Word: sidney
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...novelette, which was originally called "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," runs 60 pages as reprinted in a recent collection of Lehman's short fiction. It's good reading, from the title - itself a press agent's misrepresentation of a story drenched in sour stench - to the abrupt ending of Sidney's discovering Hunsecker at the door, seeing his furious face and crying, "J.J.! Jesus! Don't!" (Is he about to beat Sidney up or actually kill him? Is this tale, like "Sunset Blvd." of the same year, narrated by a corpse...
...From the beginning, Lehman saw many of the relationships as twisted marriages. J.J. wants to break up Susie's betrothal to Dallas, then take her on a sibling honeymoon cruise on the Queen Mary; J.J. and Sidney are a pair of 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...
...scene from the book is played almost verbatim in the film. Sidney reads an advance copy of J.J.'s column, sees that he has praised Herbie Temple, an old vaudeville comic, and learns that J.J. ran the bit without a press agent's urging - simply because he thought the fella was funny. Sidney rushes over to tell the comic he can get him a mention in J.J.'s column, then makes a phony phone call, pretending to dictate to J.J. the exact item that will appear later in the day. The novelette has a twist not in the film...
...Sidney has a kvetching mama, who calls him way too often, and a scrupulous kid brother Mike. In the movie, they are sensibly excised as being useless to our understanding of Sidney. This creature didn't come out of a womb but from under a rock. He has no lineage; he created himself, in the dark, dank, rank cave of his ambitions. The film is interested only in how he gets by in this "dog-eat-dog" world. ("Every dog will have his day," says the movie Sidney, who's full of animal metaphors.) At its black heart, "Sweet Smell...
...movie script improves on the novelette in two basic ways: by what's added (the whipcrack pungency of Odets' dialogue) and what's missing. Sidney no longer has a souring affair with J.J.'s secretary. (The boy is all ego, not libido; he's too busy screwing his clients to waste time screwing a secretary.) Also gone are the interior monologues, and good riddance; Sidney has no soul to confide to us. But he has a handsome line of patter - a slick pitch (most likely a spitter) for shoddy merchandise. He stops you on the street, talks fast, and suddenly...