Sweet Smell of Success

February 26, 2005
I've been trying to get ahead of desk work to clear time/space for writing. This is always the objective. We saw Sweet Smell of Success last night on DVD--a really good old noir (also black and white) movie, lots of shots of wonderful New York City as it used to be with phones at the tables in the 21 Club etc. Tony Curtis was so slimy he shone, so attractive that you root for him whatever he does. Burt Lancaster does a terrific job too, as the power broker columnist J.J. Hunsecker, but he plays it-- appropriately-- like a man with his face frozen, someone so heavy with his own importance and power that you imagine the human being is so far inside the caverns of stone he'll never come out. Whereas Curtis is all over the place, quicksilver, meteoric, trying something new if the other thing doesn't work. He has all this youth and hope and a kind of animal energy. The "good" guys in the movie, potato faced Martin Millner and Susan Harrison (who never did much of anything else as far as I know) were totally missing in action (although Millner's character gets to attack Hunsecker's false patriotism in a neat slap at red baiting-- Cliff Odets a co-writer of this). And surely I'm not the only person who saw that Hunsecker was dying of incestuous love for his little sister? .