Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 Sweet Smell of Success is generally classified as noir, but it’s an odd noir without criminals or much in the way of crime or moral gray area. Cowritten by famously socially conscious lefty playwright Clifford Odets, the movie is less interested in exploring and exploiting various seamy underbellies than in hammering home a moral parable about truth, honor, fair-dealing, and the deforming allure of the capitalist rat race. And yet, despite itself, that seamy underbelly is the most enjoyable part of the movie.
Sidney Falco (an oleaginous Tony Curtis) wants to scramble up to the top of the heap just like many another noir protagonist from Frank Chambers in The Postman Always Rings Twice to Johnny Clay in The Killing. The difference is that Sidney is trying to get there as a press agent, rather than through murder or knocking over a racetrack—crimes which the movie suggests would be cleaner than being an entertainment publicist.
Falco’s bread and butter is getting his clients mentioned in the column of the influential J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster.) In return for those placements, Hunsecker bullies Falco and demands he perform various shady acts. As the film opens, he’s ordered Falco to break up the tryst between Hunsecker’s younger sister Susan (Susan Harrison) and jazz guitarist Steve (Martin Millner). The lovebirds resist Falco’s machinations, though, and his tactics escalate from smearing Steve in the paper to planting drugs and tipping off a cop with a penchant for beating up suspects.
The film’s plot is somewhat at odds with its interests. In theory, the main focus here should be on the relationship between J.J. and Susan, since it’s J.J.’s rage for patriarchal control which sets all the events of the film in motion. Does J.J. actually care for Susan? What was their relationship like before she and Steve got together? Where are their parents? Has J.J. interfered in her life before? Why does he loathe Steve so hyperbolically? Does he just hate jazz that much? None of those questions are raised or answered. J.J. mutters some pro forma sentiments about how Susan is all he has in the world and then sets out to ruin his little sister’s life in between threatening Senators and dropping witticisms like, “I often wish I were deaf and wore a hearing aid. With a simple flick of a switch, I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men.”
Instead of elucidating the J.J./Susan relationship, the movie spends most of its runtime fascinated with the middle-man. Tony Curtis’ slick good looks and fast-talking patter are deployed in a performance of queasily jocular insincerity. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do! That leaves you with a lot of leeway,” he shouts back to a cigarette girl he’s maneuvered into an ugly tryst with a columnist Sidney is cultivating. “Start thinking with your head instead of your hips!” he tells Susie in an ill-considered effort to discourage her from suicide. Sidney, J.J. muses, “is a man of 40 faces, not one—none too pretty, and all deceptive. You see that grin? That's the, eh, that's the Charming Street Urchin face.”
Noir always walks a line between condemning the ugliness it depicts and reveling in it. Sweet Smell of Success places itself more on the side of moralism than some of its peers, especially in its efforts to get you to admire Steve as a straight-shooter and courageous angry young man. Yet despite Susie’s admiration and Steve’s excellent jazz guitar playing (courtesy of John Pisano), the truth is the boyfriend is a boring cliché. The bobbing, weaving Falco, and Hunsecker’s blunt enjoyment of corruption (“I love this dirty little town”), is what makes the movie compelling.
The film halfway, perhaps, admits that it’s putative moral compasses are kind of a drag in its final scene. Backed into a corner, good girl Susan strips to her underthings and behaves like a double-crossing femme fatale, beating Falco and Hunsecker at their own slimy games. You could read that as them dragging her down to their level, but that’s not how it’s presented. Instead, the film figures Susan’s machinations a straightforward triumph; by embracing femme-fatale deceit and aggression, she apportions out just desserts and frees herself from her brother’s malevolent influence. Then she walks off into that dirty city to meet her (still boring) lover.
Sweet Smell of Success presents itself as a moral parable. But it also suggests that bad is good, that good is bad, and that style is more important than the substance of your message. If it’s a noir, those are the reasons why.