poison pen
by
Douglas Messerli
Ernest
Lehman and Clifford Odets (screenplay, based on the novelette by Lehman),
Alexander Mackendrick (director) Sweet Smell of Success / 1957
Public
relations man Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) is suffering a fall in business;
having not lived up to a promise to newspaper gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker
(Burt Lancaster)—long reported to be only a slight distortion of Walter
Winchell—he cannot get any of his clients mentioned in the newspaper’s
well-read column. One might almost feel sorry for Falco, if, through the film’s
quick-moving, gloomy early images, we didn’t soon discover that in order to get
that review attention, he has become a kind of lackey to the powerful
Hunsecker, fawning over him, stroking his ego, even lighting up his cigarettes.
One of the famous lines of the film is Lancaster’s demand “Match me!”—which we
soon discover may have other significance as well.
Even more despicably Falco does dirty work
for the staunch anti-Communist bigot—who like Hedda Hopper and others of their
ilk, destroyed many a career to make themselves famous.
Roger Ebert’s 1997 review of Sweet
Smell of Success summarized the relationship between the two men in the
predictable terms that Hollywood liked to hear:
“The
two men in The Sweet Smell of Success relate to teach other like
junkyard gods. One is dominant, and the other is a whipped cur, circling
hungrily, his tail between his legs, hoping for a scrap after the big dog has
dined. They dynamic between a powerful gossip columnist and a hungry press
agent, is seen starkly and without pity. The rest of the plot supplies events
to illustrate the love-hate relationship.”
Such a tamped-down explanation of their
relationship works fine for tone-deaf audiences, particularly for those existing
in the years when this film was first released, even if Ebert was writing 40
years later. But Ebert has never been very clever when it comes to deeper
queer-coded works.
Even
as a youth when I first saw this film, I knew something was going on that I couldn’t
then quite explain. There was something about the way that Falco kept hanging
around and sometimes literally “onto” Hunsecker that made me, and the general
audience, more than a little uncomfortable, and suggested a relationship that
it was difficult to pin down.
Several critics tiptoed around the edges of
the subject. Gary Giddens 2011 essay certainly nods toward a deeper reading and
helped to reveal how both the screenwriter Odets and director Mackendrick worked
behind to scenes to strengthen the film in ways that Lancaster, whose company
produced it, wasn’t quite willing to accept.
But it took David Thomson in his 2019
essay, “The Cat’s in the Bag, the Bag’s in the River” to actually show us just
how gay-coded this film was, despite the usually heavy-handed and
heteronormative previous writings of Odets. Odets was not gay to my knowledge,
but he certainly came out the literary closet in revising Lehman’s script, Lehman
himself being a powerful writer of witty screenplays (he’d follow this work up
with Hitchcock’s North by Northwest).
Early
in his essay Thomson talks about the masked meanings that are regularly
exchanged by the film’s two major characters. The critic first intrigues us
with the possibility that such in-talk, on the very edge of being camp,
suggests other possibilities:
“‘The
cat’s in the bag, the bag’s in the river,’ Sidney Falco says to J. J. Hunsecker
as information or promise, even as endearment. Those two rats play a game
together called bad mouth. In 1957 in Sweet Smell the line had the click of
hard-boiled poetry or of a gun being cocked. It said that some secret business
was in hand, cool, calm, and collected but also dirty and shaming until you
dressed it up in swagger. We were sinking into rotten poetry. I felt for that
cat, and wondered if its death was being signaled; but I guessed the scrag of
wet fur was alive still—it was a secret and secrets don’t die, they only wait.
The very line said, What do you think I mean? And that’s what the best movies
are always asking. Sometimes you revisit those 1950s movies and feel the cat’s
accusing eyes staring at you through the bag and the rising river.”
Later in the essay, however, Thomsen more
clearly explains just what he is getting at:
“Lancaster
played Hunsecker; his own company (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster) produced the movie. So
Burt was in charge, and he is filmed throughout the story as a monarch who sits
still and orders the execution of others with the flicker of an eye or a hushed
word. That verdict will be passed finally on Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), a
scuttling press agent who survives by getting items into Hunsecker’s column and
so can be engaged to do whatever ugly deeds J.J. requires. A refined,
codependent slavery exists between them: J.J. smiles and Sidney smiles, but not
at the same time. It is the toxic pact between these two that makes the film
disturbing for at least thirty minutes—but it might have been a greater film
still if it could have seen or admitted that their mutual loathing is the only
thing that keeps them from being lovers.
This was not admitted in 1957, and no one
can blame a commercial movie of that era for lacking the courage or even the
self-awareness that would have been so direct about a destructive homosexual
relationship. If Burt had felt that subtext, his company would never have made
the picture. But Burt the man and the actor cannot resist the allure of the
secret. He looks at Sidney and at his own position like a charmer looking at a
snake and seeing danger. Yet Sweet Smell plays out finally as one more melodrama
of good people and bad people—the way Hollywood liked to tell us the world
worked. The radical situation of the lm is that Sidney fears and needs J.J.
while the columnist despises but needs Sidney. There’s no room for conventional
affection, let alone love, but dependency is like cigarette smoke at the
nightclubs where the two rats live. And it reaches poetry in the vicious zigzag
talk that joins these men at the hip.
They know each other like a married couple.”
From what we have since learned about
Lancaster’s own involvement in the gay world of his time, and looking back upon
a career in which he played a great man transgressive roles we might now argue
that Lancaster probably very much “felt that subtext,” and purposely allowed it
to be played out.
Thomson comments on a scene that reveals
just how much further their nasty verbal intercourse takes this bickering
couple:
“Sidney sits down at the table, beside but
a little behind Hunsecker. J.J. begins to order him away, but Sidney has a
password, a way into J.J.’s need—he has something to tell him about Hunsecker’s
sister. So the powerful man relents and Sidney stays. Then Miss James, trying
to be pleasant, wonders out loud if Sidney is an actor.
‘He’s
so pretty, that’s how,” she responds. And let it be said, Tony Curtis in 1957
was “pretty,” or a knockout, or gorgeous… The list of such words is not that
long, and it’s nearly as problematic now as calling a woman ‘beautiful.’ Let’s
just say ‘pretty’ fits, even if Sidney is torn between pleasure and resentment
at hearing the word.
Then Hunsecker speaks—and in a few words
we know it is one of the killer speeches of 1957.
‘Mr. Falco, let it be said, is a man of
forty faces, not one, none too pretty and all deceptive. See that grin? That’s
the charming street urchin’s face. It’s part of his “helpless” act—he throws
himself on your mercy. He’s got a half a dozen faces for the ladies, but the
real cute one to me is the quick, dependable chap—nothing he won’t do for you
in a pinch, so he says! Mr. Falco, whom I did not invite to sit at this table,
tonight, is a hungry press agent and fully up on all the tricks of his very slimy
trade!’”
Soon after Hunsecker speaks the lines, “Match
me,” literally demanding him to give him a light for his cigarette, but on
another level almost taunting his lap-dog to “match” him verbally like way
George and Martha do in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, while
also hinting yet again of their “match,” the bitchy marriage in which they are in symbolically engaged.
Once we have established that unspoken
relationship between the two men, the rest of the story turns to plot, as we are
shown how time and again Falco, despite his slavish love of Hunsecker, fails
and ultimately pulls away from the S&M torture his lover proffers.
This time around, Hunsecker has sent Falco
out to break up the relationship between his beloved sister (with who he has a
festering, slightly incestuous relationship) and a young guitarist, Steve
Dallas (Martin Milner, an actor perhaps best known for his childhood portrayal
of the young son in Life with Father and later through the TV series Route
66 and Adam -12) In Sweet Smell of Success plays the lead
performer in the Chico Hamilton Quintet, which provided this film, along with
composer Elmer Bernstein, its memorable jazz musical themes.
Falco has so far failed in his attempts to separate the timid Susan
Hunsecker (Susan Harrison) from Dallas when the film begins, and J. J. makes it
clear that if he doesn’t immediately get results Falco will be, in the film’s
parlance, “burnt toast.” And when Falco receives a hint from Susan that she is
about to announce her engagement to Dallas, the clever publicist plots a new
plan that involves nearly everyone in his creepy New York world, where people
sell their souls to whatever they define as “success.”
Strangely, about the only one who remains
somewhat out of the fray, while actually being the source of the entire dirty
series of events, is the noted columnist. Despite his fraught brother-sister relationship,
Hunsecker remains out-of-reach of the everyday blackmail, since he appears in
an isolated moral high-ground removed from the temptations of the flesh. Clearly
he gets his thrills
Falco, however, knows everyone’s secrets
which allows him a certain sense of power. He promises to help a 21 Club
cigarette girl, who having had a quick sexual fling with another columnist, is
in danger of losing her job. Falco’s blackmail attempt, however, goes sour when
the guilty rival refuses to go along with his request, that he plant an item in
his column that Dallas is a dope-smoking Communist; but yet another columnist
is willing to use the piece if Falco hooks him up for a fling with the same
cigarette girl, Rita (Barbara Nichols), waiting in Falco’s room for him to
return.
The columnist’s plant temporarily works,
giving Hunsecker a way to deny involvement and express his largesse by getting
the boy’s job—from which Dallas has been fired—while at the same time
questioning Dallas’ intentions. The guitarist, who hates Hunsecker for his
pretense and phony patriotism, gets sucked into an argument with the masterful
wordsmith that ends badly, with Hunsecker proclaiming that he cannot allow
someone who calls him and his readers into question—as if he, himself, was an
American institution beyond criticism. Susan, torn by her love of Dallas and
her blind obedience to her brother, remains mute, sealing the end to any
happiness she might find in her relationship with Dallas.
Yet even here, with the possibility of the
couple’s reconciliation, Hunsecker insists Falco go for the juggler, planting
dope in the pocket of Dalla’s coat so that his stooge police friend, Harry
Kello (Emile Meyer), can taken him in for questioning and, commonly, a severe
beating. Hunsecker appears to be willing to award Falco an ocean-liner voyage
with his sister for his loyalty.
The
last time we see the now-destroyed publicist is in a long short of a dark New
York street, where we observe the police moving towards him with the obvious
intent on getting even.
Susan, finally regaining her voice,
determines to leave her brother forever as she rushes to the hospital bedside
of Dallas, revealing to Hunsecker that, in fact, she had contemplated suicide
and that Falco had save her. Perhaps she now can at least save herself—although
given what we have observed throughout the film, we can only imagine that
Hunsecker might arrange for another “accident” to occur to either her or
Dallas. Hardly in anyone in this brilliant noir is left standing, unless you
see Hunsecker’s tottering hulk of a body as a tower of implacable strength. And
in real life, Winchell was brought down by night host Jack Paar and hostess
Elsa Maxwell, along with his strong support of Joseph McCarthy.
Oddly enough, the left-leaning playwright
Odets was partly redeemed—after having previously named names to the Joseph
McCarthy-led committee) through the power and wit of the characters’ language.
But we also have to realize that he did it, in part, by also creating Hunsecker
as a gay man through the coded queer language, gay men always being in the
public sensibility representatives of monsters.
The fact that this powerful Hollywood
drama was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, formerly director of the great
Ealing British comedies Whiskey Galore!, The Lady Killers, and The
Man in the White Suit, is quite astonishing, and reveals just how great
Mackendrick might have been given half a chance.
His next project, The Devil’s Disciple,
got him fired, in part due to feelings by the producers of that film (again
Hill-Hecht-Lancaster productions) that he was too much of a perfectionist. Yet
give the restrictions of Sweet Smell of Success, wherein Odets was
laboring over the script s they were already shooting, and the always short
emotional fuse of actor-producer Lancaster, it appears that Mackendrick was
somewhat of a magician in creating such an unforgettable work, which was
selected for inclusion in The National Film Registry and has been highly touted
by almost every critic since it first premiered.
Los
Angeles, January 10, 2016 and February 13, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).
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