The dark influence of Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 classic about the print media lives on in David Fincher's Facebook film
I don't know about anyone else, but there does come a point in the awards season's frantic celebration of the present when I start to feel like taking refuge in the past. Hence my eagerness to join in with the excitement around the admirable Criterion Collection's lavish DVD release of Sweet Smell of Success ? Alexander Mackendrick's masterpiece of greed, amorality and one-liners to die for.
It is, of course, a film to be cherished at any time ? its portrait of the machinations of monstrous gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker and PR flunkey Sidney Falco are a joy. But there's a particular value in seeing it again in the runup to the Oscars. After all, in any sane world it would sweep the board were it released today, not just for the obvious triumphs of Clifford Odets's endlessly quotable screenplay or the indelible performances of Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, but Mackendrick's sinewy direction, the pulse-quickening soundtrack of Elmer Bernstein and master cinematographer James Wong Howe's gleaming, brutal vision of New York by night. For a movie knee-deep in ruthless individual ambition, it was truly a collective enterprise.
The irony, of course, is thatthis box-office failure wasn't even nominated. But this year may just see its scabrous, cynical spirit finally claim a gong by proxy.
Because in a year where so many award favourites have at least one obvious forebear (Black Swan and The Red Shoes, The Fighter and Rocky, True Grit and True Grit), the dark influence of Mackendrick's classic lives on in The Social Network ? the greatest story ever told about the print media channelled into the best film yet made about the internet. Both, after all, revolve around ultimately tragic villains wielding huge amounts of power through their control of other people's personal information, Hunsecker with his column and Zuckerberg with his website.
The connection feels most obvious in Aaron Sorkin's script with its great dialogue calling to mind the zinger-packed exchanges of Hunsecker and Falco; it's hard to hear The Social Network's rat-a-tat-tat opening scene and not sense the ghost of Clifford Odets hovering over Sorkin's MacBook.
But the links go deeper in these partly fictionalised tales (Hunsecker having been modelled on infamous rumour-monger Walter Winchell): Hunsecker's spite-tipped morsels have their echo in Zuckerberg's online trashing of ex-girlfriend Erica Albright and the idea that a reputation, once ruined, is all but impossible to repair; the onscreen Sean Parker could easily be the grandson of the slick, sycophantic hustler Sidney Falco; and both sets of "cookies full of arsenic" have their patsy in Andrew Garfield's hapless rich kid Eduardo Saverin and smooth-cheeked jazz guitarist Steve Dallas.
Separated by more than half a century, the worlds of the two movies often seem uncannily similar places where characters revenge themselves on the rest of humanity, first with the clatter of typewriter keys then the pitter-pat of coding. Hunsecker may have carried out his vicious business with smear stories and dirty cops while Parker and Zuckerberg called on legal small print, but the result was the same. And just as New York was the dazzling hub of American capitalism back in 1957, so in the tech-era that role was taken by California, with in both cases vast numbers of punters involved ? Hunsecker his 60 million readers, Zuckerberg his 500m Facebook accounts.
The setting might have shifted from monochrome Manhattan to sun-kissed Palo Alto, and the score from throbbing jazz to Trent Reznor, but the story, in many ways, remains unchanged. So if Sorkin and David Fincher arrive on stage next weekend to pick up their little gold men, let's raise a glass to Hunsecker and Falco ? the best of friends 50 years before Facebook.
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