Return with us. boys and girls, to a long gone galaxy far far away.....where a primary source of the American public's news and entertainment came from.....prepare to gasp....NEWSPAPERS! And if you craved a steady diet of juicy tidbits made up of pithy soundbites describing celebrity and politician ups-and-downs....(the kind of stuff you can get now with one click on your phone or IPad)....then you rustled the pages of your morning paper till you came to a nationwide syndicated columnist like Walter Winchell. In a column filled with one or two sentences devoted to each of his victims or fawning 'friends', Winchell would either praise or eviscerate Hollywood titans, Presidents, Senators, or anyone else in the public eye. With a tap of his typewriter, he could build public careers or d
estroy them with the intensity of a nuclear fireball.....he was that powerful.
So essentially, Winchell (and similar columnists, like the twin movie-biz harpies , Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons) was the original Mean Tweeter.....and unlike today, his column, which read like a collection of tweets jammed together, stood largely unanswered and unopposed. If Winchell printed some nasty swipe at you...implying you.cheat on your spouse or consort with Commies, etc.....you didn't have a laptop or a phone to swiftly one-up him. You might write an angry letter to the editor, but by that time, your career in the movies was finished, your road to the White House washed out.
"Sweet Smell Of Success" fictionalizes Winchell into the icy-hearted, physically formidable J.J.Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a bottomless well of bile whose nationally syndicated gossip column and network TV show commands a coast-to-coast audience of millions. His column, a phony mixture of show-biz savvy with rabid right wing patriotism has made him a power-wielding cultural icon. He's a journalistic nightmare.....the worst kind of bully armed with a bully pulpit.
This preening reptile does have one soft spot......his unhealthy, overly possessive would-be guardianship over his 20-something kid sister Susie (Susan Harrison), a sweetly naive young woman who's fallen head-over heels in love with Steve Dallas a nice-guy jazz musician.(Martin Milner). Scheming to secretly break up this romance, Hunsecker enlists the aid of a hungrily ambitious press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) whose livelihood thrives or dies on Hunsecker's printing favorable news about Falco's clients. When Falco's initial effort to part the young lovers fails, Hunsecker vengefully cuts off Falco from getting any of his public relations shmooze into the column. ("You're dead, son...get yourself buried...") Broke and increasingly desperate to please Hunsecker, Sidney placates him by concocting a slimy new plan to destroy Dallas's reputation. ("Cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river...") Round and round they go, Sidney and J.J., like a cobra and a mongoose who've temporarily joined forces.
And that brings us to the true glory of this film.....the script written by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on Lehman's novella. Think of every time you've ever come up with a sharp, witty, devastating comeback line......unfortunately to a conversation you already had days,weeks, or months ago. Now imagine an entire movie in which every character always snaps out the most perfect, truest, nastiest, and darkly sardonic thing to say....at the exact moment it needs to be said.....directed to the person to whom it will do the most damage. Virtually every line of dialogue in this movie is a stone cold keeper......it would takes us days to list them all, through movie buffs usually remember one of Lancaster's best lines, snarled at Curtis, "I'd hate to take a bite out of you, you're like a cookie full of arsenic..."
We couldn't help recalling "Sweet Smell Of Success" in that the power its cynical nightcrawlers deploy against each other is primarily verbal.....a battleground of smears, insults and vicious lies calculated to draw blood. Words matter in this film's dark universe, words maim and wound, sometimes carelessly and more often than not, with purposeful malice.
Walter Winchell, the real J.J.Hunsecker, after a lifetime of trafficking in libel and grade school-worthy insults, died as a forgotten has been. This movie based on his rampaging gutter journalism doesn't seem too far away and removed anymore......not when 60 years later, the so-called leader of the Free World uses Twitter much like Lancaster's Hunsecker uses his newspaper column.....to spit out a daily barrage of personal vitriol, delusional untruths easily fact-checked and personal derision to counter every perceived slight. "Sweet Smell Of Success" remains fresh as yesterday's headlines (and probably tomorrow's)......only the media method has been upgraded. And lucky for us, since everybody has access to the same media now, a would-be, wanna-be Winchell never goes unanswered (or un-mocked).....which, to our delight, further enrages our so-called Fearful Leader.
If you remember the first sentence of our post, then it shouldn't be any surprise that we pound our keyboard with 5 stars (*****), for "Sweet Smell Of Success", a breaking news FIND OF FINDS.
No comments:
Post a Comment