Word: columnists
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...Ernest Lehman had written the story "Sweet Smell of Success" in 1950, when he was an ex-press agent, a nobody, and Walter Winchell was the most powerful newspaperman in America. The veiled fiction about the columnist didn't seem to ruffle him. "I don't fool with the Ernest Lehmans of the world," Winchell supposedly said. "I go after the Westbrook Peglers [a right-wing journalist]." Five years later, Lehman was a big-shot screenwriter ("Executive Suite," "Sabrina") and reluctant to have the romanette-a-clef turned into a movie. But the indie-prod outfit Hecht-Lancaster...
...Sometimes? All times. Sidney is orally assaulted by virtually every character in the film: J.J., his secretary, his sister, her boyfriend, her boyfriend's manager, another columnist, the columnist's wife, two of his clients, a cigarette girl and a fat cop. I can't think of another character in cinema history who gets harangued by so many or with such good reason. Yet Sidney is a resilient cuss; he can repackage any insult to suit the next guy in line. When a columnist in a night club spumes to Sidney that he and J.J. have "the scruples...
...miles on her hips. Sidney has occasionally shared her bed; now he sees a way he can help Rita and, always more important, himself. She's in danger of losing her job because she said no to one of J.J.'s rivals, Leo Bartha. Sidney needs a third columnist, Otis Elwell (David White), to print the slur about Dallas, thus currying J.J.'s favor. So when Elwell also promises to get the cigarette girl her job back, Sidney pimps Rita to him. The three of them wind up in Sidney's office, with Elwell uttering the oldest line...
...Sidney, whom Susie rightly pegs as having a "clever little mind," is always being outsmarted: by Rita, by a columnist (Lawrence Dobkin as Leo Bartha) whom he tries to blackmail into running an item, by Hunsecker and finally by J.J.'s sister. Sidney - who we know is making a hefty $250 a week, just from two clients we hear complain to him during the movie, so is probably earning much more - is a cheapie who won't wear a topcoat on a winter night: "And leave a tip in every hat-check room in town?" But his thrift earns...
...schemers almost worthy of Shakespeare, as if Richard III (J.J.) were married to Lady Macbeth (Sidney, rubbing those hands to get the stain out, or spark fire). Lehman built a formicary of dark characters with weak dependents: Sidney with his secretary, J.J. with Susan, Susan with Dallas, the columnist Leo Bartha with his nagging wife, columnist Otis Elwell with a sexy cigarette girl. And he nicely establishes the final frame-up, where Susie shows she is her brother's sister. "The terrible thing about people like you," she tells Sidney, "is that decent people have to become like...