Sweet Smell of Success

In a small tribute to the actor Tony Curtis, who died last week, I thought I might upload the soundtrack to one of his films. For some reason, Curtis appeared in a great number of movies that had notable scores, including Trapeze, The Vikings, Kings Go Forth, Spartacus, Taras Bulba, Paris - When It Sizzles, and others. Here is 1957's Sweet Smell of Success, which featured Curtis in his first "serious" role, and composer Elmer Bernstein in his best swaggering jazz mode.

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The ironically titled Sweet Smell was actually a particularly poisonous film noir tale of power and corruption - a genre that flourished in the supposedly placid and conformist 50s.

Whether you think Curtis was effective in such dramas or not, there is no doubt that he had a gift for farce, most notably in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic-in-drag, Some Like It Hot, in which Tony ends up with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon gets Joe E. Brown.

I think Elmer Bernstein is making his first appearance on this blog, unless my fallible memory and labelling system are both failing me. Bernstein has an enormous reputation among film music aficionados, although among the general public he doesn't have 1/100 of the reputation of his namesake Lenny - no relation. This is a relatively early score, and a particularly strong one.

I should point out that some of the music on the soundtrack was composed by jazz musicians Chico Hamilton and Fred Katz, who appeared in the film as part of Hamilton's quintet. Decca also released an LP of music from the film as performed by this group. The Hamilton quintet does not appear on this album, which features a studio group conducted by Bernstein. The back cover below has more information.