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A more nasty and cynical film was never made, and this from a director (Alexander Mackendrick) known previously for his comedies; though, when read between the lines, this 1957 masterpiece plays darkly hysterical–the laugh that coughs up blood. Tony Curtis is Sidney Falco, a pathetic PR man peddling mediocre clients to newspaper columnists, the most powerful of which is J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), a thinly veiled Walter Winchell stand-in. J.J. wants Sidney to keep his sister–Susan (Susan Harrison), for whom J.J. has incestuous eyes–from marrying a jazzer (Martin Milner); till he does that, using whatever scurrilous means necessary, Sidney’s shut out from the column. “You’re dead, son,” J.J. tells the impotent Sidney. “Get yourself buried.” (It’s a film ripe with memorable lines, among them J.J.’s ordering Falco to “Match me, Sidney.”) Mackendrick, working with the Odets-Lehman screenplay, crafted a masterful noir in which New York City is at once inviting and dangerous, glamorous and grotesque–a city of dreams, most dashed and dead on the cold streets during what feels like an eternal winter. Lancaster, peering through thick lenses, is the town’s biggest, baddest ice-cold monster; Curtis, a pretty boy doing ugly deeds, is no less reprehensible, and they make a perfect pair in a perfect movie about how easily the weak are corrupted by the mere whiff of power.
