‘SMELL OF SUCCESS’ AT LANCASTER SERIES

“Sweet Smell of Success,” screening Saturday at 8 p.m. in the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater as part of its Burt Lancaster series, has lost none of its bite in the 28 years since it was made. The dialogue of Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, in their script from Lehman’s short story, remains among the most corrosive in American movies, and James Wong Howe’s black-and-white cinematography of New York City locales looks sensational in the splendid fresh print on view.

Best of all are the performances director Alexander Mackendrick got from Lancaster as the megalomaniacal Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker, so clearly modeled on Walter Winchell, and especially from Tony Curtis as the ambitious press agent Sidney Falco, who will stop at nothing to get an item in Hunsecker’s column, which, like Winchell’s did, covers politics and crime as well as show business.

If human nature, here exposed at its pathetic worst, never changes, the power of a Walter Winchell-like columnist has. Indeed, young people, seeing this film for the first time, may find it hard to believe that a Hunsecker--or a Winchell--could be so all-powerful in American life, but “Sweet Smell of Success” does not exaggerate. The irony is that as this film was being made, television was already undermining the impact of Winchell on radio and in print.

What remains so impressive is the symbiotic relationship between Lancaster and Curtis (Lancaster’s incestuous passion for his much-younger sister, played by beautiful Susan Harrison, which sets the plot in motion, is not now so riveting).

Curtis’ Falco is without redemption, but Lancaster’s Hunsecker, for all his lust for power, is not without humanity, especially when declaring his love for the New York he clearly knows better than anyone else. And, like Winchell was, Hunsecker is one helluva reporter. “Sweet Smell of Success” will be followed by “Separate Tables” (1958); Friday’s Lancaster films: “The Kentuckian” (1955), which he also directed, and “Trapeze” (1956). Phone: (213) 857-6201.

Of the seven senior and graduate USC student films screening at 7 p.m. Friday and again on Oct. 4 at the university’s Norris Theater, only three are worth discussing; the other four are by and large hopelessly sophomoric--overlong, overwritten and showing little or no sense of the visual. Never has there been such a total absence of middle range in a USC student film program.

However, Joseph Batteer’s “The Drywaller,” Bradford Owen’s “At Land’s End” and Bill Dance’s “The Promised Land” are all well constructed, well acted and highly expressive. Significantly, their directors wrote their own scripts.