What took so long? The Criterion Collection has at last released the acrid newspaper noir “Sweet Smell of Success,” a title that’s been crying out for the Criterion treatment and that’s been on my Criterion wish list for years.
It’s one of those cult classics of increasing merit (the worth of my original 1957 poster of the film rose 10-fold in a five-year spurt; its going rate today might bring tears to my eyes) that demands a restored print and a smorgasbord of supplements. It’s languished next to Kubrick’s blistering anti-war classic “Paths of Glory,” also from ’57, on my rather persnickety wish list. Criterion must be listening: That film was released earlier this year. (What next? “The Killing”?)
Cynical, swinging, seductive, “Sweet Smell of Success” is one of those consummately good pictures — we’ll say it: perfection — that has you quietly cheering as you watch, savoring the frissons of superlative art. It’s pure pleasure; it carries you along, briskly.
I can say that about many movies, but the one that springs to mind as far as a crackling contemporary is “All About Eve,” not only because the movies share themes and an unrelenting tone. (Hell — why not a Criterion of that one?) In both: the acting, the direction, the scripts worthy of literature.
Burt Lancaster plays one of the great unsung villains of cinema, New York gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a chilly, megalomaniacal monster modeled on Walter Winchell. (Critic Gary Giddins dubs Hunsecker a “golem of gossip” in his just-right essay included in the handsome two-disc box set, which features vintage documentaries on director Alexander Mackendrick and DP James Wong Howe, whose photography pops.)
Hunsecker, pathological, power-hungry, “prints anything,” snaps one of his repulsed rivals. He destroys lives with a key stroke. “He’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.”
Tony Curtis is beautiful quicksilver as Hunsecker whipping boy Sidney Falco, whose loyalty to the grand man is fraying beneath his own ambivalence. Long regarded Curtis’ best performance (it is), Falco is a marvelous creation of shifting moral shading.
Much of what makes “Sweet Smell” so fun are the famous coruscating lines blurted like staccato shrapnel: “You’re dead, son — get yourself buried.” “I’d hate to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”
Clifford Odets rewrote Ernest Lehman’s original script and punched it up with hot pepper — a fact Lehman didn’t want to discuss during an interview with me a couple years before his death in 2005. The words got rhythm, and they swing to the “crime jazz” score by Elmer Bernstein and the straight-up jazz of the Chico Hamilton Quintet.
With stylized control, “Sweet Smell of Success” is taut and speedy, mean and exhilarating. Mackendrick, with the celebrated assist of photographer Howe, captures the grit and glamor of nocturnal midtown New York like few before. The movie is directed like silk, with cigarette holes burned in the gleaming fabric.
