The noire classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957) depicts the spirit in which entrepreneurs of popular entertainment attain their goals. These are the movie moguls, newspaper “colyumnists,” night clubs, talent agents and their call girls, pornographers, crime bosses--and the police, politicians, and investment bankers they are symbiotic with. Cynicism and sadism are key ingredients, as they are for shrewd, hard-nose empressarios of popular entertainments in general (taxi dance halls; flea circuses; bargain auctions; films about romance, crime, aliens, femmes fatale; burlesque houses; spicy books, magazines, playing cards, and photo sets) and the cops, lawyers, real estate owners, investment bankers and pols of Midtown. For the full implications of this read The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Day of the Locust, or novels by Raymond Chandler, E. L. Doctorow, Nelsen Algren, William Kennedy, or David Goodis (L.A., New York, Chicago, Albany, Philadelphia--it all works the same).

“You’re a cookie full of arsenic,” says the king of what Walter Winchell called the “colyumnists,” J. J. Hunsecker (he is modeled after W. W. himself; it’s one of Burt Lancaster’s best roles). The cookie is the grasping press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) who wants to be his clone. “I’d like to take a bite out of you.”




 From his penthouse in the Brill Building at 49th and Broadway, Hunsecker pulls the strings from which Falco, yearning for success so much he is unable to care about how he gets it, dangles as he plants marijuana on the young musician whom J. J. wants on ice, inveigles a hat-check girl to sleep with a horny colleague of J. J.’s, and ruins Hunsecker’s sister Susan’s chance for happiness with the musician (the great one wants to keep his sister  living in his penthouse, where she attends him as a mother would). Falco’s scheme fails; Susan escapes into the morning sun. But not before Falco lies in Duffy Square at dawn, being beaten by one of Hunsecker’s creatures, a cop who has planted reefers on Sidney to bring him down for good. J. J. has to blame someone, and he cannot allow Sidney to be in a position to hold anything over him.  rules, except over people courageous enough to walk away while they still can, like his own sister. As for the others, they might as well be content with the eternal yearning that Hunsecker will never be able to cope with except by proclaiming,  “I love this dirty town.”