Roots of Today’s Mistrust of the Press Go Back Decades, If ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ Is Any Guide

Wednesday’s screening of one of the great newspaper movies, “Sweet Smell of Success,” will offer an opportunity to ponder anew the probity of the press. At a time when the reputation of the journalistic profession appears to be at a nadir, Alexander Mackendrick’s film of 1957 is a reminder that newspapering has long faced criticism for its ethical shortcomings.“Sweet Smell of Success” is, to borrow a famous phrase from the film, “a cookie full of arsenic” — a cinematic confection with a noxious core. Loosely inspired by the influential newsman Walter Winchell, the film chronicles the mutually exploitive dynamic between a newspaper columnist, J.J. Hunsecker, played by Burt Lancaster, and press agent Sidney Falco, played by Tony Curtis.In a plot based on Winchell’s own obsessive meddling with his daughter’s romantic affairs, Hunsecker assigns Falco to break up the impending engagement of the columnist’s sister to a jazz musician. Falco’s initial failure to poison the relationship prompts Hunsecker to threaten: “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”Cut off from Hunsecker’s column — the lifeblood of an effective publicist — Falco manipulates, by deploying a winsome cigarette girl, another columnist to print a malicious blind item about the jazz man. “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river,” Falco assures Hunsecker. Yet that démarche backfires, forcing Falco, at Hunsecker’s behest, to frame up the musician on a drug charge.Pulling off that maneuver requires the help of an unscrupulous police officer, Harry Kello, who is in Hunsecker’s pocket after the columnist helped the officer beat a brutality rap. “Boy, was the mayor mad,” Hunsecker reminds him in a parley outside the 21 Club. “Citizens’ commission,” Kello laments. “I didn’t mean to hit the boy so hard.” As Kello’s police cruiser roars off down West 52nd Street Hunsecker pauses to watch a drunk get tossed out of a club and savors the seamy glory of it all, crowing “I love this dirty town.”The machinations by Hunsecker, Falco, and Kello are, in the film’s telling, a reflection, writ small, of the quotidian quid-pro-quos between the press and the subjects of its reporting — whether on the nighttime streets of Midtown Manhattan or at, say, Hollywood, or Washington D.C. The film serves as a reminder, too, from a distance of some seven decades, that rumor-mongering, innuendo, double-dealing, and even corrupt trade-offs with law enforcement are hardly novel tools of the journalistic trade.If “Sweet Smell of Success” holds up an unflattering mirror to the news profession, at least the reading public then had a broader array of newspapers among which to choose. At the time the film was made there were some ten dailies published at New York City alone, even if the Sun, alas, had folded its tent in 1950. Each had its own voice and its own standards for newsworthiness — like, say, whether to publish blind items, rumors, or anonymous criticism. Is there any better depiction on film of journalism? Billy Wilders’s “Ace in the Hole” comes close, with its account of a reporter’s callous exploitation of a mineshaft accident, but the credulity-straining plot veers into melodrama. Howard Hawks’s “His Girl Friday” takes a similarly jaded look at the cynicism of the working press, but at its heart ultimately fails to transcend the limitations of the romantic-comedy genre.All three films, though, predate the Watergate scandal in which the press seemed to relish a new role as guardian of the public trust by taking down President Nixon. In the aftermath of Watergate, journalism arrogated a new cachet for itself and donned a newfound respectability. A college degree — to this day at best redundant, at worst an impediment for the old-school shoe-leather reporter — became a new prerequisite for newspapering.A film from 1976, “All the President’s Men,” catalyzed this transformation, idolizing the ink-stained wretches as latter-day saints whose heroic sleuthing and pointed reportage saves America from a corrupt president. That preening portrayal of journalists as paragons of integrity calls to mind another well-known quip from “Sweet Smell of Success”: “That’s fish four days old. I won’t buy it.”

Roots of Today’s Mistrust of the Press Go Back Decades, If ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ Is Any Guide

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