One of the best, dirtiest movies ever made about the intersection of the media business, gossip, and the human soul, 1957's "Sweet Smell of Success" also features the Tony Curtis performance to watch if you ever doubted the man could act. Playing Sidney Falco, the two-bit press agent with the collapsible spine, the 32-year-old Curtis sleazes his way up and down Broadway in glorious black and white, firing screenwriter Clifford Odets' lethal dialogue like hollow-point bullets. Burt Lancaster's powerful gossip columnist calls Sidney "a cookie full of arsenic," and the movie's great irony is that the character poisons only himself. But everything about this performance moves with the restless, aggressive chutzpah it took Bernie Schwartz from the Bronx to become Mr. Tony Curtis of Hollywood. In the words of Falco himself, the star went about his career "avidly, avidly."
It's funny: When I heard this morning that Curtis had passed away, at 85, of a heart attack, those two words were the first thing that popped into my head. The Globe's Mark Feeney, in his obituary for Curtis, references the same line of dialogue and for the same reasons: It goes to the enthusiastic, sardonic playfulness of the man, and to the kind of self-starting urban energy that makes a slum kid like Falco or Curtis choose big words with care. The star was never truly taken seriously by Hollywood or the media, in part because he was so pretty when he started (Exhibit A above) and because, in Feeney's wonderful phrasing, he had a voice "like a man with a head cold sipping an egg cream." We never let him forget he was Bernie Schwartz, but on a lot of levels that was okay, since he never pretended he was anyone else.
