was noticeably on the wane. His famous column seemed antiquated, eclipsed by the lurid gossip in Confidential, which specialised in semi-pornographic stories about drugs and sex, and by the more general drift of television towards talk-shows and voyeuristic glimpses of the rich and famous. (Even Confidential, which had challenged the old-style fan magazines, was dead in 1957, the victim of censors and lawsuits by celebrities.) The McCarthy era was also drawing to an end. The redhunting senator’s 1954 televised hearings into supposed communists in the US Army proved a major tactical blunder. He and Roy Cohen were untelegenic, and one of the lawyers for the Army, Joseph Welch, energetically rebuked McCarthy on TV (‘Have you no shame, Senator?’), thereby becoming a hero for liberals and a movie actor in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). McCarthy was now a liability for Republicans, and in 1954 the US Senate censured him. Just before Sweet Smell appeared, he died of a heart attack, probably brought on by alcoholism. At the same moment, the Hollywood blacklist was dying off. Dalton Trumbo, who had served prison time for refusing to cooperate with HUAC, was given an Academy Award in 1956 for The Brave One, which he wrote under the pseudonym ‘Robert Rich’, and in 1960 received

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full credit for writing Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus. Sweet Smell of Success could be described as the attempted revenge of liberal Hollywood on a media environment that had recently passed or was passing. It nevertheless expresses important anxieties about publicity and politics, and its themes of celebrity, power and backstabbing in an age of affluence still resonate. In its own day it was daring because of its unrelentingly dark view of show business and its challenge to censorship codes. In July 1956, when Hecht–Lancaster submitted the Lehman novella to the Production Code Administration, it received the same response that had been given in 1949. Three elements were unacceptable: ‘Hunsecker’s love for his sister seems to be incestuous in nature’, ‘[t]he use of marijuana cigarettes … is in violation of the Code provision regarding narcotics’ and ‘[t]he final scene … constitutes an undetected murder without any indicated punishment’ (PCA files, Margaret Herrick Library). HHL ignored most of the report and went ahead with production. Persuaded by the fact that Marty won the Academy Award, Lehman agreed to sell his novella and write the screenplay on the condition that he could direct. As the film neared production, however, he began to feel, like Sidney Wallace in his novella, an ethical discomfort and pain in his stomach. He could sense the troubled psychological relation between Lancaster and Hecht and the jealousy between Hecht and Hill, and the company’s profligacy worried him. ‘They spent money on everything,’ he recalled, ‘$12,000 remodeling the executive washroom’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, p. 424). He was equally uneasy about the sexual promiscuity of the organisation. The partners maintained a luxurious apartment on Wilshire Boulevard for assignations, and Lehman’s first meeting with Lancaster was a shock: ‘I was sitting with Harold Hecht. The door opened and in walked a towering, impressive figure. He was zipping up his fly and smiling proudly, saying, “she swallowed it”’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, pp. 424–5).

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Lehman was probably frightened by Lancaster, as many were. Norman Mailer, a friend and frequent bridge partner of the star, once remarked that he had never seen anything more menacing than Lancaster’s ice-blue eyes. Elmer Bernstein, who composed music for Sweet Smell, recalled that ‘Burt was really scary. He was a dangerous guy. He had a short fuse’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, p. 430). Lancaster was known for giving trouble to directors and sometimes the trouble could become physical. For example, when Alexander Mackendrick ultimately took over the direction of Sweet Smell, he had a chilling confrontation with his star: ‘It was a late-night [story] session. We’d been drinking a little. Burt started shouting at me – and he’s scary. Then he came across the room with that coiled-spring animal energy, like a panther, and vaulted over the sofa in one of the most graceful movements I’ve ever seen, [as if] to attack me. I stood up and said “No, Burt,” and he stopped. That took every atom of performance possible. The reason I had that strength was that just as he came across the sofa I thought, “He’s beautiful!”’ (quoted in Buford, 2000, p. 182). This was hardly a conducive environment for a novice director such as Lehman, whose stomach pain was exacerbated when the film’s casting was discussed. Lehman had proposed Orson Welles for the role of Hunsecker, perhaps because the film, like Citizen Kane, was based on a public figure, and because the character in the original novella loves to eat. (When Alexander Mackendrick came aboard, he suggested Hume Cronyn, who vaguely resembled Walter Winchell and who, ten years earlier, had effectively played a sadistic character in one of Lancaster’s films, Brute Force [1947].) But as the film neared the shooting stage, Lancaster decided that he wanted the part. The direct participation of one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars meant that United Artists approved a higher budget, but it also meant that Lehman’s position became shaky. James Hill later told an interviewer that HHL had never really intended to allow Lehman to direct – certainly not direct Orson Welles or Lancaster – and had offered him the job only to obtain the property (Kashner, 2000,

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Tony Curtis

p. 426). Whatever the case, as soon as Sweet Smell became a Lancaster vehicle, Harold Hecht summoned Lehman to his office and fired him as director, offering him the job of producer as a consolation. Lehman complained to his agent, Lew Wasserman, but Wasserman was also the agent for Lancaster and Tony Curtis, who were now co-starring in the film, and was unmoved. Lancaster and Curtis had been friendly acquaintances since the late 1940s, when Curtis was a bit player at Universal and the goodhumoured butt of Lancaster’s practical jokes. They had both grown up in working-class New York, they attended the same Hollywood gym, and when they acted together in Trapeze they developed a rapport. Curtis lobbied for the chance to play Sidney Falco, recognising it as a ‘break-out’ role (Curtis and Paris, 1993, p. 132).

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Although he was nearly contemporary with Marlon Brando and had briefly studied theatre in New York, the boyishly good-looking Curtis had moved straight to Hollywood, where he changed his name from Bernard Schwartz and became a duck-tailed heart-throb for teenaged girls. At about the time when Brando was acting in the film version of Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Curtis was riding horses, scaling walls and sword fighting in a series of mildly enjoyable, low-budget costume adventures at Universal, which Hollywood insiders described as ‘tits and sand’ pictures. Critics mocked his New York accent, but by the mid-1950s he was a major box-office attraction for the youth market. His career began to change when Wasserman became his agent and Lancaster cast him in Trapeze. Until then he had been treated condescendingly. ‘In Hollywood,’ he wrote, ‘I was an upstart, nouveau riche, morally unacceptable, uneducated, ill-mannered, probably a fag. … The race was so intense there, you had to constantly fight the forces of envy. … Everybody was looking for that sweet smell of success. Come to think of it, that might make the title of a good movie’ (Curtis, 1993, p. 131). In fact, Curtis was virtually born to play Sidney Falco, and was so passionate about the role that he helped to produce the picture under the auspices of his and Janet Leigh’s newly formed company, Curtleigh. No matter what effect Sweet Smell had on the careers of others involved, it was the movie that would forever cement his reputation as a dramatic actor, just as Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) later cemented his reputation as one of Hollywood’s most talented farceurs and light comedians. In his new role as producer, Lehman scouted a few New York locations and asked the nearby Alexander Mackendrick, who was still under contract with HHL for The Devil’s Disciple (a picture that had been put on hold because of casting problems), to take over directing Sweet Smell. The choice was unusual because Mackendrick, although born in Boston, had spent his entire career in England, first as a storyboard designer and writer, then as a director of brilliant comedies at Ealing Studios (Whiskey Galore! [1949], The Man in the White Suit [1951] and The Ladykillers [1955]). On the surface he

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seemed ill equipped for a film so thoroughly rooted in a US setting, but anyone who had looked closely at The Ladykillers would have seen that he had a talent for dark humour and shadowy, nocturnal locales. For his own part, as he later explained, ‘I had always hankered to make a melodrama, a film noir as it has been called. … I’d had some experience of the world of [British] tabloid journalism … [and] I liked the idea of trying to capture on screen the atmosphere of Manhattan’ (Mackendrick, 2004, p. 121). He immediately agreed to the assignment and began consultations with Lehman on the screenplay. Soon afterwards, however, Lehman’s doctor informed him that he was suffering from a spastic colon due to anxiety and recommended a far-away vacation. Accepting his fate, Lehman left the production and travelled to Tahiti for a rest cure. Alexander Mackendrick directing Sweet Smell of Success

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4 Re-writing and Re-writing and Re-writing In later life, as a teacher of film-making at CalArts in California, Alexander Mackendrick posted a sign in his office and gave copies to his students: ‘Screenplays aren’t written. They’re re-written and re-written and re-written.’ This was especially true of Sweet Smell of Success. When James Hill took over as the film’s producer, Mackendrick expressed concerns about the script, which he thought uncinematic, overly confined to duologues and interiors. He wanted more scenes to begin or end outdoors, giving a greater sense of the neurotic, claustrophobic quality of New York streets, and he hoped to achieve a more pungent and dramatic interaction between characters. To this end he encouraged HHL to commission one of his culture heroes, Clifford Odets, who had been working for the company on a screenplay for The Way West. The most celebrated US playwright of the 1930s, Odets was an authentic working-class artist, an early member of the Group Theatre and the author of such politically committed classics as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy. Because he had gone to Hollywood, he was sometimes described by leftists as a sellout – a description that was given support in 1952, when, like Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller, he was called before HUAC and named communists he had known. In some quarters of Hollywood, he was also regarded as a has-been who had not done important work since 1946, when he did un-credited work on Hitchcock’s Notorious and wrote the first version of a screenplay that passed into other hands, ultimately becoming It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). But the negative views were greatly oversimplified. To argue that Odets sold his soul was to ignore conditions in US theatre, and to suggest that he was outdated after World War II was untrue to the

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Clifford Odets (1 January 1950) ([Pictorial Parade]/[Hulton Archive]/Getty Images)

facts. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1963, he was employed fairly steadily as a screenwriter and even directed a film, The Story on Page One (1959). Three of his best post-Depression plays, Clash by Night, The Big Knife and The Country Girl, were impressively adapted for movies in the 1950s. Even so, Odets was at a relative low point when he was hired by HHL. Sweet Smell gave him money and a chance to strike a blow against the right wing. He was excellent ‘casting’, not only because of his plays about the dark side of American success, but also because he knew Broadway from the inside and had often chatted with Walter Winchell at the Stork Club. In his posthumously published memoir, The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (1988), he records several meetings with the columnist. Sunday, 5 May: ‘We sat around, talked to Walter Winchell, drank brandy and soda, ate wonderful food and were not permitted to pay the bill because we were with Sylvia Sidney and Molly Picon, good showpieces for the [Stork] club. Winchell is a great bore and the vanity of all vanities’

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(Odets, 1988, pp. 142–3). Tuesday, 14 May: ‘I prowled around for the balance of the evening, later meeting Winchell in the street. – I wondered, as I listened [to him], how a human being could have so little sense of other human beings: he is a vortex of vanity. … I began to think about him and the closed-in life, stale, not a fresh perception in a month, that he lives’ (Odets, 1988, pp. 153–4). Monday, 24 June: ‘You have to be a trained fifty-yard dash runner to get a word in when Winchell takes the floor, which is from noon to midnight and midnight to noon’ (Odets, 1988, pp. 197). Odets was hired for three weeks of polishing the Lehman script, the last version of which was dated 10 September 1956. After reading Lehman’s notes and attending story conferences with Mackendrick and James Hill, he completed a major re-write on 9 October 1956, well within the promised deadline. But this was only the start of a marathon effort. Odets’ personal papers at Indiana University’s Lilly Rare Book Library contain the Lehman script, eleven of Odets’ extensive re-writes and scores of his revisions to individual scenes, some of which have as many as half a dozen versions. Lehman’s plot and some of his language was preserved, but every scene was altered multiple times. When the film began shooting on locations in New York in late December 1956 and early January 1957, Odets was ensconced in the Essex Hotel overlooking Central Park, still doing re-writes. Most of the photography was done between midnight and dawn, in freezing weather. ‘I remember,’ said Tony Curtis, ‘it was about three or four in the morning, and it was cold, bitter, and miserable. Between shots, I was strolling around, and I heard this tik-tik-tik coming from inside the prop truck. So I go in, and there’s Clifford Odets, sitting in an overcoat, huddled over his typewriter. … I see he’s just typed out, “The cat’s in the bag, and the bag’s in the river.” It took my breath away, right from his brain to my brain’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, pp. 429–30). When the production moved back to Hollywood in February and March 1957 to shoot interiors, Odets was still re-writing. Then everything shut down for a short time while HHL debated the film’s

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ending and Odets wrote multiple versions of the last scenes. Whenever possible the picture had to be shot in continuity because the script was revised as it was on the verge of being photographed – a procedure that created considerable tension and extra costs. The ‘revised final budget’ prepared on 1 January 1957 was $1,400,061, but Burt Lancaster was promised $10,000 a week for everything beyond the first two weeks of shooting and photographer James Wong Howe was paid $1,500 a week for as long as production lasted. Ernest Lehman had already been paid $50,000 and Odets $10,000 for the screenplay, but Odets continued to earn money for the re-writes. Despite all this, Alexander Mackendrick had no complaints. ‘It is, of course, well known that few writers are able to resist the temptation of changing the work of another screenwriter,’ he later observed, ‘but none of us realized how much work Clifford [ultimately] found he had to do. … What Clifford did, in effect, was to dismantle the structure of every single sequence in order to rebuild situations and relationships into scenes that had much greater tension and dramatic energy. Disastrous as this process was from the point of view of the production, the truth is that for me personally it was an experience that taught me a staggering amount’ (Mackendrick, 2004, p. 123). Mackendrick’s lectures and hand-outs to his class on filmmaking at CalArts, edited by Paul Cronin and published posthumously as On Filmmaking: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director (2004), are the work of a superb teacher and constitute one of the best books ever written on the poetics of cinema. A full chapter is devoted to Sweet Smell, in which Mackendrick downplays his own contribution and the artistic value of the film (‘a shameless melodrama’), but uses Odets’ revisions of the screenplay to illustrate how a skilled writer develops ‘density and subplots’. This chapter is particularly good at showing the way Odets managed dramatic confrontations between characters, building complex emotional chess matches and shifting power relationships. It also shows how he developed secondary characters to create ‘triangulation’, or threeway interplay.

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The key example is one of the most important scenes in the film: the meeting between Sidney and Hunsecker at the 21 Club, where Hunsecker is seated at his special table with a US senator, a beautiful young woman and the woman’s ‘agent’. In Lehman’s version, Sidney operates from a weak position, approaching the table as if he were trying to find out why Hunsecker is treating him badly; Hunsecker seems childishly vain and the three minor characters have little to do except serve as his audience. In Odets’ re-write, Sidney arrives armed with the news that Dallas and Susan are planning to marry; Hunsecker is shrewd and threatening, but Sidney has worked out a means of solving the marriage problem and therefore has a greater ability to counter Hunsecker’s moves. (In a handwritten marginal note in his copy of the script, Odets wrote, ‘Sidney, knowing he is needed, can be cockier’ [Lilly, box 25, folder 7]). Also in Odets’ version, the three minor characters function as what Mackendrick calls a ‘subplot’, offering us a miniature version of the manipulation and blackmail being played out between Hunsecker and Sidney. More importantly, they provide the film’s clearest demonstration that Hunsecker is genuinely dangerous, not only to entertainers but also to major political figures. The scene is dense with action and reaction, filled with opportunities for what Mackendrick calls ‘ricochet’ – that is, moments when character A speaks to character B for the benefit of character C. Thus, when Hunsecker explains to the senator that Sidney is ‘a man of forty faces, not one, none too pretty and all deceptive’, he seldom looks at Sidney, who is seated just behind and near his shoulder. As he enumerates several of the faces (‘the street urchin’, the ‘half a dozen faces for the ladies’ and above all the ‘quick, dependable chap’), Sidney sits close alongside and tries to look amused. As Mackendrick has noted, the scene ‘offers the director a chance to show through editing and camera angles that the significance … is in what is being implied, not said (specifically in the way the characters avoid eye contact)’ (Mackendrick, 2004, p. 156).

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At some point during Odets’ revisions, a flashback structure was considered, beginning with Susan Hunsecker’s suicide (Mackendrick, 2004, p. 128), but the various drafts of the screenplay retained roughly the same plot structure as Lehman’s original. The leading characters in the initial Lehman version are Sidney Wallace and Harvey Hunsecker, although we learn that Sidney changed his

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name from ‘Falco’. Sidney’s brother Mike serves as the voice of morality, as does his mother, with whom he has a guilty telephone conversation. Sidney, who earns enough to help his brother go to college, over-tips cab drivers and has sex with several women, among them Hunsecker’s secretary and a flashy ‘tart’ who visits his office-cum-bedroom. In the past he has also had sex with his own secretary and with Susan Hunsecker, who tells him that before attaching himself to her brother he was ‘pretty wonderful, so honest it was painful’. Sidney’s announcement to Harvey Hunsecker that Susan is planning to marry the ‘greaseball’ singer ‘Vic’ Dallas is staged in a restaurant men’s room. Sidney uses a nightclub cigarette girl to plant marijuana on Dallas, and approaches Harry Kello in a barber shop to arrange Dallas’s arrest and beating. Throughout, he takes antacid pills and expresses ressentiment: ‘I managed to get out of this lousy hole and find something better for myself,’ he tells his brother, ‘while you’re still looking for it in books!’ ‘I like money,’ he says to Susan. ‘I don’t use words like “integrity,” not even in a game of Scrabble. … All right. They spit on me, I spit on them!’ In the end, Susan tricks him by staging a rape scene, but she also deflects Hunsecker’s wrath by openly confronting him with his complicity in the plot to frame Vic Dallas. As she slips on a topcoat and prepares to leave forever, Hunsecker slaps her. When she goes to the penthouse elevator, Hunsecker apologises and begs her to stay. ‘I want Vic, that’s all,’ she says, and closes the elevator door in her brother’s face. Hunsecker is lost in misery. Sidney emerges from the bedroom, combs his hair and casually predicts that Susan will return. A moment later, walking along the streets in the grey light of dawn, he is met by Harry Kello, who tells him that Hunsecker has called and plans to write about Sidney in today’s column, saying he ‘resisted arrest’. Kello and two other cops close in as Sidney backs out of frame and the film ends (all quotations from Lilly, box 25, folder 6). Odets maintained the outline of this plot but eliminated characters, gave Hunsecker a greater role to play, shifted action into

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the streets or alleys, changed the order of certain events and everywhere improved the dialogue. In his first revision, the leading characters are renamed Sidney Falco and J. J. Hunsecker. Sidney’s office closet is filled with suits, but a sign reading ‘Sidney Falco, Publicity’ is Scotch-taped to the office door. His brother and mother are completely eliminated. He no longer takes antacid pills but frequently bites at a hangnail. In this draft, he has a father who works as an attendant in the men’s room at the club where Steve Dallas performs and an uncle, Frank D’Angelo, who is Dallas’s agent. A conversation between Sidney and the uncle provides details about Sidney’s former relationship with Susan Hunsecker: ‘J. J. asked me to take her out,’ Sidney says. ‘Listen, Sidney,’ the uncle replies, ‘where I seen you that last night with Hunsecker’s sister, J. J. didn’t ask you to take her out.’ The first scene between Sidney, Susan and Dallas is moved from Dallas’s dressing room to an alley behind the Elysian Club, and Dallas becomes a stronger character than in the Lehman script, more capable of humiliating Sidney. Harry Kello is introduced at an earlier point, in a sinister scene outside the 21 Club: J. J. calls out, ‘What’s the rumpus?’ and Kello saunters over, licking blood from his knuckles, explaining that he has just beaten up a cabbie (all quotations from Lilly, box 25, folder 7). Apart from sophisticated comedies or avant-garde experiments, few films have employed such deliberately ‘stagy’ language, in this case a mixture of gutter poetry and Winchell-ese of a sort that was never actually spoken in New York (Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil [1948] is equally artificial but less witty, with dialogue that resembles blank verse). The baroque verbiage was adumbrated in Lehman’s original screenplay, which contains witticisms such as ‘I make it a point never to end a proposition with a sentence.’ Odets dispensed with most of these lines but retained the stylised quality; in an era before profanity was allowed on the screen, his language has sting and shock, combining quasi-literary patter with brutal references to sadistic violence. Alexander Mackendrick confessed that he was ‘often uneasy’ about the length of speeches

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(Mackendrick, 2004, p. 130), but Odets gave him good advice: ‘Play it real fast’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, p. 429). In the especially wordy scenes, such as the five-way conversation in the 21 Club, the speed of performance tends to heighten the atmosphere of neurotic desperation and verbal fireworks. Although movies are usually said to be a visual medium, many good pictures have depended upon powerful dialogue; where Sweet Smell is concerned, it is almost impossible to discuss the film or even understand it without quoting a good deal of what the characters say. The screenplay was honed and enriched in many ways, but two scenes were particularly subject to revision, the first because of censorship issues. The censors were troubled when Sidney manipulates the cigarette girl, Rita, into sleeping with the columnist Otis Elwell. (They also wanted the film to indicate that Harry Kello was atypical of the police force and ‘some day his methods will catch up to him’ [PCA file, Margaret Herrick Library].) Initially, Odets wanted Rita to be relatively compliant and Elwell somewhat embarrassed (‘Give him credit,’ he wrote to himself in the margin of the scene). In the final version, Rita is unhappy and the columnist amused and smarmy: ‘Friends call me Otis,’ he says to the unsmiling

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Rita, ‘sometimes Tricky Otis.’ The censors insisted that ‘When it becomes clear to Rita that Sidney is cold-bloodedly giving her sexually to Otis Elwell, Rita must be played as a crushed woman. There must be about her manner a complete sense of her own personal degradation’ (PCA file, Margaret Herrick Library). Odets achieved a compromise by having Rita initially behave coolly towards Elwell and indignantly towards Sidney. (Even so, much of the scene was cut by censors when the film played Germany and the UK.) In the finished version, Elwell keeps saying that he and Rita have met somewhere and she keeps denying it. Privately, she tells Sidney he is a ‘snake … a real louse’. Elwell is a ‘perfect stranger’, she pathetically insists, and ‘I don’t do this sort of thing.’ But when Sidney exits (‘See you two kids later … Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. That gives you lots of leeway.’), Rita looks almost coyly at Elwell and offers him information: ‘Palm Springs. Two years ago.’ ‘That’s right!’ Elwell recalls, and laughs heartily. Rita takes a drink and adds glumly, ‘Don’t tell Sidney.’ The climactic scene in Hunsecker’s penthouse was revised more than any other, in part because HHL was unsure how to resolve certain questions. How should Hunsecker behave towards Falco and Susan when he discovers them together and how should they behave towards him? Should Falco be given any moment of moral integrity? How strong is Susan, and if she leaves Hunsecker, how does he react? On the cover of one of his scripts, Odets tried to address at least one of these issues by writing notes to himself about Hunsecker’s feelings towards his sister: ‘[He lives] a lonely, celibate life … The more he feels the emptiness of his life, the more he wants to hold on to Susie. Because of his need of Susan, J. J. both hates and loves her … Too, he wants her appreciation’ (Lilly, box 25, folder 11). At the end of his initial revision, he submitted two versions of the scene. In the first, Susan tricks Sidney and also tells him that she nearly killed herself two years ago, ‘after our little interlude’. When J. J. arrives, Sidney avoids trouble by declaring that he has a note from J. J. to Harry Kello ordering the attack on Dallas, and then he contemptuously

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walks out. As J. J. telephones Kello, instructing him to get Sidney, Susan also walks out, leaving behind a fur coat that Steve Dallas, in an earlier scene, has called her ‘badge’ of subservience to her brother. In the second version, Susan takes sleeping pills and attempts to jump from the penthouse balcony. Sidney rescues her and she groggily tries to seduce him, but when J. J. arrives Sidney rather effectively defends himself. J. J. slaps Susan and is almost on the point of throwing her over the balcony when an Asian servant enters. Susan tosses her fur coat at J. J. and leaves. ‘You’ll be back!’ J. J. shouts, much like Charles Foster Kane raging over the loss of Susan Alexander. There were several later versions. In one, Susan leaves and Sidney is given the last word: ‘You’ll never get her back,’ he says to Hunsecker. ‘You’re alone! Hear me? All alone!’ He exits, leaving Hunsecker bent with grief, monotonously putting golf balls on his carpet. In another, Sidney leaves and Susan has the last word. ‘Take your hands off me,’ she says to her brother. ‘I’d rather be dead than live in this house another hour.’ In still another, Sidney exits and we cross-cut between the penthouse and the street below, where Sidney, ‘full of bitter pride’, is met by Kello, who has left home at Hunsecker’s command and is still wearing house slippers. Sidney goes into the entrance of his office/apartment building, Kello behind him, and we hear the sounds of a beating. Back at the penthouse, Susan confronts Hunsecker. She drops her fur coat on the floor and Hunsecker picks it up, following her down to the lobby of the Brill Building, where he stands alone, clutching the coat as she leaves. In still another version, Sidney meets Kello on the street and swings a punch before being beaten; at the penthouse, Hunsecker stands on his balcony observing the action, not noticing that Susan has departed without a word. Turning back to the room, he promises to give Susan and Dallas ‘the biggest wedding this town has ever seen’. Cut to Susan’s empty bedroom, looking out through the door as J. J. enters and finds no one there. He sees her fur coat on the bed, snatches it up, and begins to rage: ‘Susie! You won’t threaten me! Nobody walks out on J. J. Hunsecker!’ Cut to Susan’s empty bathroom as he stands

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outside and looks through a crack in the door. He begins to pray: ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.’ Then he becomes wild: ‘I’m the shepherd of millions of little men and women! I don’t ask them to get on their knees, but they come to me for guidance! Who are you to reject me! I’m proud to be alone!’ (Lilly, box 25, folders 12–16). Near the end of the long process of revision, HHL seems to have worried that audiences needed to be given explicit acknowledgment that the world depicted in the film is sordid. To accomplish this, Odets wrote several pages of voice-of-God narration. The following was intended for the opening: NARRATION (Quietly, with a sense of humor; with a sure-footed dignity, and a faint world wryness.) In an age when we are getting ready to explore the moon, it might be amusing and faintly horrendous to look closer to home. New York City, of course, and more particularly that shoddy but glamorous part of it called Broadway. You may not like the people you are about to meet, but you cannot disregard them – they are part of our world. … Follow our story, with patience. Be tolerant – think of Sidney as a small monster looking for a cozy nest to rest his slick, brainy head. Judge not, you readers of J. J. Hunsecker’s column, unless you be judged yourselves for having given Hunsecker the absolute power with which he clubs his way through life. Incidentally, the characters and incidents in this motion picture are entirely fictional; and any resemblance to real persons, alive or dead, is completely accidental. For my part, I shall relish a visit to the moon (Lilly, box 26, folder 9).

Fortunately, this rather arch material was rejected. One of its interesting touches, however, is ‘Judge not … unless you be judged yourselves,’ which would have joined with other, similar lines, forming a verbal motif. As Philip Kemp has pointed out, the

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screenplay develops several such motifs: the dialogue is filled with animal imagery, as when Sidney is compared to a dog, a mouse, a shrimp, a louse and a snake; and with food imagery, as in, ‘I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic’ (Kemp, 1991, pp. 152–3). Odets also introduced a series of biblical quotations. ‘Judge not’ belongs in company with ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ from a rejected version of the penultimate scene, and with three references that made it into the completed film. At the end of the 21 scene, Hunsecker tells the senator, ‘Go thou and sin no more.’ Near the end of the scene with Rita and Otis Elwell, Sidney tells the couple, ‘Blessings on thee both.’ And in what is arguably the film’s most ironic line, he says to Hunsecker, ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to men.’

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5 Showtime Given the tense, nearly chaotic circumstances under which it was written and ultimately shot, Sweet Smell is a remarkably wellconstructed film. As the following scene-by-scene commentary attempts to show, the finished product justifies the work on the screenplay and is everywhere characterised by talented and intelligent collaboration. The credit sequence begins with a montage of Manhattan streets at night. Within a few shots we arrive at a mid-town newspaper, where an early edition is loaded onto a delivery truck bearing a sign: ‘Go with The Globe: Read J. J. Hunsecker, The Eyes of Broadway.’ At the top of the sign are Hunsecker’s eyes and eyeglasses, which will become one of the most pervasive and arresting images in the film, looking out at the city in minatory, panoptic fashion. The silhouetted truck moves off through the streets, cruising past glittering advertisements and bright theatre marquees to the sound of Elmer Bernstein’s shrill, jazzy main-title theme, vaguely reminiscent of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s ‘Blues in the Night’. (Bernstein, one of several left-wing contributors to the film, had been ‘greylisted’ during the McCarthy period and only recently saved from oblivion by Otto Preminger, who hired him to write the score for Man with a Golden Arm [1955].) The striking black-andwhite photography is by James Wong Howe, one of Hollywood’s most respected cameramen, who had won his first Academy Award in the previous year for a Burt Lancaster vehicle, The Rose Tattoo (1956). Howe’s long career embraced many different genres, but he was best known for realistic dramas; dubbed ‘low-key Howe’, he was among the earliest exponents of plausibly motivated lighting and the crab dolly, which he uses skilfully in Sweet Smell. His location work, involving exteriors of the ‘Great White Way’, the Elpine soft-drink

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stand at Broadway and 46th, the Palace and Ziegfield theatres, the Brill Building, the 21 Club, Toots Shor’s restaurant and the Active Exterminating Company on West 59th (disguised as the Elysian Club), is deliberately evocative of the ‘New York School’ of street photographers in the 1940s and 1950s, and marks the film from the beginning with an iconic noir-ness. One sign of ‘well-made’ classical cinema is the speed and economy with which the opening scenes establish characters and milieu and set the plot in motion. This film provides a good example. The credits and music end as a stack of newspapers tossed from the delivery truck lands with a thud on the sidewalk in front of a vendor’s stand. A young man in a hurry snatches a copy of the paper from the vendor, who gives us the young man’s name (we have already been introduced to Hunsecker) and indirectly describes the relation between the film’s two leading characters: ‘Hey, Sidney, want an item for Hunsecker’s column? Two rolls get fresh with a baker!’ Sidney steps into a corner soft-drink stand, elbows through a thick, hungry, oppressive crowd of New Yorkers grabbing for fast food, and

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stands at the counter. In the glaring light he looks dapper, with the slight pallor and dark-ringed eyes of a creature of the night. Biting a hotdog, he scans Hunsecker’s column, which we see in an insert with a photo of Hunsecker’s glowering face below the byline. He angrily throws the hotdog aside, slams the newspaper into a corner trash can – a gesture he will repeat in a mood of triumph near the end of the film – and strides off down the street. For much of the film Sidney is in movement, rushing from one place to another, speaking rapidly, pacing nervously, shifting expressions mercurially, becoming rigid or restless in the few moments when he is forced to sit still. Alexander Mackendrick said that he wanted him to resemble Mosca, ‘the Fly’, a scheming servant in Ben Jonson’s satiric drama Volpone; but he’s also an anxious character, never sleeping, running against the clock. In the next scene Mackendrick strongly emphasises this quality by giving Tony Curtis a good deal of swift business to perform, which Curtis executes with an appropriately neurotic energy, drawing on his innate speed and ebullience. We see him walking briskly past a pawn shop, stepping into a building and jogging upstairs. A close-up of the Scotch-taped sign on his doorway communicates his full name,

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profession and fly-by-night financial circumstances. He enters the drab ‘office’, which is actually a one-bedroom apartment, to find an equally drab secretary, Sally (Jeff Donnell), speaking on the phone with ‘Mr Weldon’. Grimly shaking his head ‘no’, he marches across to the open bedroom. Sally tells the client that Sidney is out, and through the open doorway we see him ripping off his coat and tie, beginning to change into fresh clothes. Sally explains that Weldon has called three times. ‘He wants me to break a leg?’ Sidney asks. ‘No, an arm,’ Sally explains. She moves to the doorway while Sidney steps behind it and quickly removes his pants. ‘That makes five days Mr Hunsecker has cut you out of his column,’ she observes maternally. ‘May I rent you out as an adding machine?’ he asks. This brief exchange establishes the relationship between the cow-eyed secretary and her employer, and also obeys one of Mackendrick’s major rules of script construction: exposition should grow out of dramatic conflict. A good deal of plot information is being fed to us, but the emotional dynamic between Sidney and Sally holds our interest and Hunsecker, whose photograph has been shown

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twice and name announced four times, has become a threatening figure in the background. We learn more about Sidney’s precarious finances when Sally tells him the rental agent and the tailors have called. ‘Pay the rent,’ he says as he stuffs a silk shirt into his pants, ‘and tell the tailor to wait. … Get me Joe Robard.’ Sally dials. Sidney takes the receiver, paces up and down, nervously bites a hangnail and tosses off the first of several grotesquely violent jokes which form another of the film’s verbal motifs: ‘Watch me run a fifty-yard dash with my legs cut off.’ Sidney breaks into to a salesman’s grin. ‘Hey, Joe!’ he cries, and immediately explains that Hunsecker has decided to hold off mention of the Elysian Club until the next column, when there will be space for a ‘fine, fat paragraph’. One of Odets’ contributions to this scene was to show the two sides of the telephone conversation. We cut to Robard (Joseph Leon), a Damon Runyon-esque fellow leaning against the bar in his club while in the deep-focus background musicians are setting up for a show. ‘You’re a liar,’ Robard tells Sidney, ‘that’s a publicity man’s nature. I wouldn’t hire you if you wasn’t a liar. I pay you a C and a half a week wherein you plant big lies about me and the club all over the map.’ But, he adds, ‘You are a personal liar, too, because you don’t do the work I pay you for.’ Both Robard and Sally are minor characters whose purpose is to provide information for the audience; Robard, for example, gives us a wry explanation of the work Sidney performs. But in addition – and this is a mark of good screenwriting – both are vivid types engaged in struggle with Sidney over their own desires and interests. Sally in particular makes a strong impression because we can sense that her relationship with Sidney is longstanding and, at some point in the past, sexual. Slightly overweight, lovesick, wearing a plain hairstyle and a dowdy dress, she approaches him as he sits on the edge of his bed in fear and worry. ‘I wish I could help in some way, Sidney,’ she says, ‘I hate to see you like this.’ Sidney abruptly stands and lashes out with one of the film’s cruelest lines, which Curtis

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speaks in close-up, in the tone of a cornered animal: ‘What’ll you do if I feel nervous? Open your meaty, sympathetic arms?’ His outburst inserts us forcefully and completely into the awful world of the film, where people are treated as things or pieces of meat; and it must have been especially shocking for the original audience, because it came from the mouth of a movie star who was hugely popular among teenaged girls. Crushed, Sally sits on the bed with a copy of Variety in her lap and fights off tears as Sidney restlessly taps a key on his typewriter. (A few chords of Elmer Bernstein’s theme music are played softly in the background.) ‘Oh, Sally, you ought to know me by now,’ he says, revealing a touch of self-disgust that will resurface at key moments. Then he resolutely turns to a mirror, checks his face, swiftly slips a necktie under his collar, inserts his cufflinks and announces, ‘I’m no hero. I’m nice to people when it pays me to be. … I’m in a bind right now with Hunsecker.’ Like us, Sally wants to know exactly why Sidney’s livelihood is being threatened and why he puts up with being treated so badly. He explains that he has failed to break up a romance between Hunsecker’s kid sister and ‘some guitar player’. This information is

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delivered casually, with the camera behind him, looking over his shoulder and down at Sally, as if Mackendrick were more interested in conveying the urgent need to placate Hunsecker than in giving us the precise reason for the urgency. In close-up, Sidney adds that Hunsecker is the ‘golden ladder to the places I want to get!’. Sally is disappointed. ‘You make a living,’ she says. ‘Where do you want to get?’ The rapid answer, filled with animal imagery and photographed from a low angle, is redolent of Odets’ proletarian, up-from-the-ghetto dramas of the 1930s, and a good example of the way Sidney mixes street patois with sub-literary clichés. It is also the only moment in the film when we are given a strong sense of Sidney’s background. Odets eliminated almost all signs of the working-class community that was represented in Lehman’s version of the film by Sidney’s mother, father, brother and uncle – a community that had been central to Odets’ own early dramas and to a novel such as Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?. As a result, Sidney seems more like a pure individualist, a self-created man in a postwar culture of individualism, smouldering with resentment for slights he has suffered and determined to achieve the only success possible in a social-Darwinist world. Donning his suit coat and popping his cuffs, he says he wants to get ‘way up high, where it’s always balmy’, where nobody snaps his fingers and orders, ‘Hey, shrimp, rack up the balls! … My experience I can tell you in a nutshell and I didn’t dream it in a dream: dog eat dog!’ Adjusting his tie, he concludes: ‘In brief, from now on the best of everything is good enough for me.’ Sally mournfully apologises. ‘I’m not telling you what to do, but I feel bad when Mr Hunsecker hurts you.’ Sidney stands rigidly, grim and revengeful. ‘Every dog will have his day,’ he says. Here and elsewhere, Curtis manages to convey a degree of wounded vulnerability even when the character is assertive and sleazy. As Derek Prouse remarked in his Sight & Sound review of the film’s original release, the ‘eruptive irritations, the insecurity behind the Yiddish bravado, the aggression with which [Sidney] defends a

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morally untenable position to his secretary – all these reveal a thoughtful and imaginative actor’. The acting style, Prouse observed, is in some ways indebted to the Method but is ‘not reduced to a series of cannily observed moments; rather, it reaches down to the heart of the matter, to what Stanislavsky was pleased to call the “through line of action” of the part and the whole’ (Prouse, 1957). It does this, moreover, by means of a subtly stylised behaviour, an expressive technique that owes its speed to the tradition of screwball newspaper comedies such as His Girl Friday (1940), but is used for much more disturbing ends. The phone rings and Sidney heads for the outer door. Ever maternal, Sally reminds him to take a topcoat, but he angrily replies that he doesn’t want to ‘leave a tip in every hat-check room in town’. (It was so cold in New York that in exterior scenes we often see steam from the actors’ breaths.) As Sally answers the phone a dissolve takes us to a close-up of the snapping fingers of a jazz musician who signals a downbeat. Bass, drums, cello and flute pick up the rhythm and the camera pulls back to show the Chico Hamilton Quintet, a real-life

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group specialising in cool ‘chamber jazz’, fronted by Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), the guitarist Sidney has mentioned. The smoky ‘Elysian Room’ is brightly lit and crowded with young, well-dressed jazz lovers. Like all the authentic-looking interiors of the film, it’s a Hollywood set designed by Edward Carrere, who built nightclubs two feet above the old Goldwyn studio soundstages and inserted smoke pots beneath them to generate the proper ambiance. Alexander Mackendrick beautifully handles the extras in this and other nightspots, filling them with lively, sharply individuated faces and bodies. Sidney has come here in search of Hunsecker’s sister, but first he encounters a worried cigarette girl, Rita (Barbara Nichols, a specialist in dumb, bosomy blonds, usually in comic films), who addresses him as ‘Eyelashes’ – one of several references to Curtis’s famous looks that Odets jokingly placed in the screenplay. He asks if Susan Hunsecker is around. ‘Can I talk to you?’ she asks pathetically, ‘I’m in trou …’. But Sidney has already walked away towards Frank D’Angelo, Steve Dallas’s agent and Sidney’s uncle. The only remaining member of a family that had populated Lehman’s original story and screenplay, D’Angelo is a working-class, salt-of-the earth type whom Sidney treats with contempt. (He is played by Sam Levene, a veteran character actor who had suffered under the blacklist; Levene acted in the Broadway play that first brought Burt Lancaster to the attention of Hollywood, and also appeared in Lancaster’s first film, The Killers.) Sidney accuses him of lying about a breakup between Dallas and Susan, and D’Angelo asks, ‘What the heck is it your business what they do, this boy and girl?’ Meanwhile Rita walks up and whispers in Sidney’s ear, informing him that Susan is outside, in back of the club. Odets moved the first scene with Dallas and Susan from a dressing room to a courtyard/alleyway, thus suggesting a furtive romance. Unfortunately, Falco and Hunsecker’s victims are a bit too much like Hollywood ingénues, exaggerating the melodrama. Martin (‘Marty’) Milner, acting in his first movie, looks like a clean-cut college boy (exactly the role he was given two years later in Richard

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Fleischer’s Compulsion [1959]), and Susan Harrison is a fresh-faced eighteen-year old from the Bronx who had studied acting with Sanford Meisner but whose only previous employment had been as a waitress and a model. Harrison is overshadowed by the professional actors, but in defence of the casting it might be noted that she bears a resemblance to Walter Winchell’s daughter, and that her character is supposed to be withdrawn, depressed and afraid to speak. Her initial close-up is eloquent: a young beauty in a lavish fur coat, she looks insecure and melancholy even when she smiles to greet a man she has agreed to marry. She immediately tells Dallas that she wants to delay announcement of their engagement until she has spoken with her brother, whom she tries to defend. ‘I’ll … I’ll try to be a good wife,’ she softly declares. Peering through the rear door of the club, Sidney spies the lovers and breaks in with a bright, phony grin: ‘Hi! Can more than two enjoy this?’ He claims to be in search of glossy photos to help publicise Dallas, and when Dallas brushes him off he becomes theatrically and nervously sarcastic – the first of several occasions

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during the course of the evening when his machinations lead to public embarrassment. ‘Let me apologise!’ he cries. ‘It’s been an honour serving you gratis!’ When Dallas accuses him of ‘snooping’, he adopts an ‘excuuuse-me’ tone and violent language: ‘Kill me! Push me through a window! I walked into this hallowed ground without knocking!’ D’Angelo and the jazz group now enter and become onlookers as Dallas says, ‘Next time you want information don’t scratch for it like a dog. Just ask for it like a man!’ In close-up, Sidney looks furious (‘Every dog will have his day,’ he has said earlier), but he endures the humiliation and stalks out through the gathered crowd, telling Susan, ‘If you’re going home, Susie, I’ll drop you off.’ Inside, Sidney meets Rita in a shadowed corner and keeps a lookout for Susan’s exit. ‘Are you listening?’ Rita asks. Sidney’s reply is another of the film’s irresistibly quotable lines: ‘Avidly, avidly.’ Most of the conversation is shot in a long take, with a subtle dolly of the camera inward and then back and forth as Sidney paces in a small half-circle, looks across the room, adroitly slips a pack of cigarettes from Rita’s tray (not for nothing had Curtis played Houdini in a biopic at Universal) and pays her when she snaps her fingers. She tells him that influential Broadway columnist Leo Bartha invited her to his

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apartment under the pretext of writing a news items about cigarette girls. For a moment the dialogue verges on a burlesque skit: ‘Where was his wife?’ Sidney asks. ‘I don’t know,’ Rita says, ‘it was a big apartment.’ When Bartha tried to seduce her, she was disoriented because it was so early in the day: ‘By the time I could’ve been put in a tropical island mood I was out on the street.’ We see Susan Hunsecker walking through a crowd towards the club’s exit, then return to the conversation, with the camera positioned behind Sidney’s head. He is looking towards Susan while Rita tells him that Bartha has complained to the Elysian’s owner, who is firing her. She wants Sidney to intercede. ‘I still have Sonny in military academy,’ she says. Sidney becomes momentarily attentive and suggests that perhaps he can do something. She coyly asks, ‘Do you still keep your key under the mat?’ He smiles, asks her to be there at two-thirty in the morning, and hastily goes outside. On the street, Sidney talks briefly with Susan and signals a cab. The ride is photographed in the studio using a process screen and requires a good deal of disclosive compensation on the part of Tony

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Curtis, who lets the audience see emotions that Susan presumably doesn’t see. (His job is made easier by the fact that Susan rarely looks anyone in the eye.) Much of the time he frowns, trying to learn just how much the relationship between her and Steve has progressed. (In the published screenplay [Odets and Lehman, 1998], which differs in many small ways from the film, there are hints in this scene that Sidney and Susan have been romantically involved.) Slouching with his chin in his hand, he laments that Steve thinks of J. J. Hunsecker as ‘some kind of monster’. ‘Don’t you?’ Susan asks. He sits up, pretending shock: ‘Susie! J. J. happens to be one of my very best friends!’ She smiles sadly and doubts that Sidney could be friends with someone who treats him as a ‘trained poodle’. As she talks about Steve, a close-up shows Sidney looking worried. ‘Wedding bells?’ he asks. Turning away with characteristic sadness, she describes Steve as someone who ‘likes me for myself’. Sidney leans towards her and makes an effort to play the flirtatious hipster: ‘Come on, chickie, I’m just gonna have to laugh at that – an attractive girl like you?’ She believes her brother is only pretending to like Steve.

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Sidney doubts this: ‘He’s told presidents where to go and what to do!’ But the act, she explains, is for her sake. When they arrive at the Brill Building Sidney walks her to the door and asks if she has any messages for her brother. She replies in close-up: ‘Tell him for me that Steve’s the first real man I’ve ever been in love with.’ The theme of manliness, already established in the previous scene, is emphasised whenever Susan appears, and indicates something about the phallic yet weirdly celibate J. J. Hunsecker’s deepest insecurities. As Susan walks into the building Sidney looks desperate. He swiftly moves to the waiting taxi and orders the driver to take him to the 21 Club, where he disembarks to the frenzied sound of Bernstein’s non-diegetic music. Moving through a crowd at the entrance, he bumps into James Weldon, the client who has been calling his office, and suffers a second public humiliation. The tuxedoed, cigar-smoking, slightly drunken Weldon launches into a tirade loud enough for everyone on the street to hear. Odets, who invented the scene, creates a ‘ricochet’ effect by giving Weldon a female companion in heavy makeup and a mink stole, who helps to motivate the loud harangue and makes it even more

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embarrassing. ‘This is my press agent,’ Weldon says to her, and turns to Sidney: ‘Take your hands out of my pocket, thief!’ When the woman restrains Weldon, Sidney accuses him of ‘showing off for the girl’, shouts ‘Drop dead’ and enters the club. The interior of 21, the film’s most expensive set, is a perfect replica of the famous Manhattan eatery, constructed with movable walls to accommodate Howe’s camera. Sidney approaches the maitre d’ and asks if Hunsecker is in. From Sidney’s point of view, we barely glimpse a few people seated beyond a doorway and hear the maitre d’ inform him (and us) that Hunsecker is at his customary table with ‘a senator, an agent and a thing with blond wavy hair’. Sidney again bites a hangnail, crosses to a small room off the entrance and asks a telephone operator to place a call to Hunsecker. Inside a darkened phone booth, he bends over the receiver almost prayerfully and rubs his forehead with his thumb as the camera moves to a tight close-up of his shadowed, anxious face. Hunsecker’s tinny voice is heard at the other end of the line. Sidney quietly, humbly asks to see him. ‘No,’ the voice says, ‘you’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.’

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Sidney has just told Weldon to drop dead and now, in a fashion reminiscent of Walter Winchell, has been sentenced to death himself (another death sentence will be issued in a moment). His career in the balance, he hangs up, steels himself, and marches into the dining room, standing quietly just behind Hunsecker’s shoulder. The ensuing scene, which in part I’ve already described, is our first experience of the villain, whose image and voice have preceded him, and is a good instance of what Orson Welles, speaking of his role in The Third Man (1949), called the ‘Mr Wu’ principle of dramatic construction. Welles told Peter Bogdanovich, ‘In theatre, you know, the old actors never liked to come on until the end of the first act. Mr Wu is a classic example. … All the other actors boil around the stage for about an hour shrieking “What will happen when Mr Wu arrives?,” “What is he like, this Mr Wu?,” and so on. Finally a great gong is beaten, and slowly over a Chinese bridge comes Mr Wu … That’s a star part for you’ (Welles and Bogdanovich, 1992, pp. 220–1). The same principle is at work in Welles’s Citizen Kane and Mr Arkadin (1955), and its influence here may be a result of the fact that HHL had considered Welles for the role of Hunsecker. But there is no reason to regret that Burt Lancaster took the part. He gives the film an authentic New York accent, a powerful physical presence and a frightening suggestion of contained violence. In real life Lancaster wore eyeglasses and Alexander Mackendrick proposed that he wear them here, so that he takes on the look of a scholarly brute. James Wong Howe adds to the effect by using a wide-angle lens for close-ups and a hard spotlight just above Lancaster that throws shadows from the glasses down over his eyes and cheekbones, making him seem hooded, almost reptilian. He is introduced in a low-level shot that emphasises his power as he takes notes with a gold pen, drinking coffee from a china cup. Despite his air of civilised fastidiousness and the aestheticised way he delivers some of his lines, he has a menacing quality and appears strong enough to crush everyone in sight. ‘Harvey,’ he says to the off-screen senator (a ricochet effect, since he is really speaking to Sidney),

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‘I often wish I were deaf and wore a hearing aid. With a simple flick of a switch I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men.’ Hunsecker is angry during most of the scene and Lancaster was reportedly angry during the filming of it. Mackendrick had blocked the action so that after Sidney gains access to the table by telling Hunsecker, ‘I’ve got a message from your sister,’ he slides into the seat next to him. Tony Curtis recalls that ‘Burt didn’t want to slide over. He wanted me to walk over to the other side of the table and sit down because he felt that his character wouldn’t let anyone box him in.’ According to Curtis, ‘Burt went apeshit. He got up and pushed the table over, sending all the plates and glasses and food crashing to the floor. Then he raised his fist. Sandy [Mackendrick] … didn’t back down. He was a strong man, and he wasn’t going to take any nonsense from anyone, even Burt. Burt took a deep breath, everyone calmed down, and we did it Sandy’s way’ (Curtis, 2008, p. 181). Curtis’s memory is slightly inaccurate. In the completed film a compromise was reached whereby Lancaster doesn’t slide over but Curtis pulls up a chair next to him and sits just behind his shoulder –

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a position that seems both conspiratorial and slavish. Mackendrick was correct in insisting that this staging is far better than having Sidney sit across the table. It enhances the ricochet dialogue by keeping Sidney visible next to Hunsecker, who half ignores him while putting him through still another of his public humiliations. The arrangement not only displays the psychological dynamic between two characters that seldom make eye contact, but also enables us to appreciate the performance of two stars who often share the same close-up. We witness moments when Sidney tries, with effort, to maintain a polite smile, and other moments, very precisely calibrated by Curtis, when he asserts himself, as when he tells the senator that a man who telephones Hunsecker during the conversation ‘has just been sentenced to death’. The staging is especially effective when Hunsecker, after describing Sidney to the other parties at the table as ‘a hungry press agent fully up on all the slimy tricks of his trade’, picks up a cigarette, turns to Sidney and says ‘match me’. (Philip Kemp points out that this line has a double meaning, since Sidney aspires to be like J. J.) Coolly looking Hunsecker in the eye, confident that he has important information, Sidney replies, ‘Not just this minute, J. J.’ The interaction with the other characters is edited in shotreverse shots, jumping back and forth across the table. Lancaster gets most of the close-ups, but as Hunsecker systematically tyrannises the four people around him the communicative currents run counter to the eye-lines. When the insecure young blond (Autumn Russell) speaks to Hunsecker, he looks at her but indirectly talks to the men around her. When the senator (William Forrest) tries to change the subject by asking Sidney what kind of work a press agent does, his question sparks a cutting exchange between Sidney and Hunsecker, who ostensibly speak to the people across the table. Gazing at the senator, Hunsecker accuses Sidney of peddling ‘cheap, gruesome gags’ and declares ‘The day I can’t get along without press agent’s hand-outs, I’ll close-up shop and move to Alaska!’ The agent (Jay Adler) treats the remark as a joke, but he only fuels Hunsecker’s rage

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and produces a series of direct confrontations. ‘You rode here on the senator’s shirt-tails,’ Hunsecker says to the agent, ‘so shut your mouth!’ In a large close-up, the senator comes to the defence: ‘Why is it that everything you say sounds like a threat?’ In another large close-up, Hunsecker leans forward, fixes his eyes intensely on the senator, and speaks with exaggerated sincerity. His anger – prompted by Sidney’s failure to do his bidding, his general contempt for others and his pathological dislike of the woman across the table – finds satisfactory outlet. ‘I don’t threaten friends, Harvey,’ he says, smiling sweetly. ‘Someday, God willing, you may want to become President.’ Then, in one of the film’s most quoted lines, he savagely comments on the arrangement at the table: ‘Now here you are … out in the open, where any hep person knows that this one’ (camera looks at agent) ‘is touting that one’ (camera quickly dollies right to woman) ‘around for you’ (cut to senator). The crab-like movement of the camera, one of the most effective visual effects in the film, was specified in Odets’ screenplay and is nicely executed by Howe in a style that expresses the full violence of Hunsecker’s gaze. ‘Are we friends or what?’ Hunsecker says. Cut to a high angle as he rises, invites the chastened senator to appear on his TV show and advises him to go and ‘sin no more’. The camera tracks with the tall, triumphant columnist as he strolls out like a grand seigneur, telling the maitre d’ not to allow the senator to pay for the meal. ‘President!’ he mutters to Sidney, who trails along behind. ‘My big toe would make a better President!’ Various attendants bow and scrape as he claims his topcoat and exits to the street. ‘Where’s your coat, Sidney?’ he asks. ‘Saving tips?’ Sidney points across the way to ‘your fat friend’, and we cut to Lieutenant Harry Kello (Emil Meyer) seated with his partner in a nearby police car, his face given a sinister, low-level lighting from the dashboard. (Meyer, who made memorable appearances in Shane [1953] and Paths of Glory [1957], was not the original choice for this role. Ernest Borgnine, who had played a sadistic military-prison

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guard in From Here to Eternity, was the leading candidate but was passed over because he was involved in a lawsuit against HHL over money he claimed was due for his Academy-award performance in Marty.) As Hunsecker crosses the street, Kello gets out of the car and greets him in drawling, badly accented Italian: ‘Buonasera, commendatore. Come sta?’ Hunsecker turns to Sidney and remarks

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that Kello likes ‘your people’. Kello adds, almost as if in reference to Tony Curtis, ‘I’m good on Yiddish, too.’ One of the many changes Odets made to Lehman’s original script was to give Sidney a visceral hatred and fear of Kello, which is reciprocated by Kello’s evident sexual pleasure at the prospect of beating up a pretty young smart-aleck. Learning from Hunsecker that

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Sidney has just called him ‘fat’, he chuckles at ‘the boy with the icecream face’ – another of Odets’ sly references to Curtis’s looks. (‘That’s good,’ Hunsecker says. ‘In fact, it’s apt!’) When he offers to shake Sidney’s hand, Sidney backs away, trying to act amused, not wanting to be tricked by ‘the strongest cop on the force’, and showing a trace of panic that foreshadows the climactic scene of the film. Hunsecker recalls that he once saved Kello from the wrath of a citizen’s committee. ‘I didn’t mean to hit the boy that hard,’ Kello murmurs. In a manner again reminiscent of Walter Winchell, Hunsecker leans into the window of the police car to check on the status of an ‘item’: a ‘doll’ in Bellevue hospital might the source of a ‘heart-throb’ story. Kello’s partner reports that she died twenty minutes ago, and Hunsecker shrugs, ‘That’s show business.’ Waving farewell, he re-crosses the street, followed by Sidney. Kello shouts, ‘Hasta la vista, J. J. Hasta luego.’ Cut to Sidney, who looks back resentfully and says, ‘That must show he likes spicks, too.’ Pausing in the distance, Hunsecker muses, ‘I like Harry, but I can’t deny he sweats a little.’ The tone of the film has grown ever more blackly humorous. When a ruckus breaks out on the street and a drunk is tossed from a

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bar, Hunsecker turns away, smiles and speaks one of his definitive lines, which Lancaster delivers with relish: ‘I love this dirty town!’ The camera tracks as he signals a waiting limousine and strolls down the street, Sidney moving alongside and circling like an anxious Mosca dealing with a cold, impervious master. Hunsecker orders Sidney to ‘Conjugate me a verb … for instance, to promise.’ Sidney’s anguished response gives another hint of his troubled conscience and reveals that he has no illusions about Hunsecker’s character; at the same time, it gives us a glimpse into his desperate need for Hunsecker’s patronage. ‘About a year ago,’ he reminds Hunsecker, ‘you asked me to do a favour. It was a thing – well, I never did a thing that dirty in all my life!’ Nevertheless, he is continuing to help. ‘I don’t like this job!’ he says. ‘I’ll do it – don’t get me wrong … but stop beating me around the head. Let me make a living!’ When Hunsecker insists that Sidney must do as he promised, Sidney stops him in his tracks by announcing, ‘That boy proposed to her.’ But not to worry, Sidney explains, he has a plan to solve the problem this very night: ‘The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.’ As Hunsecker steps to his waiting limousine, a light from the car’s interior gives his face an eerie effect and the street lamps in the distance look serene, almost romantic. He warns Sidney not to be ‘a two-time loser’ and drives off, spattering dirty water on Sidney’s trousers. Like many classic Hollywood films, Sweet Smell is structured in three ‘acts’, the first of which ends here. Bernstein’s theme music accompanies a dissolve to Toots Shor’s restaurant, where Sidney tries to blackmail Leo Bartha, one of Hunsecker’s rivals, into printing a scandalous story about Steve Dallas. The set is another accurate copy, featuring the restaurant’s distinctive round bar; but the most impressive aspect of the scene is the way Odets and Mackendrick give life to Sidney’s intrigue by means of two nicely acted minor characters: Bartha (Lawrence Dobkin) and his wife, Loretta (Lurene Tuttle). ‘How goes that Sunday piece on cigarette girls?’ Sidney asks when he encounters Bartha coming out of the men’s room. Moving through the crowd to Bartha’s table, he ostentatiously remarks,

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‘I never had the pleasure of meeting your wife.’ The mise en scène conveys a marriage settled into boring routine: a stylish middle-aged woman sits next to a bottle of champagne. ‘New York State, that’s the kind he buys me,’ she tells Sidney in a wry, sociable tone, writing in the margins of a horse-racing newspaper while her husband takes a chair across the table and sullenly eats a club sandwich. Sidney manoeuvres his way to a seat at the table and Mackendrick frames the three figures with the wife somewhat apart, preoccupied with her racing form. ‘It’s compensation,’ she says, ‘for the marginal life I lead.’ Sidney, a practised flirt, chats with the wife, makes insinuating remarks and tries to pass a note containing a ‘blind item’ for Bartha’s column. The few close-ups are given to the wife, who gradually realises that a clandestine struggle is going on between Sidney and her husband. Suddenly Bartha rises and signals a waiter. Snatching the racing form from his wife’s hand, he accidentally knocks over her glass and spills champagne on her dress – a nice dramatic touch that adds to the mistreatment of the wife, attracts attention to the table and creates an air of wince-inducing

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embarrassment. ‘Lorrie,’ Bartha says, ‘I can’t let this man blackmail me.’ Sidney looks flustered as Bartha apologises to his wife for ‘kidding around’ with a cigarette girl who ‘took it seriously’. Turning to Sidney, he announces loudly that despite ‘my bilious private life’, he runs a decent column – this in contrast with Sidney’s ‘man’ Hunsecker, who has ‘the morals of a guinea pig and the scruples of a gangster!’. The restaurant has grown hushed and several customers in the background are looking on, witnesses to Sidney’s third public humiliation. Bartha’s wife rises and calmly tells Sidney he has ‘laid an egg’. With dignity, she allows her husband to put a fur coat around her shoulders, and as they exit she says, ‘Leo, this is one of the cleanest things I’ve seen you do in years.’ This scene was probably designed to suggest that not all Broadway columnists are completely horrible, but it also motivates a dark joke that plunges us directly back into the world of shameless lies and manipulation. Pulling himself together, Sidney looks around and from his point of view we see columnist Otis Elwell (David White, who later played a similar role in Wilder’s The Apartment [1960]) seated alone at a shadowy distant table, flourishing a cigarette holder and grinning with decadent pleasure. Elwell beckons

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Sidney, and as they talk we quickly learn that Elwell dislikes Hunsecker and is also a libertine (one of the magazines on his table contains pinups and he hungrily eyes a couple of showgirls who walk past on their way to the dining room). Pretending to be outraged at Hunsecker, Sidney blithely appropriates Bartha’s indignant speech: ‘I make no brief for my bilious private life, but he’s got the morals of a guinea pig and the scruples of a gangster!’ As incentive to print a nasty item about Susan Hunsecker’s boyfriend, he offers Elwell the chance to meet a ‘lovely someone’ who is ‘good and bad … and available’. A direct cut takes us to Rita, garbed in sweater and capri pants, reclining on the bed in Sidney’s office, reading Esquire and listening to a jazz recording of ‘I’m Biding my Time’ on the radio. Hearing the doorbell, she checks herself in a mirror and pads barefoot through the darkened front room to the entrance, where Sidney is visible through pebbled glass. Mackendrick’s blocking of this scene creates effective business for everyone and Howe’s camera gives Rita, whom the censors had insisted must be an unwilling participant, a series of large, impressively lighted close-ups that emphasise her humiliation. Opening the office door, she stands silhouetted against the hallway, ready to offer a kiss; then the tall figure of Otis Elwell steps into view

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behind Sidney. A reverse-angle close-up throws harsh light on her dashed and fearful face, which is beginning to show its age. As the two men enter and Sidney switches on the overhead light, she backs away stiffly, giving ‘tricky Otis’ a scowling, child-like ‘hello’. Sidney removes Elwell’s coat, smiles and announces that ‘Otis was real outraged when I told him Van Cleve was going to fire you.’ Elwell leers at Rita, strolls around, eyes the bedroom and says the office is ‘cozy’. Sidney hurriedly mixes drinks and explains that Elwell is going to instruct Rita’s boss ‘not to pay attention to anything youknow-who says about you-know-what’. Ellwell insists he knows Rita from somewhere and sits jauntily on the corner of a desk while she stands rigidly at a distance, frowning and denying she has met him. When Sidney fusses with papers and needs to go out for ‘one of those business meetings’, Rita storms into the bedroom and slams the door. Elwell jokes: ‘Consternation reigns’. He prepares to leave, but Sidney asks indulgence and rushes after Rita. In the bedroom, Rita packs an overnight bag and looks for a missing shoe. ‘Don’t you think I have any feelings?’ she shouts. ‘I beg your pardon,’ Sidney replies, making an elaborate, courtly bow – a parody of the sort of thing Tony Curtis performed in his swashbuckling films. She hobbles to the closed bedroom door and pauses and we cut to a second tight close-up, a dark shadow falling over the top half of her bowed, dejected face. ‘Sidney,’ she says quietly, ‘I don’t do this sort of thing.’ ‘What sort of thing?’ we hear him ask from off screen. ‘This kind of thing,’ Rita insists, her head still bowed. Tony Curtis’s movement in the subsequent medium shot has a diabolic quality. ‘I need his column – tonight,’ he insists. He leans close to Rita’s back and says ‘Didn’t you ask me to do something about your job?’ Then he swiftly moves around to her right. ‘Don’t you have a kid in military school?’ Nearing tears, Rita turns, crosses back into the room and softly calls him a ‘snake’ and a ‘louse’. With Mephistophelian ease, he reaches for the highball he put aside upon entering and holds it out to her. ‘How many snorts does it take to put you in that tropical island mood?’

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Leaving Elwell and Rita, Sidney hurries to the nearby juice stand and telephones Hunsecker, who sits in his penthouse aerie at an impressive desk, wearing a topcoat, sipping coffee, smoking and typing his column with two fingers. The set design suggests everything Sidney regards as life ‘way up high’ – not only money, but also tasteful luxury. Hunsecker asks the correct spelling of ‘Picasso’, which the surprisingly more erudite Sidney provides, adding that Steve Dallas is doomed: ‘Starting today you can play marbles with his eyeballs.’ Hunsecker warns Sidney not to call again in case Susan might overhear. Hanging up, he rises and moves through shadows to peer into her bedroom. A reverse angle looking across the sleeping woman as he stands near her doorway gives the film its strongest indication of incestuous eroticism. Worried, he wanders to the penthouse balcony, where an over-the-shoulder matte shot shows him looking down like a lonely king on the lights of Broadway and Times Square. Bernstein’s theme music rises to a crazed pitch and we dissolve to a daylight view of the street from the same angle, with Hunsecker no longer present.

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At street level, Sidney takes a morning newspaper from a vendor and scans Elwell’s column; smiling, he vigorously throws the paper into a waste basket – a reversal of his attitude in the opening scene. He enters The Globe to visit Hunsecker’s busy secretary, Mary (Edith Atwater), a mature woman who has a tough-minded yet maternal attitude towards Sidney. This is the film’s only glimpse of the inner workings of a newspaper office, and Hunsecker, a god-like figure who delivers his opinion from on high, is significantly nowhere present. Mary reads aloud the smear of Steve Dallas, which accuses the guitar player of being not only a communist and a dope fiend, but also a member of the cultural elite: ‘The dreamy marijuana smoke of a lad who heads a highbrow jazz quintet is giving an inelegant odour to that elegant East Side club where he works. That’s no way for a card-holding Party Member to act. Moscow won’t like you, you naughty boy!’ Cheerfully, Sidney manoeuvres around Mary’s cluttered desk, trying to flirt with her while peeking at a proof-page of Hunsecker’s column. ‘You’re a real rascal,’ Mary says with friendly detachment, offering one of the film’s many explicit judgments of him: ‘You’re an amusing boy, but there isn’t a drop of respect in you for anything alive – you’re too immersed in the theology of making a fast buck. Not that I don’t sometimes feel that you yearn for something better.’ She hands him the proof page on the condition that he says nothing about it and stops behaving ‘like a boy stealing gum from a candy machine’. Sidney discovers from the column that Hunsecker has given an unsolicited plug to a burlesque comic: ‘If there’s a more hilarious funny man around than Herbie Temple at the Palace, you’ll have to pardon us for not catching the name. We were too busy screaming.’ This motivates him to scurry off to the Palace, where he tricks Temple and his agent (Joe Frisco and Lewis Charles) into believing that he, Sidney, has the inside track to Hunsecker and can boost the comic’s career. (As Tony Curtis enters the stage door on 46th Street, James Hill and Clifford Odets can be very briefly glimpsed at a shoeshine stand.) Alexander Mackendrick has pointed out that while this

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scene retains a good deal of language from Ernest Lehman’s original screenplay, it does little more than ‘further illustrate Sidney’s devious methods’. It remains in the film, however, because it allows Sidney a measure of success, providing ‘relief from the picture of the young man who is so at the mercy of his co-conspirator’ (Mackendrick, 2004, p. 159). Mackendrick stages much of the action in a long take, with the camera unobtrusively dollying as Sidney paces around Temple and the agent. The chief pleasure is Tony Curtis’s performance-within-performance when Sidney pretends to be speaking to Hunsecker on the telephone. Like a smooth version of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1983), he becomes caught up in a narcissistic fantasy: ‘J. J., Sidney! How are you, sweetheart?’ He asks if it’s too late to add something important to the column. ‘If you’ve got a pencil there I’ll suggest a word or two.’ Pondering a moment, he dictates the lines we heard in the previous scene, ostensibly revising as he goes along: ‘pardon us for not catching the name, we were too busy laughing – no, make that screaming’. Then he becomes quietly intimate: ‘It’s sweet of you, J. J., thanks. Probably see you at 21 tonight. No, for supper, late. Bye.’ Hanging up, he pauses for a beat, enjoying the fantasy.

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Next Sidney goes to his office, where Steve Dallas and Frank D’Angelo are waiting. A tense confrontation between Sidney and Dallas ensues, but its chief function is to motivate a subsequent, more dramatic confrontation between Dallas and Hunsecker. Dallas is convinced that Sidney or Hunsecker or both must have been responsible for the newspaper smear. Still chafing from the previous night’s emasculating encounter, Sidney becomes angrily defensive. ‘I don’t like you, period! But neither do I go along with this column saying you smoke marijuana and belong with the reds!’ He points out that Hunsecker will be upset by the story on several grounds: he and Elwell hate one another, Hunsecker believes in ‘fair play’, and the rumour about Dallas makes Hunsecker’s sister seem guilty by association. The most unexpected and powerful moment occurs when Sidney suddenly expostulates, ‘Well, I tell you what – excuse me for breathing, will ya?’ Tony Curtis delivers the line wild-eyed, utterly forsaking his usual star image, his body twisting into an effeminate pose that conveys anger, defensiveness and fear. When D’Angelo and Dallas exit on their way to keep the jazz quintet from being fired, Sidney is left with his hang-dog but disapproving secretary. He takes the telephone into his bedroom and calls Hunsecker, who answers in pyjamas and robe at his breakfast table overlooking the Manhattan skyline, again surrounded by signifiers of taste and power. Hunsecker is disturbed to learn that Steve Dallas is suspicious, but Sidney promises that things are under control. ‘You have to play your part. You be the Saint and let me be the Devil.’ Hunsecker orders Sidney to meet him ‘at the TV’ where he rehearses his weekly broadcast. As he hangs up, Susan enters, wearing her mink coat; she has received a telephone call from Steve and is carrying a newspaper. This is our first direct evidence of how she and her brother interact, and Lancaster plays it skilfully, towering over the insecure young woman yet suggesting a fear of losing her. Hunsecker barely allows his sister to speak while grandly claiming to have her interests at heart. His every speech is delivered with hammy sincerity and sudden changes of attitude. First, he’s the

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sympathetically concerned patriarch: ‘Susie, come here a minute, dear … you’re very much in my thoughts today … . Anything to these charges?’ When Susan answers with a determined ‘no’ and mentions Sidney as a possible culprit, he tries to tamp down her emotion. ‘Susie, take it easy. I trust your judgment.’ He holds out his arms and she reluctantly enters his embrace. ‘You know, dear,’ he says, ‘we’re drifting apart … and I don’t like that.’ She tries to push the conversation back to Dallas and Sidney, but Hunsecker wards her off by becoming the angry patriarch: ‘Let me finish, dear. You had your say, now let me have mine!’ Susie quietly points out that she hasn’t been able to say anything and insists that he prove his concern by saving Dallas’s job. Forced to appear helpful, he now becomes the good-hearted chap, his volume rising like the con man Lancaster later played in Elmer Gantry (1960): ‘Susie, I like this new attitude of yours! You’re growing up and I like it! I don’t like it when you’re limp and dependent. … This Dallas boy must be good for you. Why not bring him around today, before the show? This time I’ll clean my glasses for a better look. A man couldn’t ask for a

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squarer shake.’ Crossing to his telephone, he calls the owner of the Elysian Club and makes a show of insisting that Dallas should not be fired. Sidney has told Hunsecker ‘You have to play your part,’ and the climactic confrontation between Hunsecker and Dallas is appropriately set in a theatre/television studio on Sixth Avenue, where Hunsecker makes his weekly broadcasts. (A poster outside the theatre reveals that the title of the Hunsecker show is It’s a Wonderful World.) Approaching the entrance, Sidney notices Susan on the sidewalk and avoids her by using a door in an alleyway. During the few next minutes he is at his most Mosca-like, hovering around Hunsecker and guiding him towards a blow-up with Dallas. As promised, he also plays the role of Devil; at one point, as he perches at the edge of the stage, his widow’s peaks make him look distinctly Satanic. First, however, we see Hunsecker practising his closing speech for the upcoming television broadcast while one of his guests, an older woman who vaguely resembles Hedda Hopper, gazes adoringly at him. (Several minutes were cut from Sweet Smell after the initial press showing, and I suspect some of them came from here: the well-known character actor Philip Van Zandt is briefly visible in the role of a TV director, but has no lines.) ‘You know, and I know, that our best secret weapon is D-E-M-O-C-R-A-C-Y,’ Hunsecker proclaims, then becomes humble: ‘Let’s not forget it, ladies and gentlemen.’ Sidney approaches and follows as Hunsecker pretends to study the script while moving off to a dark, off-stage corner by a water cooler, cleverly lit by Howe in expressive shadow. Hunsecker quietly complains that he has been forced to restore Dallas’s job because Susan knows about Sidney’s ‘dirty work’. Sidney shrugs it off, confident that everything is going well; if the next few minutes are played correctly, he argues, Dallas won’t accept Hunsecker’s favour; Dallas suffers from ‘integrity’, Sidney explains, ‘acute, like indigestion’. Hunsecker looks at him with a mixture of contempt and admiration: ‘I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.’ Sidney smiles, enjoying the compliment.

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Outside, Dallas and D’Angelo arrive and are met by Susan in the lobby, but before they confer Sidney appears, acting surprised and ushering them into the rehearsal. Hunsecker grandly steps from the stage to meet the group as they move down the aisle, remarking that it ‘looks like a wedding’. The writing and direction here are especially good at using the different motives of the five characters to create an almost musical dynamic of insinuation and shifting emotions; it’s also a scene that requires the actors to pay close attention to their marks and movements, especially in the opening shot, a long take. The two figures at the centre of the action are Dallas and Hunsecker, with Susan, D’Angelo and Sidney arranged around them like a chorus. Dallas, who has met Susan’s brother only once, squelches his distaste and politely but stiffly thanks Hunsecker for using his influence. In a paternalistic tone that veils hostility, Hunsecker asks a return favour: Dallas must give assurances that he will be good to Susan (in the background, Sidney pipes up, ‘Yeah, she’s had a peck of trouble for a kid’) and that he isn’t ‘just tomcatting around’. Susan, relegated to near silence, tries to object, but Hunsecker cuts her off, claiming that Dallas ‘wouldn’t be much of a man’ if he refused. (The theme of manliness has again surfaced in the context of who will possess

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Susan.) Dallas sullenly agrees and Hunsecker boomingly compliments him on being ‘sober as a deacon’. The camera then dollies as Hunsecker crosses to Sidney, who has unobtrusively moved out of sight and taken a seat in the second row of the theatre. ‘If Sidney ever got anywhere near Susie,’ Hunsecker says calmly, ‘I’d take a baseball bat and break it over his head.’ This line ironically foreshadows the final scenes of the film and also serves as a ricochet, implicitly threatening Dallas and giving Susan a glimpse of the violence she fears. Sidney, looking pleased, reaches out to light Hunsecker’s cigarette – a gesture he refused to make previously at the 21 Club. Sitting down and addressing Dallas, Hunsecker suddenly becomes aggressive: ‘Sidney lives so much in moral twilight, he predicted … you’d chew up the job and spit it right back in my face! Any truth in that?’ He points a finger threateningly at Dallas, his tone in sharp contrast with the earlier scene when he indulgently asked Susan, ‘Any truth to these charges?’ In a low-level, reverse-angle shot from over Hunsecker’s shoulder, D’Angelo tries to protect Dallas

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before he can show anger, but Hunsecker coolly orders D’Angelo to be quiet. Sidney echoes the order, rising from his seat and telling his uncle, ‘Keep your mouth shut!’ This further provokes Dallas, who loses his calm and begins to ask a series of angry questions. ‘Who are you,’ he asks Sidney, ‘to tell a man like Frank D’Angelo to shut up?’ To Hunsecker, he asks, ‘Does he have to be here?’ Hunsecker sees an opportunity. ‘Why do you keep coupling me with Falco?’ he asks in return. Dallas parries with another heated question and another of the film’s animal references: ‘Do you think, sir, when [Falco] dies he’ll go to dog and cat heaven?’ In response, Sidney rushes forward and stands at the front of the stage, where he delivers an outraged speech that also functions as an in-joke about the language of the film: ‘Let’s forget about dogs and cats and all that other pseudo-literary junk,’ he shouts. Then he drops the explosive news that Dallas and D’Angelo visited him earlier in the day, when, ‘according to Saint Dallas, J. J. was responsible for the Elwell smear!’. The scene has reached a turning point, and everyone excitedly tries to speak. Hunsecker quiets them. ‘If you’re tired Susie, sit

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down,’ he says in his fake fatherly tone, ‘this needs investigation.’ As she sits, Hunsecker and Dallas square off at the centre of the shot, with Sidney in the background, and Dallas becomes more assertive towards Hunsecker than anyone has dared to be. Hunsecker’s response is to deflect everything back to Susan. ‘Susan Hunsecker is the injured party here,’ he declares authoritatively. Dallas congratulates him on having ‘more twists than a barrel of pretzels’ and tries to get Susan to say publicly that she wants to marry. Standing over the mute, fearful young woman, Hunsecker speaks with exaggerated solicitude: ‘Susie, as always, is free to say anything she thinks. Go on, dear, say exactly what’s on your mind, dear.’ Dallas, also standing over the frightened girl, accuses him of bullying her, and Hunsecker seems on the verge of violence. ‘Son, you raise your voice again and I’ll … .’ This causes the terrified Susan to break her silence: ‘Please, please stop!’ she cries, and runs up the steps to the stage in tears. Hunsecker remarks, ‘We may have to call this game on account of darkness.’ Dallas makes explicit the film’s judgment: ‘To you, you’re a national glory, but to me, and thousands of others like me, you and your slimy scandal, your phony patriotics – to me, Mr Hunsecker, you’re a national disgrace!’ In the background, Sidney smiles and applauds softly. Hunsecker orders Dallas out with a quiet threat: ‘Here’s your head. What’s your hurry?’ As Dallas exits, a lowlevel close-up shows Hunsecker looking intently after him. Hovering just behind Hunsecker, Sidney whispers, ‘You did it, J. J.! You did it good!’ But Hunsecker’s victory is Pyrrhic. Going to Susan in the wings of the stage, he stands behind her, framed in a tight close-up, and speaks uncertainly: ‘Susie … I’d have to take it very much amiss if you ever saw that boy again.’ Reverse angle: on the verge of tears, she turns and levelly but without affect says, ‘I’ll never see him again.’ When he tries to kiss her cheek, she closes her eyes in revulsion, submits passively and exits the theatre. As Sidney follows, Hunsecker orders his secretary to call Van Cleve at the Elysian and tell him ‘the

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Dallas boys are not worthy of his club’. Out on the street, Sidney tries to step into Susan’s taxi, but she slams the door on his fingers. This gesture marks the end of the film’s second act, which neatly rhymes with the ending of the first act: for the second time in twenty-four hours, a member of the Hunsecker family has punished Sidney with an automobile. That evening, Sidney and Hunsecker meet for dinner at 21, where the mise en scène has a symbolic quality, suggesting a mirrored relation between the two characters. Side-by-side places are set at Hunsecker’s table, along with identical Gibson cocktails and oysters on the half shell – an arrangement that indicates Sidney’s new status and facilitates certain important bits of business. The conversation is photographed mostly in two-shots, cutting back and forth from either side of the table. A sullen Hunsecker snaps at the over-attentive waiters, sending them away, and begins to eat while Sidney becomes anxiously cheerful, proclaiming that the relation between Susan and Steve has turned into a ‘farce’ and will soon be over. ‘This syrup you’re giving out you pour over waffles,’ Hunsecker

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sneers, ‘not over J. J. Hunsecker.’ He grasps Sidney’s necktie and pulls it towards him in an emasculating, violently contemptuous gesture that makes Sidney recoil. A mad look comes over his face: ‘Am I supposed to forget what that kid said to me today?’ Tony Curtis gives a nice reading of Sidney’s response – an appeal to Hunsecker’s ego, delivered in a softly pleading tone: ‘J. J.! Is he worthy of a second glance from a man like you?’ ‘Bite on this,’ Hunsecker says, holding out an envelope and explaining that he has tickets for himself and Susan to sail to Europe on the Queen Mary. He quietly and viciously announces that he wants Steve Dallas ‘taken apart’. Writing with his golden pen on his personal notepaper, he tells Sidney to handle the matter. He passes the note to Sidney and an insert shows that it orders him to ‘Get Kello. Tonight.’ ‘I think I’m going home,’ Sidney darkly and wearily jokes. ‘Maybe I left my sense of humour in my other suit.’ Hunsecker calmly insists that he isn’t motivated by ‘personal pique’. His rationale is that ‘Today that boy wiped his feet on the choice and the predilections of 60 million people in the greatest country in the

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world.’ The largest close-up in the sequence accentuates his crazed expression and casts a shadow across his face as he says, ‘It wasn’t me he criticised. It was my readers!’ Sidney recoils in fear: ‘It’s one thing to wear a dog collar. When it turns into a noose I’d rather have my freedom.’ He stands, and we cut to a high-angle reverse shot looking past him down at Hunsecker, who confidently predicts that Sidney will always be a prisoner of fear, greed and ambition – three qualities that have been abundantly evident throughout. Sidney passionately denies this charge, swearing on his mother’s life that he would never accede to Hunsecker’s demand: ‘If you gave me your column I wouldn’t do a thing like that!’ Suddenly, he does a double take and the rhythm of the scene changes. Hunsecker, eyes gleaming with pleasure, asks ‘Who do you think writes the column while Susie and I are away for three months?’ A moment of truth has arrived and Sidney’s last shred of decency falls away. He sits down at his place, ‘matching’ Hunsecker and becoming his partner in crime. ‘And Sidney,’ Hunsecker pleasantly says, ‘I’ll have that piece of paper back.’

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Inside the Brill Building, Steve and Susan are also seated sideby-side in an empty diner – an ironic visual rhyme with the previous scene. She’s proud of the way he stood up to Hunsecker, but also frightened. Huddling in her mink coat, she trembles as she lights a cigarette. She can’t look Steve in the face when she explains that they must part because ‘my brother is capable of doing very great harm’. Covering her ears, she bows her head and won’t listen to Steve’s arguments. The two young lovers have a last kiss, underscored by Elmer Bernstein’s yearning music, and Steve walks off into the night with Frank D’Angelo. At Robards’ club later that evening, Sidney slips marijuana cigarettes into Steve’s coat and goes to inform Kello. He is stopped at the exit by D’Angelo, who resentfully tells him that the young couple has broken up. Obviously guilty, Sidney moves out to the street, which brims with noir visuals: wet pavement glistening under lights from the jazz club; impenetrable shadows; a black, unmarked police car; and two silhouetted cops in hats and topcoats. Kello, again lit from below, greets Sidney with sadistic amusement, grasping his lapel and observing that the ice-cream face is ‘melting’. ‘Listen, rectify me a certain thing,’ he says. ‘Wasn’t you kidding, Snooks, when you told J. J. I was fat?’ Sidney backs away to a safe distance and shouts, ‘J. J. says you sweat!’ He moves to a stairway leading to a street above, tells Kello he is a ‘fat slob’, and dashes up the steps. Like a sinister Santa Claus, Kello rears back in hearty laughter. ‘Ha, ha, ha; come back, Sidney!’ he calls. A wide-angle, deep-focus shot, Wellesian in style, looks vertiginously down at Kello as Sidney’s head reaches the top of the stairway and disappears at the bottom of the frame: ‘I want to chastise you!’ Kello shouts. Sidney walks along a curving sidewalk, huddled against cold night air and heavy traffic, as if he inhabited a film noir version of a circle in Dante’s hell. He pauses at the balustrade and from over his shoulder we see Steve exiting the jazz club below. Sidney nods to Kello. As Steve walks down the empty street, the police car pulls up behind him and Kello gets out; the car moves ahead, stops and Kello’s

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partner gets out. A low-angle close-up shows Steve’s reaction as the two men approach. Cut to a crashing cymbal inside the jazz club. The next brief scene serves to motivate the film’s closing action. We look down on the circular bar at Toots Shor’s, where Sidney is drowning his guilt. He orders drinks for a gaggle of fellow press agents and proposes a toast to ‘My favourite new perfume: Success!’ The bartender tells him that J. J. Hunsecker has just called and wants him to come right away. He weaves drunkenly to the exit, contemptuously waving aside the comic Herbie Temple, and a dissolve takes us to Hunsecker’s penthouse. Sidney finds the door partly open and tentatively enters the shadowed front room, calling out for J. J. The camera dollies with him as he moves around. He arrives at Susan’s bedroom door, which he pushes open to find halfpacked luggage on the bed and Susan on a balcony outside, wearing a slip and her fur coat. As we’ve seen, the melodramatic concluding encounter between Sidney, Susan and Hunsecker, which creates a kind of poetic justice, involved much revision of the screenplay. It was also a source of contention when it was finally shot. According to Mackendrick, Lancaster rejected some of Odets’ ideas because they required Hunsecker to become histrionic, behaving in ways unsuited to Lancaster’s range as an actor. (Perhaps more likely, the ideas weren’t in keeping with the steely, repressed way he had chosen to portray the character.) In addition, Lancaster and Harold Hecht quarrelled with Mackendrick on the set because they wanted a final confrontation between Hunsecker and Sidney to occur after Susan’s exit. Lancaster argued that the film needed to end with a ‘shoot-out’ between the two stars, which was in fact the way Lehman’s original script had ended. But Mackendrick insisted that Susan’s decision to leave was the dramatic high point and that any further exchange between Hunsecker and Sidney would be anticlimactic (Kemp, 1991, p. 159). Mackendrick’s point was not only dramatically valid but also offered a certain relief from the film’s atmosphere of aggressive masculinity. Given that the production was administered by the two male stars

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and imbued from the start with a spirit of womanising, it must have required all the director’s ingenuity and strength of will to persist in giving an ingénue actress the last word. He shot the closing sequences his way, but Lancaster and Hecht ordered the film’s editor, Alan Crosland, to change the order of events so as to favour the two stars. Mackendrick then stayed without pay during post-production in order to plead his case. When his version was shown alongside the producers’ in a screening room, Hecht and Lancaster relented (Kemp, 1991, p. 160). The denouement as it appears on screen gets much of its dramatic power from the fact that Sidney doesn’t completely control the flow of narrative information. (Almost the only previous moment when the audience knows something he doesn’t know is when Rita says to Elwell, ‘Don’t tell Sidney.’) This allows for a rapid succession of dramatic reversals and ‘beat changes’ – moments especially valued by actors, when a character encounters new information that changes his or her expressive behaviour. The first change is Sidney’s discovery of Susan in her slip, which causes him to back away from her bedroom door. The second comes when Susan announces that Sidney will be ‘going down with the ship’ because he has driven Hunsecker’s little sister to suicide. Sidney tries to cover his uneasiness with a display of machismo: ‘I’ve heard this woman talk before,’ he says, and the camera dollies as he moves across the room to Hunsecker’s whiskey. ‘Start thinking with your head instead of your hips!’ He helps himself to a drink: ‘By the way, I got nothing against women thinking with their hips – it’s their nature, just like it’s man’s nature to go out and hustle and get the things he wants.’ When he reminds her that she’s only nineteen and has a ‘fatality for picking wrong’, she returns to her bedroom and locks the door. Sidney crosses, maintaining a cocksure attitude: ‘Come round some night when I’m not writing your brother’s column. … That body of yours deserves a better fate than falling off some terrace.’ Inside the bedroom, Susan has taken off her fur coat. Sidney stands at the closed door. Beat change: he’s worried about her silence. ‘Hey, don’t

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be no square,’ he says, then rushes in panic to the terrace just in time to grab her before she can jump. As he pulls her into the bedroom, she makes an animal cry and falls face down on the bed. Beat change: ‘Susie, look, I’m sorry if I said anything or did anything to hurt you.’ A low-level, deep-focus shot looking across the couple through the bedroom doorway shows Hunsecker walk in. ‘It’s all right, Susie, I’m here,’ he says, bending down and helping her into a robe. Beat change: in the background, Sidney is agitated. ‘J. J., it’s lucky I came right over after I got your message!’ Hunsecker turns and calmly asks, ‘What message?’ Beat change: Sidney is momentarily speechless. ‘Well, be that as it may,’ he says, ‘someone called me.’ Susie, he explains, was so depressed by the news about Dallas that she tried to kill herself. ‘What news about Dallas?’ Hunsecker asks, and again Sidney has to recover: ‘You’re not going to like this, J. J., but they picked him up on a marijuana rap.’ Hunsecker asks, ‘Is that why you put your hands on my sister?’ Beat change: Sidney is shocked and frightened. The scene also contains several ‘ricochet’ or triangulation effects as Sidney and Hunsecker speak to one another in Susan’s presence. Mackendrick blocks the action cleverly, moving the characters to precise marks so that Susan usually remains visible, a silent figure in the background between the two men. An ironic turning point comes when a close-up shows her becoming aware of her power to manipulate events. ‘Susie,’ Sidney begs, ‘tell him the truth!’ Forced into silence throughout, she now uses her silence as a weapon. Hunsecker begins slapping Sidney, driving him against the wall and hitting him repeatedly until Susan intervenes. Cowering, Sidney shouts, ‘You big phony! Didn’t you tell me to get Kello?’ Beat change: it dawns on Sidney that he has let the cat out of the bag. Hunsecker stands beside his sister and says with upright seriousness, ‘Susie, just as I know he’s lying about your attempted suicide, you know that he’s lying about me.’ The dramatic irony is almost Henry Jamesian. Hunsecker marches to his telephone while Sidney quietly remarks to the still

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silent Susan, ‘You’re growing up. Cute.’ In another ricochet, Hunsecker tells Kello that a ‘mistake has been made’, speaking loudly enough for Susan to hear. Heading towards the penthouse door in the distance, Sidney tells him, ‘You lost her! You’ll never get her back!’ The camera dollies to a close-up of Hunsecker at the phone as he says, ‘Sidney Falco planted that stuff on Dallas. Jealousy. Behind my back he was trying to make my sister.’ A wide shot shows Sidney as a small, shadowed figure at the doorway, a frightened rat turning to hurl a threat before scurrying off: ‘That fat cop can break my bones, but he’ll never stop me from telling what I know!’ Hunsecker hangs up and, through an imperceptible trick of timing that movie editing can accomplish, Susan emerges from the bedroom already fully dressed, wearing a cloth coat and carrying an overnight bag. Beat change: Hunsecker becomes stern, blocking her path and asking, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Quietly, with the greatest determination she has shown in the film, Susan says she is going to Steve Dallas. ‘No you’re not,’ Hunsecker declares, ‘you’re going into the hands of a good psychoanalyst. You tried to kill yourself tonight.’ This threat, reminiscent Walter Winchell and his rebellious daughter, is Hunsecker’s only remaining weapon, which

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he’s willing to use even if, by the logic of his previous remark, it indirectly confirms his role in the attack on Dallas. In close-up, Susan pauses, looks him in the eye and softly replies, ‘Yes, I’d rather be dead than living with you.’ Beat change and checkmate: Hunsecker moves with her to the door and stands with his head bowed. Susan tells him, ‘I know I should hate you, but I don’t. I pity you.’ She walks out to the elevator. The final moments of the film are played without dialogue, making good dramatic use of dawn light. On the empty streets of Duffy Square in the pale, early morning, Sidney is cornered by Harry Kello and his partner. Kello gets out of a squad car and smiles as he approaches, relishing the occasion. A large process-screen close-up shows Sidney looking into the camera, trapped and fearful. In a wide shot Kello closes in, but our view is obscured by the cop in the foreground. We hear the crack of fists. The partner moves forward, revealing Kello standing over Sidney’s broken body, wiping his knuckles with a handkerchief. The two men drag the body away, scattering a picturesque flock of pigeons. At the entrance of the Brill

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Building, Susan comes out into early rays of sunlight. A low-angle close-up shows Hunsecker on his inexplicably dark balcony, alone and frightened. On the street, Susan walks away from the camera – as characters often do at the end of Hollywood movies – down Broadway and into the rising sun.

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6 Aftermath and Retrospect One of the odd and in some ways amusing occurrences following the release of Sweet Smell was an appeal by the Publicists Association Local 818 in Hollywood to James Hagerty, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Press Secretary, calling for the establishment of a ‘National Press Representatives Week’ to offset the film’s unfavourable view of press agents. Another was a stunt devised by HHL publicists Dave Golding and Jack Cooper, who tried to illustrate the film’s theme of success by putting $1 million in cash on display in the window of an LA drugstore. Golding and Cooper were fired two weeks later, for reasons not made public. According to Ernest Lehman, Walter Winchell was lurking across the street when the picture opened in New York and Irving Hoffman circulated through the theatre lobby telling everyone the movie was a bore. Several months later, Winchell used his column to gloat over Sweet Smell’s box-office failure, announcing that HHL had lost $2 million (Gabler, 1994, p. 502). The free-spending production company had, in fact, experienced its only financial disaster. Earlier in 1957 Tony Curtis had received a Golden Globe Award as the most popular male actor in the USA, and his followers were dismayed when they saw him in an unattractive role. At the film’s initial preview in San Francisco, where the audience report was mostly negative, Alexander Mackendrick realised that ‘the fans were not only going to dislike it, they were going to resent it’ (quoted in Hoberman, 1994). A downbeat, black-and-white picture such as this, offering no hero the audience could root for, was no competition for the wide-screen spectaculars dominating the market that year, two of the most popular of which were Bridge on the River Kwai and Peyton Place. Mackendrick had done as much or more than anyone to assure the film’s excellence – nurturing Odets through revisions, managing

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Lancaster’s ego, mollifying the tough-guy masculinity, gracefully and intelligently staging the action – but his subsequent career, which involved only three more films, was probably affected by the unsuccessful reputation it gave him. Harold Hecht enjoyed a moment of Shadenfreude at the failure of James Hill, and Lancaster, strangely and perhaps jokingly, threatened to punch Lehman, who told the actor ‘Go ahead, Burt. I need the money’ (quoted in Kashner, 2000, p. 16). Critical reception was mixed. Time, Sight & Sound, London’s The Observer and The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, but The Christian Science Monitor suggested it needed ‘a little less glibness to its anger and a little less pleasure in its disgust’ (23 July 1957). The New Yorker accused it of ‘melodramatic razzle-dazzle’ (6 July 1957), The Saturday Review said it offered nothing but ‘the taste of ashes’ (6 July 1957) and The New York Times complained that it lacked ‘a towering, universal theme’, being too preoccupied with a ‘small, special segment of society … known only to the cognoscenti’ (15 June 1957). Many reviewers noted – correctly but with displeasure – that there was no character in the film with whom the audience could strongly identify. Perhaps the most damning response where sophisticated viewers were concerned came from Manny Farber, easily the best movie critic of the day, who disliked anything smelling of a liberal social-problem picture. In The Nation, Farber equated the makers of the film with a school of ‘hard-working mediocrities’ – including, in his view, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Franz Klein, Larry Rivers, Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky, Budd Schulberg, Rod Serling and John Frankenheimer – whose work gave off the feeling of ‘a high-powered salesman using empty tricks and skills’. Tony Curtis, he remarked, ‘breaks the Olympic record for fast acting’, leaving the viewer with ‘a buzzing head, plus the feeling that the jingle-jangle of hard-sell cinema is a long way from the complicated art of simple picture-making’ (Farber, 1998, pp. 113–23). The passage of time has vindicated the film, even to the point where some would argue it has become slightly over-rated. Beginning in the 1970s it became a cult object for a younger generation of

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cinephiles and today, whenever it plays revival houses, it receives high critical praise for its black humour, stylised dialogue, swift performances and sleek evocation of New York jazz in the 1950s. A good deal of the contemporary affection for Sweet Smell probably rises out of a kind of nostalgia, but this should not obscure the fact that it has artistry, continued relevance and historical significance. In retrospect, it can be seen as the product of a different cultural formation than the one described by Manny Farber. Many of its key personnel had grown up or begun their careers in New York during the 1930s and had later experienced the McCarthy witch hunts; the Winchell–McCarthy axis was no longer a serious threat to them, but the wounds it created were still present and the technique of lies and fear-mongering it practised would live on to the present day. The restless world of big-city newspapers evoked by Sweet Smell may seem quaint in the digital era; yet news and entertainment are increasingly bound together in the twenty-first century, and there is no shortage of ‘reporters’ who manipulate opinion. In historical perspective, Sweet Smell marks the moment when certain members of the Hollywood left, many of them associated with the populism of the 1930s, became deeply pessimistic and to some degree prescient about the culture industries and their gullible public. Their pessimism was foreshadowed at an intellectual level in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944 [2002]), and, in less complex ways, in Dwight Macdonald’s ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’ (1953), in which the commercial media is compared to ‘spreading ooze’ from a 1950s horror movie (p. 73). Popular sociologists in the mid-1950s were increasingly concerned about the American ideal of success, which seemed to be leading to empty affluence, complacency and the rise of the organisation man. In this context, the class-conscious, utopian melodramas of the left cinema in the 1930s looked increasingly dated. We can gauge the depth of mid-century darkness, at least in certain quarters, if we place Sweet Smell alongside earlier Hollywood films about tabloid journalism, nearly all of which took

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their inspiration from Ben Hecht and Charles Macarthur’s cheerfully cynical, politically libertarian The Front Page (first filmed in 1931). Depression-era Hollywood occasionally produced newspaper melodramas like Five Star Final (1931) or romantic farces like Libeled Lady (1936), but before 1950 there is very little to compare with the chillingly savage world inhabited by J. J. Hunsecker and Sidney Falco. (Phil Karlson’s low-budget Scandal Sheet [1952], could be described as a precursor, but is less troubling.) On the other hand, as several reviewers noted when it was released, Sweet Smell has a good deal in common with two other pictures about the media, both made by veterans of the Popular Front, which appeared at virtually the same time: Jose Ferrer’s The Great Man (1956) and Elia Kazan and Budd Shulberg’s A Face in the Crowd (1957). These two films were based loosely on the career of Arthur Godfrey, a folksy, hugely popular host of a CBS-TV variety hour and daily radio programme of the early 1950s, who was much valued as a pitchman by corporate sponsors and Arthur Godfrey and Walter Winchell (1 January 1950) ([Ray Fisher]/[Time & Life Pictures]/Getty Images)

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Madison Avenue. Godfrey became an increasingly powerful public figure, but his fortunes declined when his sinister attributes began to show through his Will Rogers-like image. Ferrer, Kazan and Schulberg used characters that resembled him to make a case against the dangers of mass-mediated, country-boy populism and to indict the mass audience as yahoos or ignorant dupes (a theme Billy Wilder had explored earlier in the decade, in a newspaper picture that failed at the box office, Ace in the Hole [1951]). Sweet Smell deals with some of the same issues but is a more absorbing film – never bland like The Great Man and never shrill or preachy like A Face in the Crowd. As a fable about demagoguery it has greater dramatic force, perhaps because its narrative has a short time scheme involving Sidney’s desperate attempts to meet deadlines in the busy, claustrophobic city. Unfortunately, it shows us none of Hunsecker’s audience and very little of the work he does, and, unlike the other two films, it does rather little to suggest the superstructure

José Ferrer in The Great Man (1956)

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Andy Griffith in A Face in the Crowd (1957)

of corporate power that makes a figure like Hunsecker something more than an individual aberration. Notice also that Sweet Smell tells us little or nothing about the backgrounds of its two major characters. In 1957 this aspect of the film troubled the critic for The Saturday Review, who complained that Sidney Falco had not been given a ‘poverty-haunted childhood that might explain [his] unscrupulous drive’. A good deal of Popular Front literature in the years before World War II – Odets’ Golden Boy, for example – had done exactly that, creating potentially tragic protagonists who forsake their New York ghetto community for the individualist values of gangsters, capitalists and the decadent rich. The theme persists in postwar John Garfield films such as Humoresque (1946, scripted by Odets), Body and Soul (1947) and

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Force of Evil – and, as we’ve seen, it can be found in Ernest Lehman’s original novella and screenplay of Sweet Smell, in which Sidney Wallace’s mother, father and brother keep reminding us of his poor but honest origins. In the completed film, however, Sidney’s early history is barely suggested. Nevertheless, we know all we need to know about Sidney. To create a ‘poverty-haunted childhood’ would be to simplify a film that demands a complex response. Sidney’s background and motives are clearly and economically established in the opening conversation with his secretary, and we can easily confirm the various contradictory things other characters say about him – he’s the ‘charming street urchin’ and the ‘louse’, the ‘boy with the ice-cream face’ and the believer in the ‘theology of the fast buck’, the inhabitant of a ‘moral twilight’ and the frightened young man who occasionally seems to ‘yearn for something better’. He resembles the minor, autochthonous scoundrels in dramas such as Volpone, but also a newer character type from the McCarthy era and the darker regions of film noir. The first cousin of Harry Fabian, the would-be wrestling promoter in Night and the City (1950, directed by the blacklisted Jules Dassin), he’s an ambitious operator on the lower levels of show business who becomes the victim of a truly evil master. The difference is in his physical attractiveness and the thin veneer of glamour and sophistication that covers the world in which he operates. In retrospect, Sweet Smell owes a good deal of its power to the fact that it almost (but not quite) avoids the sentimentalism of 1930s ‘proletarian’ drama. It derives from socially committed literature of an earlier period but has a cynical, cruelly amusing quality more appropriate to the culture and politics of the 1950s, when representations of the old working-class community had all but disappeared from popular culture and capitalism had entered its late stage. Neither a formally adventurous nor a perfect film, it nevertheless has a strong narrative drive and skilfully manages its various internal tensions. Its style is swift and seductive, its atmosphere slick and sleazy, its mode smoothly oscillating between

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satire, melodrama and near tragedy. We find similarly mixed attributes in the brilliantly acted Sidney Falco, who is one of the most reprehensible yet pitiable figures in Hollywood movies. In contrast to the monolithic Hunsecker, who is little more than a monstrous ego given presence by Lancaster’s performance, Sidney is a convincing symptom of a society that worships money, power and celebrity. An anti-Horatio Alger of a more cunning and slick type than the ones we find elsewhere in American film (the Warner Bros. gangsters, for example), he’s a sycophant, a manipulative pretty boy, but also a cringing, desperate, pathetic figure, humiliated and beaten by the values he embraces. Few films have given us such a complex protagonist or such a disturbing yet perversely entertaining glimpse into the very world out of which they were created.

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Credits Sweet Smell of Success USA/1957 Director Alexander Mackendrick © 1957. Norma Productions/Curtleigh Productions Production Company Hecht–Hill–Lancaster and Norma-Curtleigh Productions Distributor United Artists Producer James Hill Screenplay Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, adapted from a 1950 novella by Lehman Photography (black and white) James Wong Howe Music Scored and conducted by Elmer Bernstein Jazz by Chico Hamilton and Fred Katz Editor Alan Crosland, Jr Art Direction Edward Carrere Set Decoration Edward Boyle Costumes Mary Grant Makeup Robert Schiffer

Production Manager Richard McWhorter Production Assistant Ruth McCrough Miller Assistant Director Richard Mayberry Dialogue Director Thom Conroy Music Editor Lloyd Young Sound Recording Jack Solomon Sound Effects Editor Robert Carlile CAST Burt Lancaster J. J. Hunsecker Tony Curtis Sidney Falco Susan Harrison Susan Hunsecker Martin Milner Steve Dallas Sam Levene Frank D’Angelo Barbara Nichols Rita Jeff Donnell Sally Edith Atwater Mary Joseph Leon Robard Emil Meyer Harry Kello Joe Frisco Herbie Temple David White Otis Elwell

Lawrence Dobkin Leo Bartha Lurene Tuttle Loretta Bartha Queenie Smith Mildred Tam William Forrest Senator Harvey Wallace Autumn Russell Linda Jay Adler Manny Davis Lewis Charles Al Evans John Fiedler Bartender Chico Hamilton Quintet Themselves Philip Van Zandt TV director Running time: 96 minutes (103 minutes at press screening) US Release 27 June 1957

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Bibliography Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Brady, John, The Craft of the Screenwriter: Interviews with Six Celebrated Screenwriters (New York: Touchstone, 1981). Buford, Kate, Burt Lancaster: An American Life (New York: Da Capo Press, 2000). Curtis, Tony and Barry Paris, Tony Curtis: The Autobiography (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1993). Curtis, Tony with Peter Golenbock, American Prince: A Memoir (New York: Harmony Books, 2008). Farber, Manny, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998). Gabler, Neal, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Vintage, 1994). Hoberman, J., ‘Once Upon a Times Square’, Village Voice (22 November 1994). Kashner, Sam, ‘A Movie Marked Danger’, Vanity Fair (April 2000), pp. 416–32. Kemp, Philip, Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick (London: Methuen, 1991). Lehman, Ernest, ‘Tell Me About It Tomorrow!’, Cosmopolitan, April 1950. ——, Sweet Smell of Success: The Short Fiction of Ernest Lehman (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1957). Macdonald, Dwight, ‘A Theory of Mass Culture’, in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard

Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), pp. 59–73. Mackendrick, Alexander, On Filmmaking: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director, ed. Paul Cronin (New York: Faber and Faber, 2004). Odets, Clifford, The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (New York: Grove Press, 1988). Odets, Clifford and Ernest Lehman, Sweet Smell of Success (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). Parsons, Louella, New York Journal – American, 14 April 1950. Prouse, Derek, ‘Sweet Smell of Success’, Sight & Sound, August–September 1957. Steinberg, Cobbett, Reel Facts: The Book of Movie Records (New York: Vintage, 1978). Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film, 3rd edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). Welles, Orson and Peter Bogdanovich, This is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). (Clifford Odets Collection, Lilly Library, Bloomington, IN; and Special Collections department, Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, CA)