Ciao, Manhattan, or, the chocolate of reality gets into the peanut butter of fiction in "Sweet Smell of Success"

This post should be con­sidered as a con­tri­bu­tion to the above-depicted bloga­thon; please see here for fur­ther details. And please give!

Is Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 The Sweet Smell of Success really a film noir? The Clifford Odets-Ernest Lehman scrip­ted pic­ture isn’t a crime movie per se, although it does fea­ture a supremely slimy cor­rupt cop, a very nasty frame-up, intim­a­tions of inces­tu­ous feel­ings, and a con­stant stream of back-and-forth recrim­in­a­tions and resent­ments and sub­lim­a­tions of guilt and obses­sions that it can­’t really be any­thing BUT a noir, can it? As The Siren her­self put it when I was hash­ing out with her wheth­er I was gonna dis­cuss this pic­ture for her and Marilyn Ferdinand’s very worthy bloga­thon, “you’ve got fate, dark deeds, twis­ted motives, great shad­owy cine­ma­to­graphy, what’s not to noir?”

Right. Of course there’s also the prob­lem that Sweet Smell has already been writ­ten about pretty much to death, and if you’re a fan of it (and good lord, if you’re not a fan of it, what are you doing read­ing this blog?) basic­ally all you want to know about it right now is how good the new Criterion discs of it (stand­ard def and Blu-ray edi­tions) are, and they are very damn good indeed, by my estim­a­tion. In any event, there really isn’t, to my mind, all that much new to say about the picture…unless I bring things into the putat­ively actu­al, and pos­sibly personal. 

The pic­ture estab­lishes its snappy, prac­tic­ally break­neck, pace—and seedy/glamorous Manhattan milieu—in its cred­it sequence, which shows us a bust­ling Times Square as the latest edi­tions of the Globe, the paper for which colum­nist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) acts as “The Eyes of Broadway,” are loaded onto trucks that will deliv­er that edi­tion far and wide…and, in one case, to a news­stand lit­er­ally around the corner from these load­ing docks, before the feet of hungry press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), who will be quite dis­ap­poin­ted to see and men­tion of his cli­en­tele once again absent from Hunsecker’s jot­tings. The avid ama­teur his­tor­i­an of New Amsterdam will know that news­stand is lit­er­ally around the corner via a visu­al pars­ing of the loc­a­tions cap­tured by Mackendrick and James Wong Howe for their mont­age. By gum, those docks look very much like the ones that were on the ground floor of the old New York Times build­ing on West 43^rd Street between Broadway/7^th Avenue and Eighth Avenue. There they are from street level facing west, behind Curtis’ credit. 

If we need any fur­ther con­firm­a­tion of the loc­a­tion, it’s provided with­in a couple of shots; the visu­al closer is hard to catch when watch­ing the film in a theat­er, but easy to nail with the tech cap­ab­il­it­ies of DVD. The trucks of “The Globe” have big ads on their sides advert­ising Hunsecker’s column; but the prop depart­ment did­n’t cov­er every truck at that load­ing dock. And as one of the trucks moves out, anoth­er truck is visible…

…and this truck bears a plaque with the New York Times’ “All The News That’s Fit To Print” motto, and an advert­ise­ment for that paper. 

…and off the truck goes.

“I love this dirty town,” Hunsecker fam­ously intones a little later in the film, out­side and a little down the block from the still-extant res­taur­ant “21,” over on 52^nd Street. The town would get a lot dirti­er in the com­ing years, and the trucks leav­ing the Times’ load­ing dock would get a lot big­ger. Across the street from the Times’ build­ing was a hotel first known as the Dixie, and then known as the Carter (and no, I’m not mak­ing that up); nev­er exactly the Waldorf-Astoria, it was for a time the home of the fre­quently down-on-his-luck writer and race enthu­si­ast known as Colonel Stingo, immor­tal­ized by A.J. Liebling in his won­der­ful book The Honest Rainmaker. By the early 1990s, what had been the hotel’s ball­room, I pre­sume, had become one of New York’s truly great tran­nie dives, Sally’s II, yclept Sally’s Hideaway. It opened its doors at around five o’c­lock every after­noon, around the time the vast major­ity of the isle’s trans­gendered pop­u­la­tion was just get­ting out of bed, really, save for a hand­ful of stal­wart gals whose cir­cum­stances neces­sit­ated a slight boost of spring to the step. Okay, I’m exaggerating/romanticizing a bit, but you get the idea. While a fair amount of busi­ness, that is, hust­ling, went on at Sally’s from the late rush hour onward, its main func­tion was as a place for the indi­gen­ous com­munity, such as it was, to social­ize. Which also kind of made it a great place for a non-transgendered heavy drink­er and sub­stance abuser to isol­ate, and watch life’s rich and strange pageant go by. And so I did, on way too many nights than I some­times care to recall.

For the tran­nie pros­ti­tute, Sally’s was the pre­lude to Edelweiss, down the way west, next to the diner on 43^rd Street and 11^th Avenue, which was much more of a “real” nightclub, and had a more sex-tourist/regular-tourist friendly vibe to it. A friend of mine from the trans­gender world had strong con­nec­tions to the lar­ger demi-monde, and was fre­quently asked to act as docent to the celebrity class in their quasi-slumming activ­it­ies; one night he was dep­u­tized with squir­ing Tim Burton, then-cohort Lisa Marie (this was 1996, around the time of Mars Attacks!), and Francis Ford Coppola to Edelweiss to see the gor­geous dan­cing Dominican not-girls. Lisa Marie went down a storm with the queens, as you might ima­gine; Coppola, appar­ently, walked around mar­veling at how “the­at­ric­al” it all was, and was fre­quently mis­taken for a poten­tial john by some of the work­ing girls, on account of his hav­ing kept his over­coat on for the whole vis­it. Anyway. So on a par­tic­u­larly lucky night, any giv­en girl work­ing at Sally’s could hook either a reg­u­lar cli­ent or a new friend and get him to shell out con­sist­ent cash for blow, and drinks, and pos­sibly some party­ing later. This entailed stick­ing around for the even­ing “show” at Sally’s (lip-syncing in fab­ulous gowns, natch; my Southern belle pal Miss Gina Germaine really sold Reba McIntire’s “Fancy,” as you might ima­gine), wait­ing around for who­ever was deal­ing the always badly stepped-on coke to show up, and, after that trans­ac­tion was com­pleted, skip­ping down to Edelweiss for sev­er­al night­caps or more blow or someone to bring to the party later or whatever. Except. (I bet you were won­der­ing where the hell this was lead­ing, right?) If you’d try to catch a cab from Sally’s to Edelweiss between one and two-thirty or three in the morn­ing, chances are you’d have to wait out­side for some time, because taxi traffic was fre­quently hal­ted by the fleet of now eighteen-wheeled trucks back­ing in and pulling out of the Times’ load­ing docks. This activ­ity led to con­sid­er­able inter­ludes of anxi­ety for both hunter and game, hust­ler and hustled; if the john star­ted feel­ing pangs of con­science (I prob­ably don’t need to tell you that good num­ber of these fel­lows were lead­ing some form of a double life) or, you know, budget­ary con­cerns, this break in the momentum of their, um, head­long rush into sybar­it­ic degrad­a­tion could con­ceiv­ably provide them with an exit strategy, escape hatch, what have you. And the queen, left in a rel­at­ive lurch, would have rel­at­ively short notice from then until clos­ing time (which really just meant a dash to some after-hours joint in many cases) to find anoth­er sug­ar daddy for the evening. 

Yeah, it sure was a dirty town, and it still is, but not that way, not any­more. I always thought it was not insig­ni­fic­ant that Sally’s was pad­locked for good on November 13, 1997, the night of the offi­cial open­ing of The Lion King. The pho­to­graph­er Brian Lantelme has a reas­on­ably fab­ulous web­site com­mem­or­at­ing the joint here. Its con­tents are not thor­oughly NSFW, but still…you might be the type who wor­ries that your work cohorts will take you for a trannie-chaser. Some of the people pic­tured therein are still my friends; and too many of those pic­tured therein have died.