Sweet Smell of Success
At its core, Sweet Smell of Success is about two men. At the beginning of the film, you think — while similar — one is decent, just desperate, and the other is beyond saving. By the end, you understand that both men are evil; the only thing separating them is the amount of power they wield.
These two performances by Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are flatly terrific. There is little to say, because I've concerned myself much more with the 60s and 70s than the 50s, and so I can't say much about how these roles are in conversation with their prior oeuvre. But it is plainly clear that the screen bursts alive whenever either of them is talking.
The rest of the film is a push-pull: a fairly standard and at times cartoonish melodrama — filled with an evil that feels more cartoonish than banal as each act progresses — rescued by the best window dressing in the world, and a whiplash script that finds entertainment and grace in its brief moments of joy. The director wrings a lot of tension out of how lovely every individual scene feels at the onset. Beautiful jazz soundtrack. Beautiful Manhattan nightclubs. Filmed and captured with just the right amount of realism. And then, the decrepit material disgust they're all wading through.
I don't really go for morality tale movies at this point. While there's a certain world-weariness and hardscrabble wisdom to the proceedings here that might have been more winning with contemporary audiences, it's not exactly breaking news to me that owners of media corporations can be childish, petty, and controlling.
Perhaps my fundamental flaw with viewing the film is that I think it hinges on a dwindling confidence that our protagonist is going to, at some point, snap out of it and do the right thing — even though it's so aggressively telegraphed that he won't.
It seems odd to spend so much time criticizing a movie I thought was very good, so let me end with this: it is a smart, beautiful, honest movie that does not pull any punches.