Sweet Smell of Success

Sweet Smell of Success is a 1957 film noir made by Hill-Hecht-Lancaster Productions and released by United Artists. It was directed by Alexander Mackendrick and produced by James Hill, with Tony Curtis, Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster as executive producers. The screenplay was by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman and Alexander Mackendrick from the novelette by Lehman. The movie was photographed by James Wong Howe. The original music score by Elmer Bernstein.

The film stars Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison and Martin Milner. It tells the story of a powerful newspaper columnist who uses his connections to ruin his sister's relationship with a man he deems inappropriate. Lancaster's role as J.J. Hunsecker is based on famed New York columnist Walter Winchell.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot

Sidney Falco (Curtis) is a sleazy PR man who will do anything to get publicity for his clients. J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster)is a powerful New York newspaper columnist; he is also an over-protective brother who disapproves of his sister's current affair with a jazz musician. Falco sees an opportunity to win J.J.'s favor by breaking up the affair. So, he sets out to smear the musician in the local newspapers.

Cast

• Burt Lancaster as J.J. Hunsecker
• Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco
• Susan Harrison as Susan Hunsecker
• Martin Milner as Steve Dallas
• Sam Levene as Frank D' Angelo
• Chico Hamilton as Himself
• Emile Meyer as Harry Kello
• Barbara Nichols as Rita

Production

Faced with potential unemployment from the sale of Ealing Studios to the BBC in 1954, Mackendrick began entertaining offers from Hollywood. He rejected ones from the likes of Cary Grant and David Selznick and signed on with independent production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, enticed by their offer to adapt George Bernard Shaw’s play The Devil's Disciple. After the project collapsed during pre-production, Mackendrick asked to be released from his contract. Harold Hecht refused and asked him to start work on another project – adapting Ernest Lehman’s novella Sweet Smell of Success into a film.

Lehman’s story had originally appeared in a 1950 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine under the title, "Tell Me About It Tomorrow!" It was based on his own experiences working as an assistant to Irving Hoffman, a prominent New York press agent and columnist for The Hollywood Reporter. Lehman parlayed the notoriety of his novella into a screenwriting career in Hollywood writing Executive Suite, Sabrina and The King and I.

By the time that Hecht-Hill-Lancaster acquired Success, Lehman was in position to not only adapt his own novella but also produce and direct the film. After scouting locations, Lehman was told by Hecht that distributor United Artists was having second thoughts about going with a first-time director and so Hecht offered the film to Mackendrick.

Initially, the director had reservations about trying to film such a dialogue-heavy screenplay and so he and Lehman worked on it for weeks to make it more cinematic. As the script neared completion, Lehman fell ill and had to resign from the picture. James Hill took over and offered Paddy Chayefsky as Lehman’s replacement. Mackendrick suggested Clifford Odets, a left-wing playwright who had been blacklisted for his political affiliations.

Mackendrick assumed that Odets would only need two or three weeks to polish the script. He took four months. Mackendrick remembers, in the biography Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick by Philip Kemp, "We started shooting with no final script at all, while Clifford reconstructed the thing from stem to stern." The plot was largely intact but, as Mackendrick stated in Notes on Sweet Smell of Success, "What Clifford did, in effect, was dismantle the structure of every single sequence in order to rebuild situations and relationships that were much more complex, had much greater tension and more dramatic energy."

This process took time and the start-date for the production could not be delayed. Odets had to accompany the production to Manhattan and continued rewriting while they shot there. Returning to the city that had shunned him for going to Hollywood made him very neurotic and obsessed with all kinds of rituals as he worked at a furious pace with pages often going right from his typewriter to being shot the same day. Mackendrick commented in Kemp’s book, "So we cut the script there on the floor, with the actors, just cutting down lines, making them more spare – what Clifford would have done himself, really, had there been time."

Tony Curtis had to fight for the role of Sidney Falco because the studio he was contracted to, Universal, was worried that it would ruin his career. Tired of doing pretty-boy roles and wanting to prove that he could act, Curtis got his way. For the role of J.J. Hunsecker, Orson Welles was originally considered. Mackendrick wanted to cast Hume Cronyn because he felt that Cronyn closely resembled Walter Winchell, the basis for the Hunsecker character. United Artists wanted Burt Lancaster in the role because of his box office appeal and his successful pairing with Curtis on Trapeze.

Hecht-Hill-Lancaster allowed Mackendrick to familiarize himself with New York City before shooting the movie. In Notes on Sweet Smell of Success, Mackendrick said, "One of the characteristic aspects of New York, particularly of the area between 42nd street and 57th street, is the neurotic energy of the crowded sidewalks. This was, I argued, essential to the story of characters driven by the uglier aspects of ambition and greed." He took multiple photographs of the city from several fixed points and then taped the pictures into a series of panoramas that he stuck on a wall and studied once he got back to Hollywood.

Mackendrick shot the film in 1957 and was scared the entire time because Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had a reputation for firing their directors for any or even no reason at all. The filmmaker was used to extensive rehearsals before a scene was shot and often found himself shooting a script page one or two hours after Odets had written it. Lancaster’s presence also made Mackendrick nervous. Not only was he one of the film’s stars but also a producer and a frustrated director with a reputation for being tough on others. Shooting on location in New York City also added to Mackendrick’s anxieties. Exteriors were shot in the busiest, noisiest areas with crowds of young Tony Curtis fans occasionally breaking through police barriers. Mackendrick remembers, "We started shooting in Times Square at rush hour, and we had high-powered actors and a camera-crane and police help and all the rest of it, but we didn’t have any script. We knew where we were going vaguely, but that’s all."

Reaction

A preview screening of the film did not go well as Tony Curtis fans were expecting him to play one of his typical nice guy roles and instead were presented with Sidney Falco. Mackendrick remembers, in the biography Lethal Innocence: The Cinema of Alexander Mackendrick by Philip Kemp, seeing audience members "curling up, crossing their arms and legs, recoiling from the screen in disgust. Burt Lancaster's fans weren't thrilled with their idol either, "finding the film too static and talky." The movie was a box office failure and Hecht blamed his producing partner Hill. "The night of the preview, Harold said to me, 'You know you've wrecked our company? We're going to lose over a million dollars on this picture,'" Hill recalled. However, Lancaster blamed Lehman who remembers a confrontation they had: "Burt threatened me at a party after the preview. He said, 'You didn't have to leave - you could have made this a much better picture. I ought to beat you up.' I said, 'Go ahead - I could use the money.'"

Critical reaction was much more favorable. Time magazine said that the movie was "raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction...superb camera work...and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue." Both it and The New York Herald included the film on their ten-best lists for 1957. The film's reputation only improved over time with David Denby in New York magazine calling it "the most acrid, and the best" of all New York movies because it captured, "better than any film I know the atmosphere of Times Square and big-city journalism."

Sweet Smell of Success holds an 100 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.2-rating at the Internet Movie Database with 3,740 votes.

Trivia

• In 2002 Sweet Smell of Success: The Musical was created by Marvin Hamlisch, Craig Carnelia and John Guare.
• Hunsecker's apartment building is actually the show-business office tower at 1619 Broadway, also known as the Brill Building, a famous part of Tin Pan Alley.
• In Barry Levinson's film Diner, there is a character who constantly quotes dialogue from the movie.
• Tom Cruise has said that the Sidney Falco character was one of his main inspirations for the agent role he played in the film Jerry Maguire.

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