***Out In The 1950s Film Night- Burt Lancaster’s The Sweet Smell Of Success

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

DVD Review

The Sweet Smell Of Success, Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis,

Apparently screenwriters, Hollywood screen-writers anyway, a bandit breed themselves taking perfectly good material like War and Peace and turning it into soap suds and cleavage, when characterizing Broadway theater critics (uh, the legitimate theater in the old time parlance) refuse to touch them with anything less than a cattle prod. Maybe a rather long cattle prod at that. At least that has been my recent film review experience after watching Bette Davis’ All About Eve and its totally cynical critic Addison played superbly by George Saunders. Here we are confronted with the weasel Broadway critic and man about town J.J played by Burt Lancaster ably assisted by press flak Sydney Falco played to a groveling tee by Tony Curtis. The story line is a little thin, mainly concerning J.J.’s overweening concern that his very much younger sister does not wind up with some ne’er- do- well.

In the red scare cold war 1950s that winding up included some weirdo ultra-communist parlor pink with a smooth line (party line of course) and fast hands. Or worse some dope-addled beatnik opium den jazz musician reeking of some Norman Mailer white negro madness (or worse, much worst some miscegenation real negro madness, Jesus, J.J. would definitely flip on that). Also, by the way, with fast hands. So brother/father scribe for the public prints moves heaven and earth to protect Sis and tears up half the great white way in the process, that and he ever present need to humiliate whoever and whatever he can along the way. Except, of course, maybe some chorine that he has his eyes on and can plug in his rag column.

The tricks, manipulations, and downright skullduggery, hardly invented by J.J., although he has made his bid for the heel hall of fame here, has a long pedigree and might seem all too real to a modern audience who know that fame is fleeting and one better grab it by the neck, fast. This tricks played in this film set in 1950’s Broadway, however, seem almost like kid’s stuff compared to the vicious action today, on any given day in Hollywood, Wall Street or Washington (the D.C. one). That, my friends, was something of a ‘golden age’ of gentile skullduggery by comparison.

A note on Tony Curtis who on the face of it seems in cinematic history to have been something of a ‘pretty’boy, a draw for the ladies and not much more. But then you think about the performance here as the groveling and morally confused Mister Falco and in Spartacus and in Some Like It Hot and one, including this reviewer, is compelled to start changing one’s opinion of the depth of Mr. Curtis’s talent. Change it upward and fast.