Sweet Smell of Success courtesy MGM
DVD Tuesday: Celebrity scoop-mongering gets the once-over in Sweet Smell of Success.
When I hear people bemoan the fact that in a world full of serious, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan dominate the front page, I want to direct them to Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Not because it proves them wrong, but because it's 50-year-old proof that the voyeuristic allure of celebrity journalism is nothing new.
Based on screenwriter Ernest Lehman's 1950 story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," Sweet Smell is rooted in the toxic relationship between small-time publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and big-time gossipmonger J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), who revels in the glamour, the scandals and the sordid backbiting of New York City nightlife. "I love this dirty town," he declares as the neon lights of Broadway glint off the inky-black streets.
Hunsecker's column is the place to be mentioned, and he panders to the powerful and exploits the desperate. Hunsecker's only weak spot is his younger sister, Susan (Susan Harrison, whose daughter is Darva Conger, of fleeting Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? fame), to whom he has a positively creepy devotion. When she persists in dating a handsome young jazz musician (Martin Milner), Hunsecker alternately bullies and cajoles Falco into breaking up their relationship by any means necessary. Falco uses the tools of his trade, first surreptitiously smearing the musician's reputation and then getting him arrested as a hophead.
Shot in ominously seductive black-and-white by James Wong Howe and dipped in acid by director Alexander Mackendrick, Sweet Smell of Success is about the glittering prizes that turn to coal in the sunlight and the addictive rush of the spotlight, even if only at second hand. Lancaster is phenomenal as the bitter, petty, ruthlessly calculating Hunsecker, and Curtis has never been better, his pretty-boy looks the veneer that mask Falco's abject, degraded desperation to claw his way out of obscurity.
Things to consider:
Do most people think about the relationship between people who write about celebrities and trends and the publicity machine that feeds and tries to manipulate them, or do they take what they read at face value?
Walter Winchell, the model for J.J. Hunsecker, was one of the first writers who used celebrity dish to turn himself into a brand name — a celebrity in his own right. Do you think there's a difference between someone like Winchell/Hunsecker and, say, a gossip blogger like Perez Hilton?
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Previously in DVD Tuesday:
Daughters of Darkness
The Crazies
Blade Runner
Zodiac
Manhunter
A Simple Plan
Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
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