Friday Night Movie Club
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Sweet Smell of Success,released in 1957, shows its age only on its gleaming surface.
(And man oh man, those crowded bars and clubs look mouthwatering right now.)
But get one millimeter below that black-and-white shell, and it is just an incredibly contemporary movie.
(Sidney doesnt hop to it and give him a lighttill later.)
And then, later, to Sidney again: Id hate to take a bite out of you.
Youre a cookie full of arsenic.
Its frankly amazing that his name is a sort of dusty antique today.
Winchells column was the mass-market draw for nearly 2,000 papers around the country.
New York, that year, had seven daily general-interest papers.
(Afternoon papers are virtually extinct now, killed off by car culture and the 6 oclock local news.
A rare survivor is the New YorkPost,which switched to mornings in the 1970s.)
TheJewish Daily Forward,published in Yiddish, had a six-figure circulation, hard to imagine today.
And then there was Winchell, who stood alone.
Then he went into radio, and got even bigger, and then TV.
His machine-gun reading speed at the microphone helped to define his public persona.
Try that on your podcast, folks.)
Maybe it was true.
Conversely, an ebullient word about a restaurant or a Broadway show would put cash in the bank.
Early on, Winchell had the ear of President Roosevelt, then broke with him.
Instead, he left this world nearly alone.
Walda, in fact, had had a fraught relationship with her father.
That didnt work, but a half-trumped-up tax-evasion charge did, and Cahn ended up in jail.
After doing his time, Cahn left the country altogether to get away from the persecution.
Which brings us to Hunsecker.
He was nervous about the movie, thinking that Winchell might rain down fire on him.
But the combination of Winchells waning power and the movies disappointing commercial performance managed to stave off his ruination.
And a funny thing happened: Instead of sticking to Lehman, the movie instead clung to Winchell.
The movie, not the scheming press agent, was the thing that was full of arsenic.
Sweet Smell of Successis available to rent on Prime Video and iTunes.
