Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Year Released: 1957
Rating: 3.5
Clifford Odets' screenplay - based on Ernest Lehmann's novella - is a study of moral corruption in fifties' New York (and, essentially, America itself), with Burt Lancaster doing his best Walter Winchell routine while fast-talking lackey Tony Curtis sifts through the dirt on some of the city's more vibrant personalities, eventually ruining some of their reputations. The film proves prophetic and continues to be appropriate today, given our almost sexual lust for starting rumors about the people we idolize - putting them on a pedestal so we can pull the legs out from under them - and also the disturbing propensity we have for voyeurism and the need to see the successful and famous suffer horribly. James Wong Howe's cinematography has to be among the best in American cinema - hell, cinema as a whole - and his streets are glitzy and bright but enveloped in darkness, an apt metaphor for Sweet Smell's stern tone. It moves gracefully, and I was intrigued by its inner workings - Curtis is like Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita, acting as our possessed guide through the city's underground. The performances are dead-on (the fact that Mackendrick and Odets can get you to identify with these people is a feat in itself), and the pace is never broken, but it comes to somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion, with the shaky subplot involving Lancaster's impressionable sister conveniently tied up (I never bought Lancaster's strange reaction to Curtis - you have to see it) and resolved. In fact, I never exactly grasped Lancaster's sexual obsession with his sister - it implies that, in a Freudian way, Lancaster's interest in the hidden lives of others masks his own psychosexual hang-ups. Still, despite these faults (and an occasional qualm here and there with the too-cute jargon delivered by the characters), it stands up well, and one of the best films of the decade it came out of.
