The Stranger

The tension of the main characters in Sweet Smell of Success represents a tension between two periods: the modern age (1947 to 1968) and the jazz age (the 1920s). On the modern side is a young woman (Susan Harrison) and her lover, a jazz musician Martin Milner; on the jazz-age side is a sleazy columnist (Burt Lancaster) and his sleazy press agent (Tony Curtis). The jazz-age men have no respect for women. They either treat them like whores (Curtis), or want to completely control their lives (Lancaster). The modern world, on the other hand, treats women like human beings. It also respects black men. Chico Hamilton (who plays himself) speaks like a person with a brain, wears handsome suits, and stands on the same social and class ground as other whites of the modern age. The struggle between the old and the new, the sleek modernism of the interiors and exteriors, the experimental cinematography—all of this places Success in the higher regions of post-WWII American cinema. By Charles Mudede