Word: smell
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Sidney (Tony Curtis): "J.J., it's one thing to wear your dog collar. When it turns into a noose I'd rather have my freedom." - from the film "Sweet Smell of Success...
...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...
...Lehman's first meeting with Lancaster, the actor walked in zipping his fly and declaring, "She swallowed it!" Soon Lehman's writing assignments were extending beyond script work, according to Kate Buford's cogent biography, "Lancaster: An American Life," which gives the fullest account of the making of "Sweet Smell." Barbara Nichols, who was to play the sexy cigarette girl, had spent most of a recent night trysting with the film's producer, James Hill - like Lancaster, a notorious ladies' man. In the wee-smalls of that same night, she visited a woman friend in an apartment upstairs...
...Sweet Smell of Success' destroyed us all," said Mackendrick, who would never again direct a major Hollywood film. But that's press-agent reverse-spin. In the projector lamp of history, no one cares whether the film's makers had a good time or whether the film was a commercial and critical flop. (TIME did put it on its 1957 Ten Best list.) What matters is the creepy, elevated pleasure it gives today. The movie proves how savory and nourishing a cookie full of arsenic...
...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" is about that honorable, horrible thing called work. Take Sidney's job: he's in sales. He sells people...