DVD: Sweet Smell of Success

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It’s difficult now to imagine Hollywood conceiving a one-two punch as ferocious as Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, which were released a month apart in the summer of 1957. Their target was the absolute corruption of media figures who acquire untrammeled fame and power: Face’s coarse cracker-barrel philosopher “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), an ex-hobo who becomes a politically influential TV superstar; and Sweet Smell ’s monstrous Broadway gossip columnist J J Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) whose Stalinesque sway has senators quaking at his restaurant table.

Though bordering on caricatured, Kazan’s film is trenchant and warrants a bigger reputation than it enjoys. But Mackendrick’s late-classic-period noir, which hinges on the need of Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) to sever Hunsecker’s incestuously coveted kid sister from her jazz guitarist fiancé or be permanently frozen out of J J’s column, is a timeless masterpiece - with its cast of traducible leeches, so appalling a depiction of showbiz realpolitik in Manhattan’s theatre district that until its last few seconds it’s sickening, albeit laceratingly entertaining. It’s not demeaning the analogous The Social Network to say that J J wouldn’t deign to use that movie’s Marc Zuckerberg and Sean Parker for Q-tips.

Sweet Smell was bankrolled by the unsavoury, inharmonious team of the great star Lancaster and his two producer partners, Harold Hecht and James Hill, who made life hell for the publicist-turned-writer, Ernest Lehmann, who conceived it (Hunsecker was inspired by the innovative and malign über-columnist Walter Winchell). They then pulled off a masterstroke by hiring the former Ealing master Mackendrick. Not that they weren’t bamboozled by his perfectionism as a director of actors and as a metteur-en-scène (in collaboration with cinematographer James Wong Howe), or, perhaps, by his urbane, cultured Anglo-Scottish demeanour.

Lancaster and Hill compliment Mackendrick's brilliance in the quotes they give the 1986 TV documentary about his career that’s included among the supplements of Criterion’s fabulous new DVD, but their admiration hadn’t stopped them firing him from 1959’s The Devil’s Disciple. The other extras worth watching are on-camera interviews with director James Mangold, assessing Mackendrick as his film-school mentor, and with Winchell biographer Neal Gabler, who explains why “the real story" (that is, Winchell and his common-law wife institutionalised their daughter Walda for loving a producer-cum-hustler before Winchell sicked the FBI onto him) "was more bizarre than the movie."