It wasn't always a 'Sweet Smell'

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"Sweet Smell of Success" was always an ironic title, alluding to principal characters who exemplified spite and malice. Sarcastic, manipulative comic grotesques Sidney Falco and J.J. Hunsecker, portrayed by Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster as a terminally depraved protege and mentor, specialize in vendettas and unscrupulous career advancement within a setting of tawdry big-city journalism and show business.

Most of the film's episodes occur between dusk and dawn. The action is confined to an area of Manhattan bordered by Times Square and a nightclub corridor around 57th Street, circa 1957.Broadway is the artery that links them, geographically and metaphorically.

Shooting began in December 1956 with night locations in New York, and the movie was released in the summer of 1957 to popular shock and distaste. But "Sweet Smell" transcended its initial commercial failure within a matter of years. Rebounding as a durable unsavory classic in the repertory circuit, it preserves much of the cynical humor and impact that appealed to original admirers.

I was one of them, a 15-year-old high school student at the time. As a pleasurable moviegoing experience of the sinister, amoral kind (the term "guilty pleasure" hadn't been coined yet) "Sweet Smell" was rivaled in my estimation only by Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" a year later. I'm not sure there's been any improvement on their stylization of vice in the act of outsmarting itself.

"Sweet Smell of Success" is being shown today, Sunday and Wednesday at the American Film Institute Silver Theatre.This brief revival is part of a posthumous career tribute to screenwriter and producer Ernest Lehman, who died in July at age 85. The material, which originated in his novelette published in Cosmopolitan in 1950, reflects his professional apprenticeship in the 1940s with a prominent Broadway press agent named Irving Hoffman, a close associate of the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell.

The author took some pains to identify Hunsecker as a fictionalized rival to such established columnists as Mr. Winchell and Ed Sullivan.Nevertheless, Mr. Lehman's background was too well known to escape notice among insiders. It was assumed that Hunsecker -- also described as a kind of Napoleonic half-pint before being embodied by the physically imposing Burt Lancaster -- was a Winchell caricature.

"Sweet Smell" provoked a falling out between Mr. Lehman and Mr. Hoffman, who buried the hatchet a few years later by touting his former protege as a promising recruit to the movies when writing a column for the Hollywood Reporter.

Hollywood at large had shown interest in "Sweet Smell" from the outset, but Mr. Lehman remained leery about selling the film rights, largely because of his former boss' resentment.

Hired by the surging independent company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, in which the actor was linked with producing partners named Harold Hecht and James Hill, Mr. Lehman also sold them "Sweet Smell." Originally, he intended to make it a debut directing project.

In the course of completing a first draft, he was stricken with a spastic colon (possibly aggravated by day-to-day contact with his new employers) and advised to take a rest cruise to Tahiti.