Not to be Missed: Fifty-four Favorites from a Lifetime of Film by Kenneth Turan

Author:Kenneth Turan [Turan, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2014-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

Sweet Smell of Success

1957

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis.

“Match me, Sidney.”

It sounds like a simple request from Burt Lancaster’s omnipotent Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker to Tony Curtis’s hustling, conniving press agent Sidney Falco that he strike a match and light the great man’s cigarette.

But on another level, that iconic line from Sweet Smell of Success plays like a challenge, a call to combat from a confident film in effect saying, “Match this dialogue. Write talk that’s as alive and electric as these arias of angst and desperation. If you think you can.” Few films have taken up that challenge, and even fewer have succeeded.

Justly acclaimed today, in Martin Scorsese’s summation, as “one of the most daring, startling, savage films ever made about show business and power in this country,” Sweet Smell of Success was not always perceived that way. Or maybe it was but what people saw made them uncomfortable enough to treat the film, to borrow another memorable Hunsecker phrase, “like a cookie full of arsenic.”

Written by Clifford Odets and Ernst Lehman from a Lehman novella and directed by Alexander Mackendrick, Success always had its staunch defenders but it was mostly dismissed in its day, a viewer at an advance screening going so far as to write on the preview card, “Don’t touch a foot of this film. Just burn the whole thing.”

Critics of all stripes were equally unhappy: Manny Farber derided it in The Nation, the New York Times concluded its plot “had holes large enough to be seen even by the myopic,” and the Saturday Review said it conveyed “the taste of ashes.” Even its director was publicly unhappy.

“I cannot recommend the film for student study on aesthetic grounds,” Mackendrick wrote years later. “It is a film I have mixed feelings about today.” Just because he was writing about it, the director took pains to point out, didn’t signify that “I mean to claim that it is an important work. It isn’t.”

In many ways Mackendrick seemed an unlikely person to have made this ultimate Manhattan melodrama in the first place. Born in America but raised in Scotland, he made his reputation directing daft Ealing comedies like the Alec Guinness vehicles The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers. A key reason Mackendrick took this assignment was because it was “a chance to get out of a reputation I had for small cute British comedies.”

Screenwriter Lehman, by contrast, was so immersed in this particular world that he initially intended to direct his original script himself. Lehman had at one time worked for press agent Irving Hoffman, a key source for the terrifying Walter Winchell, the syndicated newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster who was the model for J.J. Hunsecker. When Hunsecker says that a detractor “wiped his feet on the choice and predilection of 60 million men and women in the greatest country in the world,” it is Winchell’s voice he is channeling.

Perhaps one reason that Mackendrick was less than enthusiastic about Success was that the production was so troubled there apparently never was a final shooting script.

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