The Lancaster shark

Forget Jaws. In the Sweet Smell of Success, directed by noble Scotsman Alexander Mackendrick in 1957, Burt Lancaster is easily the scariest shark in cinema.

I could never find a video copy or DVD release of this film, and it never played on local TV, so even though I've read a hundred reviews extolling its virtues, I only just got to it last year. It's been built up in my head for decades as one of the great achievements of 50s cinema, but it was always more of a reputation that an actual movie.

And then it was on late night TV and I stayed up to watch it, and holy shit, it's just as good as everybody claimed. 

It's a fascinating slice of space and time - such a weird, lost world of PR agents, schmoozing with high-class gossip columnists in jazz bars at 2am. Nobody is on their phones, but that doesn't mean anybody is listening to the band. The trolling is just there, out in the open.

And through this world of wanna-bes and never-weres, through the thick fog of corruption and lust for power, Lancaster moves like a fuckin' shark. Always moving, even when he's just sitting at your booth staring you down, sniffing blood in the weaknesses of lesser men, and not bothering about the detritus and debris left behind. Dragging along parasites like Tony Curtis' Sydney in his wake.

For his time, Lancaster's JJ Hunsecker may have been as much a toxic influence on men as Tyler Durden did for me 40 years later, because he is such a fucking alpha male in this film.

But like Fight Club, that's the wrong lesson to learn from JJ's story. Ultimately, the sharks are left swimming alone in the cold, cold ocean, because everybody runs away from them, and he's left with a terrible hangover and nothing else as dawn breaks.