Word: sidney
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...What he can't accept is a compliment or concern, especially from the ladies. When Sally murmurs that she wishes she could help him, Sidney feels obliged to shoot down the neediness at once: "And what will you do... open your meaty, sympathetic arms...?" That "meaty" is a zinger. It shows how practiced Sidney is at hurting people; he can do it so acutely without hardly trying. Does he even know who's on the receiving end of his barbs? At one point he calls Sally "Sam," even as he sometimes addresses J.J.'s secretary Mary (Edith Atwater) as "Maida...
...other woman who wants Sidney is Rita (Nichols), a puffy blond cigarette girl who has a few miles on her hips. Sidney has occasionally shared her bed; now he sees a way he can help Rita and, always more important, himself. She's in danger of losing her job because she said no to one of J.J.'s rivals, Leo Bartha. Sidney needs a third columnist, Otis Elwell (David White), to print the slur about Dallas, thus currying J.J.'s favor. So when Elwell also promises to get the cigarette girl her job back, Sidney pimps Rita...
...Sidney, whom Susie rightly pegs as having a "clever little mind," is always being outsmarted: by Rita, by a columnist (Lawrence Dobkin as Leo Bartha) whom he tries to blackmail into running an item, by Hunsecker and finally by J.J.'s sister. Sidney - who we know is making a hefty $250 a week, just from two clients we hear complain to him during the movie, so is probably earning much more - is a cheapie who won't wear a topcoat on a winter night: "And leave a tip in every hat-check room in town?" But his thrift earns...
...then, J.J. is a master of the castrating word or glance; a man at his table can laugh at the wrong moment, and from the guillotine look J.J. shoots him, the guy may as well have said, "I voted for Hitler." So if Sidney is to swim back into J.J.'s orbit, he'll have to do the crawl. J.J. wants to see whether Sidney's pugnacity will overcome his need to grovel; how much will he scrap, and how much scrape? We watch J.J. watching Sidney from the great height of his own megalomania. It happens that Lancaster...
...buzzing around J.J., like Moscone the fly around sly-fox Volpone, is Curtis' Sidney. Mackendrick mentioned the Ben Jonson play to the actors as they shot outside "21" late one night; but he might also have said that Sidney was the fly to J.J.'s taut, watchful spider, and 52nd Street was his web. Whatever Sidney's floating status as villain and victim, Curtis was the victor in the movie. I'll bet that when he first read the script he thought exultantly, "That's me all over!" Curtis may have spent the 50s playing pretty boys at Universal...