Match me, Sidney.
8pm PST – Sweet Smell Of Success (1957) – A crooked press agent stoops to new depths to help an egotistical columnist break up his sister’s romance. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Marty Milner Dir: Alexander Mackendrick BW-96 mins, TV-PG
You could fill pages about the complete greatness of this film, but when all is said and done what impresses most is how so much character and so many plot turns all fit into 96 minutes. As Burt Prelutsky points out in this essay, the all important art of pacing has pretty much vanished in Big Hollywood. When raunchy sex comedies start clocking in at 126 minutes, the canary in the coalmine to warn you something’s gone horribly wrong is long, long dead.
This will sound off-topic for a bit, but hang in, we’ll get there. The reason Gary Oldman’s such a perfect choice for Commissioner Gordon in the new “Batman” series is because we all know Oldman is (on screen) a wild man. To take an actor capable of anything and button him firmly down is genius. The tension this adds for the audience (who know what boils beneath the milquetoast) adds a dimension no script could. The same can be said for Burt Lancaster here.
Lancaster is wonderful in roles requiring him to look to the sky, open his arms, and launch that second-to-none smile, but shut him down, button him up, cork the volcano and then you really got yourself a character. “The Train,” “The Birdman of Alcatraz…” The stoic Lancaster is the one raging with possibilities, which finally brings me to his role in today’s pick.
J.J. Hunsecker, who’s supposedly based on columnist Walter Winchell, is one of the all-time great screen monsters. Other than ambition and obsession (with his own sister, no less), Lancaster shuts off Hunsecker’s humanity. Elmer Gantry goes shark, his eyes dead, his only desire to feed his own desires; a killer who won’t be negotiated with, but try to deal with the devil Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) does.
Damn these people who say Curtis was just a pretty face or only remember his Brooklyn accent in “Spartacus.” You hold your own with Burt Lancaster – you go toe toe in scene after scene and come out in one piece and you better believe you’re a hall of famer. Curtis is an absolute knock out here. His Sidney Falco is layered thick with conflict and so tortured with self-loathing you wince right along with him as he suffers one humiliation after another. You feel for this character and you root for him to find the courage to give up on his ambition. Certainly part of that is great screenwriting, but you watch this film and imagine Matthew McConaughey in the Curtis role. That’ll box your compass.
Another of the film’s stars is the mostly on-location black and white photography. Everything from the city streets to the nightclub where Hunsecker holds court to Falco’s seedy office-apartment is an added character helping to complete this world and tell an engrossing story about the small, vapid, worthless crumbs men sell their souls for.
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