Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, most powerful of the New York columnists, whose items can make a career or break one. Curtis is Sidney Falco, a press agent so marginal that his name isn't painted on his office door, but written on a sheet of paper and taped there. (The inner room is his bedroom.) Falco supports himself largely by getting items into Hunsecker's column, and recently Hunsecker has frozen him out. Why? Hunsecker asked Falco to break up a romance between Hunsecker's younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and a jazz musician named Steve Dallas (Martin Milner), and Falco has so far failed.
Audiences at the time might have heard whispers that Walter Winchell did much the same thing, using his column to attack a man who wanted to marry his daughter, Walda. (Her name provides some measure of her father's ego.) In "Sweet Smell of Success," Falco hatches a scheme to convince another columnist--Hunsecker's bitter rival--to run the smear item, so that Susan won't suspect it comes from her brother's camp.
All of this is pitiless and cruel, and reflects Hunsecker's personal style. He is a man apparently without sexuality of his own, although he seems delicately tuned to the weathers of Falco's moods. Falco is a very pretty boy, but J.J. is wary. ("I'd hate to take a bite out of you," he tells the publicist at one point. "You're a cookie full of arsenic.") There are certainly suppressed incestuous feelings in J.J.'s odd household, where his sister lives firmly under his thumb and the columnist grows hysterical when another man seems about to take her way.
The movie, photographed by James Wong Howe in winter in black and white, takes place within a few blocks of Manhattan's midtown club district. Scenes are set in "21" and other night spots, and those who notice will find a nice irony in the fact that Hunsecker lives in the Brill Building on Broadway, which for decades has housed showbiz offices and Tin Pan Alley composers--and has a long, empty entrance hall that was used for the loneliest shot in "Taxi Driver."
Hunsecker knows his beat cold. "I love this dirty town," he says in the opening scene. He calls all the maitre d's and hat-check girls by name, holds court for senators and call girls at his favorite booth, and doesn't miss a thing. Here is the kind of detail the movie notices: Falco leaves his office without his coat, to save on tips. Later, as he and Hunsecker leave "21" together, the columnist says, "Where's your coat, Sidney? Saving tips?" But we have just seen Hunsecker take his own coat without tipping. He never tips and never pays and no one in this world would ever expect him to.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46gqZ6ZpGK6sMLInmStoJViwLixxK1krKWVobluu8Vmqq6bk5rAtHmQcmxw