Sweet Smell of Success: The Meanest Dialogue in Cinema

Most crime films kill people. Sweet Smell of Success prefers to ruin them, and it does the ruining with words, which is why more than half a century on it still feels like the cruellest film ever set loose on a city. Nobody gets shot in a dark alley here. The murder weapon is a newspaper column with sixty million readers, and the men wielding it talk in a language so serrated that you can practically hear it draw blood. This is the film with the meanest dialogue in cinema, and unpicking how it achieves that meanness is a masterclass in how writing, casting and light can combine into something genuinely poisonous.

It was a commercial failure in 1957, partly because audiences did not want to watch Tony Curtis, a heart-throb, play a crawling worm, and partly because the film flattered no one. Its reputation has only grown since, and it now reads as one of the sharpest things Hollywood ever said about power, publicity and the men who serve both.

The columnist and his creature

J.J. Hunsecker is the most powerful newspaper gossip columnist in New York, a man who can make or destroy a career, a nightclub or a politician with a single line of print, and who sits at his regular table dispensing favour and annihilation like a Roman emperor. Burt Lancaster plays him behind heavy glasses, still and cold, a coiled physical presence used almost entirely in repose — the threat is in how little he needs to move. The character was transparently modelled on Walter Winchell, the real broadcaster and columnist whose national reach in the 1940s made him one of the most feared men in America, and audiences of 1957 knew exactly who was being flayed.

Orbiting Hunsecker is Sidney Falco, a press agent who needs the columnist to plant his clients’ names and will do anything to stay in favour. Tony Curtis, cast against his matinee-idol image, gives the performance of his life as a grinning, sweating hustler with no floor beneath him, a man so hungry for a rung on the ladder that he will pimp, lie and betray to get it. Hunsecker has assigned Falco a job: break up the romance between Hunsecker’s younger sister Susan and a decent jazz guitarist, by any means necessary. The columnist’s control of his sister is possessive to the point of the incestuous, and the film never quite says the word, which makes it worse. Falco takes the job because he must, and the film watches him destroy an innocent man to keep his access to a monster.

Why the dialogue cuts so deep

The screenplay is credited to Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, adapted from Lehman’s own novella, and the collaboration produced something neither man quite managed alone. Lehman knew the Broadway press-agent world from the inside and supplied its texture and its plot; Odets, a great playwright of American speech, rewrote the dialogue into a heightened, hard-boiled poetry that no one has ever surfaced in the real world and every viewer instantly believes. The lines are famous for their venom — Hunsecker’s dismissals and Falco’s grovelling comebacks land like slaps — and the reason they work is that the cruelty is always specific and always tactical. Nobody insults anybody for mere colour. Every barb is a move in a power game, a probe for weakness or a demonstration of dominance, so the wit carries real stakes. You wince because the words are doing actual damage to actual careers on screen.

What keeps the style from tipping into camp is that the actors play the poetry as though it were plain speech. Lancaster delivers his most baroque threats in a flat, bored murmur, and Curtis fires his comebacks with the manic energy of a man who knows he is one wrong word from oblivion. The dialogue is written up and performed down, and that tension is the whole sound of the film. It is the same faculty of charm-as-weapon that makes Bogart’s screenwriter so alarming in In a Lonely Place; here it is scaled up to an entire ecosystem of predators, each one talking beautifully while cutting the next man’s throat.

Why it works: the city as a snake pit

Sweet Smell of Success is one of the great films about New York, and the credit belongs substantially to James Wong Howe, whose black-and-white location photography turns Times Square and the 21 Club and the rain-slicked side streets into a glittering trap. Howe shot much of the film at night on real Manhattan streets, and the neon and the wet pavement give the city a hard chrome shine, gorgeous and merciless. The look says everything the script says: this is a beautiful place engineered to eat people.

The film was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, an Ealing comedy veteran who had made gentle British films like The Ladykillers and then crossed the Atlantic to make the most savage of American ones. The outsider’s eye matters. Mackendrick films the rituals of power — the tables, the phone calls, the favours traded and withheld — with an anthropologist’s precision, watching how the pecking order enforces itself in a thousand tiny courtesies and cruelties. He understands the whole system as a machine for humiliation, and he lets the camera hold on the small print of it: who stands and who sits, who is kept waiting, who is allowed to light whose cigarette.

That interest in the machinery of power is the film’s real subject and its lasting influence. Its lineage runs directly into every later film about the media as a predatory system — you can draw a straight line from Falco to the camera-wielding ghoul of Nightcrawler, a man who monetises other people’s ruin with the same hollow ambition. The difference is only the technology. Falco needed a columnist to launder his poison; the modern version uploads it himself.

The film’s afterlife is a lesson in how reputation outlasts box office. Audiences of 1957 stayed away, uneasy at seeing their idols play vermin and unwilling to spend an evening inside a world with no one to root for. Filmmakers and writers kept it alive instead, quoting its lines and stealing its rhythms, until it became a touchstone for anyone trying to write dialogue with an edge. Its influence is easiest to hear in the theatre and in later screen work that treats conversation itself as combat, where every exchange is a negotiation over who holds the power in the room. The film taught a generation that you could stage a war entirely at a dinner table, and that the right sentence, delivered flat, could do more damage than a gun.

Where to watch

The Criterion Collection Blu-ray is the one to own, with a transfer that does justice to Howe’s silver nightscapes. Watch it late, with the lights off, and let the city close over you. It is a film that gets better the more of the world you have seen, because you keep recognising the people in it.

Spoilers below

The engine of the plot is the job Hunsecker gives Falco: end Susan’s romance with the guitarist Steve Dallas. Falco’s method is a small masterpiece of calculated evil. He plants a false item in a rival gossip column implying that Dallas is a marijuana-smoking Communist — the two most career-ending smears available in 1957 — and does it in a way that will reach Dallas’s employers and destroy his standing. To silence a columnist who might expose the plant, Falco effectively pimps out a cigarette girl he has strung along, trading her to the man for the favour. Every rung Falco climbs is greased with someone else’s ruin, and the film refuses to let him enjoy any of it.

The masterstroke is the ending, which punishes everyone. When Dallas, cornered and disgraced, finally tells Hunsecker to his face what he is — naming the possessive rot at the centre of the columnist’s love for his sister — Hunsecker’s fury turns nuclear. He has Falco arrange to have Dallas beaten and framed on a narcotics charge by a corrupt cop on the columnist’s payroll. But Susan, who has understood at last exactly what her brother is, turns the trap on both men. She lets Hunsecker believe she is about to kill herself over what he has done, and when he and Falco arrive she reveals the whole scheme, exposing Falco as the agent of the frame-up. Hunsecker, needing a scapegoat, throws Falco to the same crooked police, and Falco is beaten in the street and hauled off, destroyed by exactly the machinery he operated.

The final image belongs to Susan, walking out on her brother into the dawn, free of him at last — the one clean escape the film permits, and it costs her everything familiar. Hunsecker is left alone with his empire and his emptiness, having driven away the only person he loved in his monstrous fashion. Nobody is redeemed. Falco gets what he deserves and it brings no satisfaction, because the system that produced him is untouched; there will be another Falco at the table tomorrow. That refusal of catharsis is what makes the film modern, and it is the same cold honesty about power that runs through In a Lonely Place and forward into Nightcrawler. For a portrait of crime stripped of even this much glamour, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the plainest, saddest film on the shelf.