Prelude to a longer article entitled “The Sweet Stink of Success”.
The title alludes specifically to the Burt Lancaster film, The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), with Tony Curtis and Martin Milner. Lancaster plays a Walter Winchell-like journalist who was the epicenter of NYC celebrity and gossip. If you don’t know who Walter Winchell is (to start: he’s the narrator of television’s The Untouchables (1959-63), it provides the best example of the ultra-successful achiever who has left the world nothing. His thirty years of journalism a burning rancid heap of scandals and hype.
Fittingly, Lancaster stars in The Swimmer (1968) as Ned Merrill, the successful businessman, Connecticut upper-middle class suburbanite, who decides to embark on an odyssey through his neighbors’ backyard pools. Like Ned had when rising to the top of his profession, he confidently sells his project to the people he meets. Initially, his friends are intrigued; they also exchange quizzical glances, especially when he talks about his family. His progress through one estate after another bogs down into bouts of nostalgia (his meeting a girl who babysat his kids), weirdness (an elderly couple swimming and sitting around the pool naked), and burgeoning hostility (at a party he is persona non grata). Finally, he arrives home to an empty mansion with the surrounding property dilapidated by months of neglect.
Shock Corridor is stylistically very different. Shot in black and white. Most of the scenes are indoors. The journalist, Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), is on investigative quest, to find a murderer inside an insane asylum, the antithesis of the beautiful estates of the wealthy suburbs. Johnny is, potentially, on the way up. His articles, he and his editor hope, may win a Pulitzer Prize. He must first get committed to the asylum where, like Ned, he will meet a series of people who reflect his deteriorating psychological state. In the end, Johnny will become catatonic and mute, while Ned will be crying out in a rainstorm to an unresponsive world.
Both films show similarly different sides of the coin of success. Ned’s odyssey leads to a growing awareness that not only has he lost everything but what he had achieved was not worth what he thought. His life with his family was apparently miserable, capped off by his daughters’ drug addictions. He and his wife had also gone into debt and were unable to pay their bills (in Ned’s world, this is the ultimate humiliation). Johnny’s quest indicates that he apparently attained the coveted Prize while losing his fiance and his mind.
Johnny and Ned have another thing in common. They are not nice men. We learn piecemeal how Ned was ruthless in business and relationships. Shock Corridor shows Johnny’s pitiless feeling toward his fiance, Cathy (Constance Towers), and her objections to his scheme to be committed. He wants her to pose as his sister and claim that he forced incestuous affections upon her. She eventually goes along and informs the police. At the asylum, Johnny details how much he desires his sister, as well showing a violent side. One can’t help noticing that his description of how he forced himself on her bears great resemblance to his pitiless arguments to get Cathy to accede to the plan.
I would like to pull the newspaper thread a bit more. Johnny’s harebrained scheme to convince the doctors he suffers from severe narcissism as the means to journalistic success reminds me of two Fritz Lang films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).
In both Lang films, Dana Andrews plays an ambitious, seasoned journalist. In While the City Sleeps, his newspaper is as culpable as he in pursuit of sex-crazed killer. The publisher creates a competition among several editors, whereby the first to break the story naming the murderer will receive the Chief Editor’s job. Andrews, at one point, uses his fiance (a la Shock Corridor), as bait to capture the murderer. He pressures and cajoles her to go along with plan, and, while it succeeds, he nearly gets her killed. Andrews nor his editor get the promotion.
Andrews’ journalist in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt goes further in getting the successful story. His publisher (Sidney Blackmer) dislikes the District Attorney and has found a way to humiliate him. He convinces Andrews to be accused of murder based solely on circumstantial evidence. They want to show (in a progressive fight against injustice) that being condemned to death based on circumstantial evidence is wrong. Andrews and the publisher act on their plan after a woman has been found strangled. They go to the scene of the crime, they find, if not create, incriminating evidence to make Andrews appear guilty. Soon, he’s arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to the electric chair.
Unfortunately, on the way to the district attorney to reveal Andrews’ innocence, the publisher’s car is broadsided by a truck, blows up, the publisher dies, and his evidence is lost in the flames. Andrews now faces the electric chair with no one to believe that his guilt is a charade.
Perhaps the emblem of Success’s Stench is the horribly flawed plan. Those who concoct it are blind the problems and how it will badly effect theirs and their love ones’ lives. Ned Merrill’s swimming odyssey best abstracts the flawed plan or, better, reveals the delusions within such a pursuit. What seemed idyllic, almost poetic, Ned swimming home exposes how lousy his life had turned out. Worse, the delusion of success had become the stench enveloping his life.
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