Not So Sweet
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Not So Sweet Skip the new Broadway version of Sweet Smell of Success. Watch the movie instead. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Making the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success was an unhappy experience with parlous...
...If you had told people in 1957 that one day Broadway producers would spend more than $10 million to mount a stage-musical version of Sweet Smell of Success, they would have judged you insane...
...to blacklist Sidney's clients from his all-powerful column, read by sixty million nationwide...
...The chorus in the musical (which we're supposed to think is the secret voice of Broadway itself) is forever standing behind Falco urging him on as he suffers over every corrupt move he makes...
...Someday I'd like to look into your clever little mind and see what you're really thinking," Susie Hunsecker tells Sidney when he's all sweetness and light with her...
...Only those theatergoers who admire the poetry and sentiment expressed in Hallmark greeting cards will be seduced into joining Sidney's cause...
...Hunsecker, which just demonstrates how unmiti-gatedly evil he is...
...The scene is seedy and glamorous at the same time, just as New York was...
...Sweet Smell of Success has the American cinema's most distinctive screenplay...
...Before Sweet Smell of Success, Curtis was a Hollywood hunk who spent most of his time in period pictures trying to hide his thick Bronx accent...
...Cinematic flops do not make successful stage productions...
...Sidney's secretary wonders why he finds it necessary to stoop so low—and he explains he wants to get to a place "where no one snaps his fingers and says, 'Hey, shrimp, rack the balls.' Or, 'Hey, mouse, mouse, go out and buy me a pack of butts.' I don't want tips from the kitty...
...Tony Curtis's Sidney Falco needed no encouragement...
...But while Sidney is terrified of J.J.'s power over his ability to earn a livelihood, he's actually willing to stand up to the columnist...
...That's why the movie is great and the musical lousy...
...first, Lancaster's company agreed that Lehman would direct the film, but then they kicked him off the picture, replacing him even as screenwriter with the has-been playwright, Clifford Odets...
...The brilliance of the movie lies in its unique combination of hyperreal-ism and stylization...
...Now, how many drinks does it take to put you in that tropical-island mood...
...The story begins with Sidney on J.J.'s bad side...
...Nobody sane could love the New York in Sweet Smell of Success, a city trapped in perpetual night in which no man is faithful to his wife, no one speaks a trustworthy word, and fealty to the will of J.J...
...I love this dirty town," says columnist J.J...
...Th columnist has already enlisted him in a plot to break up the romance between J.J.'s sister Susie and a young jazz musician, but Sidney cannot do so before Susie accepts the jazz musician's secret proposal...
...But the one I like, the really cute one, is the quick, dependable chap—nothing he won't do for you in a pinch...
...Odets's once-brilliant career concluded shortly thereafter with the script for an Elvis Presley picture—while Lehman went on to become the most commercially successful screenwriter in Hollywood history...
...Hunsecker is enforced by a vicious police lieutenant who plants evidence on innocent men and beats up whomever he chooses...
...Ernest Lehman was the author of the short story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," the source material for his own screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success...
...These influences coalesce to make Sweet Smell of Success a movie that sounds like no other...
...And once he has them, he's merciless with them...
...Lancaster's production company had revolutionized Hollywood by making high-quality, low-budget movies outside the studio system, and it broke the big-studio hammerlock on the Academy Awards in 1955 when its production of Marty won the award for best picture...
...It's part of his helpless act...
...In the movie, they almost succeed...
...In the movie, Lancaster says it to Curtis in an off-hand, emotionless fashion that masks J.J.'s glee at his own cleverness...
...Perhaps because he was free to speak in his own voice at last, Curtis took to the part with uncompromising ferocity and hunger...
...There are more memorable pieces of dialogue here than in any American movie besides The Godfather...
...This throws the entire plot into confusion and chaos, because her refusal to tell J.J...
...This storytelling calamity was made necessary by present-day Broadway correctness, which insists female characters be proud and self-confident spokespersons for their gender—even when that makes dramatic hash out of everything you're seeing...
...says...
...While the movie was being photographed on the streets of Manhattan, Odets drank himself near to oblivion in a suite at the Essex House Hotel overlooking Central Park as he tried to figure out an ending...
...Match me, Sidney," Hunsecker says, brandishing a cigarette and demanding the behavior of a courtier...
...Its director, Alexander Mackendrick, was traumatized by his confrontations with its star and co-producer, the gargantuan Burt Lancaster—who threatened Mackendrick bodily during the filming—and he all but left the business...
...Do it, Sidney...
...It was filmed on location in the streets and clubs of New York...
...Watching Tony Curtis assay this ugly part is like watching a caged animal suddenly sprung loose...
...So then we see the lengths to which Sidney and J.J...
...Curtis's Sidney Falco is one of the great screen performances, all the more astonishing because he never came anywhere close to it before and has shown only glimmers of his ability in the movies he made afterward...
...had deputized Sidney because the Hunsecker way is to maintain plausible deniability: "My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years," he says...
...The lavish new musical called Sweet Smell of Success, which opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater this month, reveals just how radical and uncompromising a vision of New York City and humankind the movie really is...
...On stage, Lithgow speaks the words in an anguished whine...
...Sweet Smell of Success was a box-office disaster, was widely panned by critics, and did not garner a single Academy Award nomination— not even for the landmark photographic work of veteran cinematographer James Wong Howe, a perennial Oscar favorite...
...In the play, there's never any doubt they will fail...
...They have turned the terrifying Hunsecker, who rules by intimidation alone in the movie, into a cold-blooded charmer...
...And it belongs on the all-too-short honor roll of American films far too daring and unconventional for the audiences and opinion leaders of their time...
...You're a cookie filled with arsenic...
...And anyway, what would be musical about the story of a desperate young press agent who learns he will do anything to remain in the good graces of a psychotic gossip columnist who rules the roost in a New York City corrupted by sin, sleaze, and rumor...
...go is exactly where the real-life versions of them would have been—in the swank precincts of the "21" Club, the honky-tonk jazz bars that lined West 52nd street, and the low-rent buildings of Times Square where Sidney has his office...
...His good looks give him the ability to smooth-talk and charm women into doing almost anything he asks...
...about her new love makes no sense...
...he asks his loyal and lovesick secretary...
...Sidney, conjugate me a verb—for instance, to promise," J.J...
...Do it, Sidney...
...It finally turned out that she was the ill mother of Darva Conger, the nurse who demanded an immediate divorce after she was chosen for matrimony on the notorious reality-TV special Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire...
...It takes place over three breakneck nights, and doesn't bother with introductions, niceties, or exposition...
...He understood that he had been given an indelible part to play, and he rose to the occasion by sinking very low...
...Open your needy, sympathetic arms...
...Sweet Smell of Success is not the story of Sidney Falco's corruption...
...But the fights between the movie star and his behind-the-scenes partners during the making of Sweet Smell of Success effectively ended Hecht-Hill-Lancaster just as the company was making its greatest contribution to the cinema...
...I'm nice to people where it pays to be nice...
...None too pretty and all deceptive...
...The musical's Hunsecker is a seducer, and Falco is his likable dupe...
...I'm no hero...
...Sidney is already beyond salvation...
...In the movie, Sidney is as much a villain as Hunsecker...
...Despite the passage of forty-five years in which movies and theater have turned an all-too-open eye to unspeakable human conduct, the makers of the musical couldn't see a way to adapt it in 2002 for the stage without filing down its diamond-hard edges...
...Most disturbing is the musical's revision of the character of Hunsecker's sister...
...But in the Broadway show, Sidney jumps to it, and is upbraided for not lighting the cigarette more quickly...
...The ugliness off-screen was based in an anxiety about the movie's commercial and critical prospects, and that anxiety was justified...
...So he says...
...Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of forty faces, not one," Hunsecker tells a visiting U.S...
...Sweet Smell of Success has achieved its own kind of immortality as a result: It's probably the best American movie to be entirely overlooked by the Academy Awards...
...John Lithgow, playing J.J., opens the second act by repeating one of the movie J.J.'s first lines to Sidney—"You're dead, son, get yourself buried...
...The movie's Susan seems like she's on the verge of breaking into a million pieces at a moment's notice...
...He's got a half-dozen faces for the ladies...
...But Sidney, though defeated once, has a new plan...
...I'm ready to soar...
...The stage Susan is strong and passionate, and her brother is so neurotically devoted to her that she clearly has the upper hand with him...
...Hunsecker even lives in an apartment atop the Brill Building on Broadway...
...At John Podhoretz is a columnist for the New York Post and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...BY JOHN PODHORETZ Making the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success was an unhappy experience with parlous consequences for many of those involved...
...I'm in the big game with the big players...
...You see that grin...
...senator...
...The cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the river," he explains...
...He will not kowtow...
...In John Guare's libretto, J.J...
...So did the movie's ingenue, Susan Harrison, who disappeared so completely that hardworking journalists searching for her decades later could find no trace...
...Do it, Sidney...
...He is grateful for the research provided by Tim Dirks and his website, www.filmsite.org...
...In the movie, Sidney replies, "Not right now, J.J...
...Hunsecker wants to know what the jazz musician has that his sister likes so much...
...He throws himself upon your mercy...
...That's the charming street-urchin face...
...In the musical, Sidney's Darwinian credo becomes a dreadful pseudo-aria by composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Craig Carnelia in which Sidney bellows out his joy: "I'm finally at the fountain," he sings...
...The moral question posed in Sweet Smell of Success is whether Sidney and J.J...
...What'll you do if I feel nervous...
...The sets are hyper-stylized, while the actors labor mightily to make the dialogue and the songs sound realistic...
...The curse of Sweet Smell of Success did not end there...
...are willing to go to succeed in their aim...
...Worse yet, they have turned the young press agent Sidney Falco (described by one character in the movie as having "the morals of a guinea pig and the scruples of a gangster") into a wide-eyed innocent who is taken under Hun-secker's wing and shown all the glories of New York...
...But while the photography has an almost documentary feel to it, the dialogue is something else again...
...She fears her brother the way she fears her own shadow, and her inability to tell J.J...
...Sidney's failure to live up to his promise to break up J.J.'s sister's love affair has caused J.J...
...You can hear the glee in Burt Lancaster's voice as he spits out classic line after classic line...
...Later, Sidney invites an occasional girlfriend to his apartment to loan her out to another gossip columnist from whom he needs a favor...
...is impressed and repelled: "I'd hate to take a bite out of you," he tells Sidney...
...In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me...
...and the Yiddish-flavored repartee of Odets's own early plays...
...I do it enough on the outside, so don't expect me to do it in my own office...
...In the film, Sidney's quick-talking, quick-thinking immorality seduces us into becoming Sidney's confederates...
...that she knows the jazz musician and wants to marry him is what gives her brother the weapon he needs against her...
...will be able to take something entirely good—the love between Susan and her musician—and turn it rotten...
...Honey, he's going to help you," Sidney protests when she broken-heartedly complains...
...Mr...
...is more peevish than terrifying—and far less amusing as well...
...Everywhere Sidney and J.J...
...The dialogue would seem ludicrous were the movie not anchored in the very real world of New York in the 1950s—which is exactly what the new Broadway musical gets wrong...
...The collaboration between Lehman and Odets gave birth to a hardboiled New York argot that owes debts to Damon Runyon's Broadway stories, the rat-a-tat tabloid style of Runyon's friend Walter Winchell (the model for J.J...
...Just as Sidney Falco is willing to say and do anything to succeed in his aims, Curtis was willing to subsume his own vanity to the demands of a part that required him to be an unparalleled weasel...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 28
