Film Review - The Sweet Smell of Success

[Brief Note - I'm not very happy with this piece, and as it was my first work of criticism there's less organization, more awkardness, and less room for personal voice or actually interesting opinions.  The film, on the other hand, deserves the finest of words in accouterment, so I'll probably rewrite it eventually.]

“The Sweet Smell of Success”

             The New York of “The Sweet Smell of Success” is swollen ripe and fit to burst with seamy steamy sin, oozing corruption like a clammy flopsweat, pouring off the slick streets to bleed out of the celluloid itself.  The pulse of the city, and the film as a whole, is one of unremitting and unrepentant hunger and savagery, and the city streets teem with all of the repulsive, frenetic scrabbling of a cockroach nest.  The camera constantly glides and grinds and jives in jazz clubs and alleyways, hustling hotspots and shaking down the audience’s more idealistic angles before fading back into the night.  What a groove it is.  Like all great movies of vice, we are seduced by its sordid cinemascape.

The story is very much that of two men, both utterly unscrupulous.  There’s something refreshing the film’s unapologetic willingness to let Sidney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker be bad men at considerable length.  Falco is a dervish, desperate and opportunistic and scrabbling for a vague brass ring to usher him into vaguer green pastures.  He’s a slimy invertebrate, but how could a press agent possibly be honest in this world?  Even with every repulsive trick in his bag he just barely scrapes by, and as his immorality seems more necessary, more filth begins to soil the shining ideal of the American Dream itself, which is quite explicitly the impetus for Sidney’s sins.  Tony Curtis owns the role, and his charisma is the foundation of the entire film, which would collapse if the audience despised Falco so much as he deserves.

The alpha male whose scraps Falco so dutifully laps is J.J. Hunsecker, channeled with such organic intensity by Burt Lancaster that the force of his malevolent personality is a black hole of attention and focus.  He sucks in our gaze through a cold magnetism, and the force of his hypnotic countenance upon those around him must surely evoke the feelings of a mouse in the coils of a snake.  Falco is repulsive, but not evil.  J.J. is evil enough for the both of them, in the lonely way of a person so removed by his own intellect that almost every moment is excruciatingly boring and predictable, and other people seem like lesser beings.  Much of the film’s more outrageous dialogue spills from J.J.’s urbane grimace, and it is a testament that not even Hunsecker’s more colorful turns of phrase (“I’d hate to take a bite out of you, you’re a cookie full of arsenic.”) subvert the believability of his character, who must surely have refined such artificed expression as a means of amusing himself.

The overall plot is largely besides the point, and is established mere minutes into the picture.  Suffice it to say that the film is the story of an evil king and an amoral hyena joining arms to murder young love from the shadows.  The joy of the film, the mastery of the piece, is in watching the story deftly leap from point to point, in watching Falco’s continual efforts to reposition himself to the best advantage, conning and wheeling and dealing so quickly that his schemes can be irrelevant by the time they bear fruit.  The film is about the world that it so vividly creates, and deserves enshrinement in the same pantheon as the greatest works of film noir.  The film never sags, it never allows itself to become bogged down, and accomplishes a rare harmony of energy and complexity without ever stepping too far away or ahead of the audience.  Films like this come along too rarely to not take the time to see.