Sweet Smell of Success (1957) - by Faro

OUTDOOR SUMMER MOVIES OF NYC:


The sun is setting slowly. We are perched on a hillock of grass, looking over the southern end of the City, with its spires of steel and stone. The Brooklyn Bridge is behind us, along with several local food vendors who can’t utter a sentence without including the buzzword “organic”. Cops are wandering in endless circles around us, watching to see that we don’t open any adult beverages, thus ensuring that real crimes can be committed elsewhere. The stage is set, the movie screen is ready to reflect images of light captured 50 years ago, and we are primed for another Outdoor Summer Movie in New York City.


And what a great movie! Smart and fast and dialogue-driven, Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis pummel away at each other and everyone around them in the madness of self-promotion and urban-journalistic jockeying that is the arena in which these amoral characters claw at each other. Make no mistake about it, these are not immoral characters who know morality and have lost their way… no, these are amoral characters who have no interest in notions of right and wrong. All of them are willing to flip the story and turn the screw on someone else to get what they want, and all of them want success.


Perhaps the pretty boy jazz guitarist escapes this harsh description, but he is so tied up in knots with his immature notions of honor that we can immediately sense that he doesn’t belong in this world of hustle and hucksterism. When the corpulent and crooked cop cuts him down, we don’t complain, we know he had it coming. Not that we see the violence… that is one of the greatest joys of watching this film is to realize that you have rarely watched something so harsh and nihilistic, and yet there is no cursing, no violence, and no easy display of the dark facets of humanity. Instead it must all be shown, even the queasy overtones of the incestuous desires of Hunsecker for his sister, with wicked wit and suggestive subtlety.


We know the title is sarcastic even before the film starts, but after the director has pushed us down into the surging and sickly crowds of Times Square for two hours, we know that he is telling us that nothing smells less sweet than success purchased at the cost of our ideals. Then the film ends. The well-satisfied crowd blinks, stretches, and looks again at the walls of stone and steel glittering in the night sky just past the screen and across the river… and as we all disperse and head back to our cramped little apartments, there are those who wonder why they ever came to this crazy and frequently foul-smelling city, and there are others of us who remember with a wry smile that we came here for something other than the smell.