Sweet Smell of Success

Saw Sweet Smell of Success, a noir's noir. Snappy lines, moral ambiguity with a heavy dose of pessimism, jazz, reefer, noir, baby! And in a big way. The plot follows the scheming press-agent Sidney as he runs to the beck and call of Hunsecker, a Heast-ian businessman who has narcissistically conflated his own and the public's interests so thoroughly he considers them identical (Coen bros fans, note the names.) The conflict arrives in the form of a decent jazz-man who loves Hunsecker's sister. Hun can't have this and dispatches crooked cops and scheming newsmen to dispatch him. The sister is one of those wilting women who quake and treble and are always about to scream or cry. Not exactly a fatal, but this is a deliciously evil nether-world where women are only exploited. There's molls as well, tough broads who begrudge but accept their exploitation. Deliciously evil, sour and mean. It reads like a poison pen letter to us about the world.

Almost the entire film takes place during a seemingly eternal night, everyone up too late and jangling with booze and coffee. The deadly Hunsecker is cruel and magnificent, the only smug man in a world of suffering. Behind every sentence he utters seems to lurk the threat of immediate and personal harm. He reminded me of less nuanced Daniel Plainview and I could easily imagine him bludgeoning someone who had displeased him sufficiently (I was really rooting for this during the climax.) Because the film was made in the 50s, the noble and upright jazz-man gets a lot of good lines which pleased me immensely. For all my gleeful preceding description of the nastiness, the virtuous bits provide welcome relief from all the bile.

The closing scenes are great, revealing all the supposed sophistication of Hun and Sid to be mere sophistry and giving us a pale sunrise, suggesting a better tomorrow. So, the film is delightfully fun. Full of everything that made noirs great. The people are evil, the sets blackened with shadow, the dialogue peppered with strained analogies, the men brutal, and the women weak. A glorious romp, a cliche which has wrapped around into an archetype. A wonderfully fun film.