A Cookie Full of Arsenic by Alex Bilmes

sidney falco: “Sure, the columnists can’t do without us, except our good and great friend JJ forgets to mention that. You see, we furnish him with items.” jj hunsecker: “What, some cheap, gruesome gags?” sidney falco: “You print ’em, don’t ya?” jj hunsecker: “Yes, with your clients’ names attached. That’s the only reason the poor slobs pay you — to see their names in my column all over the world. Now, I make it out, you’re doing me a favour... The day I can’t get along without a press agents’ handouts, I’ll close up shop and move to Alaska, lock, stock, and barrel.”

— Tony Curtis as PR man Sidney Falco and Burt Lancaster as gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success

In Barry Levinson’s calorific 1982 comedy Diner, the first and best of the director’s benevolent quartet of features about the Baltimore of his youth, there is an oddball minor character, an intense geek in a checked shirt, who speaks only to parrot lines of dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success, the hardboiled New York noir from 1957.

“JJ!” he barks, irrelevantly, in an electrical store, “it’s one thing to wear your dog collar but when it turns into a noose I’d rather have my freedom!”

I’m not as bad as that guy. But I’m pretty bad. There is no rat-a-tat exchange between Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, in the course of that blaring siren of a movie, that I cannot chorus along to, in my limp approximation of mid-century Noo Yoik.

We are not children, we do not have to commit ourselves to favourites. But when I am asked, as we all are on occasion, to name the film I love the most, I always say Sweet Smell of Success. With the exception of those bank holiday TV standbys that every boy of my background and generation has seen multiple times (Goldfinger, The Great Escape), Sweet Smell must be the film I’ve watched most often. I don’t say it’s the best film ever made. It’s not Bicycle Thieves or The 400 Blows or Blue Velvet, but I fell for it as a teenager and my love for it deepens as I age and become knackered and decrepit and it stays the same: angry, vital, terrifying.

Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the presiding genius of Ealing Studios, making his first film in Hollywood, Sweet Smell of Success, from a peerless screenplay by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is a high-contrast portrait of corruption and depravity among Fifties Manhattan’s nocturnal movers and shakers — the slick, glib, switchblade-sharp predators of 21 and El Morocco, and their soft-skinned prey. A movie near-deranged with cynicism, drunk on cocktails and contempt, Sweet Smell of Success is a howl of despair at the way the city brutalises its citizens, and the society that has risen from its sewers like a stink. It’s as cool as an icy wind off the East River; as bracing as a punch in the gut.

And yet, to these eyes it is a thing of beauty: a film that fizzes with wit, crackles with intelligence, hums like neon, seethes and throbs and pulses with excitement and energy. And so, even while it dismays, it seduces. The editing is furious. Elmer Bernstein’s score is a blast from a jet engine. And James Wong Howe’s camera watches the shadows lengthen and the walls close in with a sense of dreadful fascination.

It shames me to admit it, and it demonstrates so vividly my inability to check my white male privilege — this is the film that puts the “toxic” in “toxic masculinity”, and who would want to be a black man, or a gay man, or a woman of any colour or creed or sexuality, in Manhattan in 1957? — but still there is a part of me, I confess, which would love to be there, talking tough and drinking stiff with the bent coppers and the yellow reporters and the corrupt politicos and the dry-eyed hat-check girls.

Sweet Smell of Success tells the story of a venal PR man for crummy nightclub acts, Sidney Falco, played by Curtis, and his efforts to flatter and cajole a monstrous tabloid gossip columnist, JJ Hunsecker, played by Lancaster and based on the famous columnist, Walter Winchell. It’s hard to say that those two greats of Hollywood’s Golden Age were never better than here — both gave indelible performances in more famous and acclaimed films — but in my view these are their most revealing roles, and this is the film that made the most of their dazzling but dubious charms.

In Sweet Smell, both actors discover within themselves reserves of loathsomeness that went untapped — understandably — in more palatable performances. There is a pathetic neediness in Curtis’s compromised press agent and there is a streak of something truly nasty, something vicious and perverse, in Lancaster’s selfregarding bully. Never have their good looks been used to better effect, even as they are subverted. Curtis, the Jewish exotic, is “so pretty”, as one character remarks, you’d think he were an actor. (A pointed gag, that one.) Lancaster is a rock of a man, a slab of Harlem concrete made flesh and fitted with old-lady glasses, but here his beauty is so hard as to be almost grotesque, inhuman.

The plot — not, admittedly, the film’s strongest point — details Hunsecker’s attempts to manipulate Falco into breaking up the love affair between his innocent younger sister, whose life he ruthlessly polices and with whom he is, it is suggested, sexually obsessed, and her milquetoast musician boyfriend. All does not go according to plan. Both men sink further into the moral abyss than they ever have before. By the end they’re drowning.

For all the verbal sparkle and the chiaroscuro camerawork, there’s something real about Falco and Hunsecker that is rarely seen on screen. The male characters in Levinson’s movie-mad Diner, to take an example of an American film with a more conventional approach to mid-century masculinity, are, like so many heroes of Hollywood, loveable man-children. Their arrested development is regarded with benign indulgence. For all their flaws, these guys are softies. They’re cute.

Think of a more recent dual portrait of midlife manhood: Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino’s wonderful Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Both stars are tremendous in the film: charismatic, funny, handsome, winning in every way. But their characters — a faded TV actor and his stuntman amanuensis — are kidults, toddlers in sunglasses. Tarantino loves them, you can tell. He forgives them their foibles, their crises, their solipsisms.

Sidney Falco and JJ Hunsecker in Sweet Smell of Success are fully grown men, and their flaws are there for all to see. I was a teenager when I first saw the film and they confirmed all my worst suspicions about what fully grown men are like: selfish, mendacious, compromised. I was repelled and, of course, hopelessly drawn to them, to their swagger, their sophistication.

Not everyone is. In 1957, Sweet Smell of Success bombed. Audiences were repulsed by its desolate vision of human nature. The scapegoat for this failure was Alexander Mackendrick, who was fired by the same producers,

Harold Hecht, James Hill and Burt Lancaster himself, two weeks into his next film. His career never fully recovered.

Others suffered collateral damage: apart from a 1960 B-movie, Susan Harrison, who played Lancaster’s sister, never worked in Hollywood again. Elmer Bernstein, the composer, likened the atmosphere on the set of Sweet Smell of Success to “a snake pit”. Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter whose novella the film is based on, said of his experience working with Hecht-Hill-Lancaster that “I really sank into the depths when I decided to work with them”.

You might argue that Sweet Smell of Success has a special resonance for me, a secret sauce that makes me forgive the potboiler narrative, the dodgy sexual politics and the rapacious unpleasantness of the men who made it. And you’d be right. For obvious reasons, stories about desperate publicity people being pushed around by powerful journalists have considerable appeal for hacks such as myself. I loved the film long before I fell into the world of celebrity journalism — by which I mean journalism about celebrities, rather than journalism by celebrities (there is a difference, or there used to be) — but once I had fallen, Sweet Smell of Success cushioned the blow.

Today, social media has considerably diminished the power of celebrity publicists and showbiz journalists both. We are, all of us, bypassed by the performers themselves, who use Twitter and Instagram to talk directly to their audiences. Kim Kardashian has no use for either of us; she writes her own press. Perhaps that’s how it should be.

So the film is a period piece. But when I was growing up, these figures still stalked the earth, just about. There were still showbiz newspaper columnists with the power to make or break careers, and scuttling publicists who wished to influence them — and vice versa. It was a shabby, disreputable business. But it had its compensations.

“I love this dirty town,” says Lancaster’s crooked newspaperman.

Me too, JJ.

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