Rating: 
Summary: Dark, powerful film. One of my faves.
Review: "Sweet Smell of Success," the Lancaster/Curtis team-up of 1957, is a brilliant little piece of work, underappriciated as a classic film but widely praised in many circles and by fans of twisty, biting noir. The script (co-penned by Ernest Lehman of "North by Northwest" fame) is very, very dark and lets no one off the hook. The characters are all sinister and manipulative, but the film itself shares a strong moral center and the consequences of J.J. & Sidney's actions are greatly taken into account during the closing moments. Entertainment Weekly's TOP 100 MOVIES OF ALL-TIME listed the film at #49 and said it was the type of movie "you stumble upon late at night on cable tv." And they're right: I happened to flip by TCM at 2:00 am one night, caught the opening titles of "Sweet Smell of Success," and sat riveted for the entire running time. It's great, really great. One of my favorite films, and even though the DVD itself is medicore to say the least (CRITERION! HEED MY CALL!), it holds a special place in my DVD collection. Grade: A+
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Noir Tale set on New York's Streets
Review: "Sweet Smell of Success" is one of the most brilliant film noir epics ever made. Burt Lancaster not only starred in this masterpiece, but co-produced through the auspices of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. The dialogue crackles. It is no small wonder since Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Clifford Odets shares screenwriting credit with Oscar recipient Ernest Lehman. Never has the internal warfare permeating New York's competitive streets been presented with more brutal reality, or with a greater sense of rapaciousness. Lancaster is letter perfect as an unprincipled, authoritarian, syndicated newspaper columnist who holds his younger sister, played by newcomer Susan Harrison, in constant bondage. Tony Curtis is a low life publicist who, working for Lancaster, is caught in a Catch-22. When he behaves in the same sociopathic manner as Lancaster, a trait the columnist demands, he is repulsed by Curtis'absence of scruples. Lancaster's disdain for Curtis no debt stems from the mirrored reflection he sees of himself. As someone who has written extensively about film noir and is fascinated by the genre, this is one film I glowingly endorse without qualification. The writing, the acting, and the deft direction of Alexander MacKendrick coalesce to make this a venerable cinema classic. William Hare
Rating:
Summary: On my list of favorite overlooked films.
Review: April 12, 2002 If I had to pick one American studio movie that I felt was
unjustly forgotten in surprising relation to how entertaining and
timeless it was, there'd be no contest. 'The Sweet Smell Of
Success' nearly always comes out of my mouth first when I'm asked
about my favorite movies. Inevitably, I'm told rather pleasantly, "Never heard of it." Try explaining to someone under forty that it stars Burt
Lancaster and Tony Curtis (two studio stars who don't penetrate
very far into contemporary consciousness) and that it concerns
newspaper columnists, and you're liable to receive a puzzled smile
in return. "That's one of your favorite films?" By contemporary standards, on the surface, it just doesn't
appeal. Trying to explain its excellence in five hundred words or so
isn't easy, but I'll try. For starters, we like to think that our present day is as
wise and hip a period as has ever existed. Why, this is the age
of irony. We've been there, done that. We're tougher, more jaded,
more cynical, more smart-alecky that anybody else, right? Wrong. The flick is sharper, more adult and more vicious
than ninety percent of the stuff being made today, fifty years later. What's more, watch this movie and you'll quickly realize that
the smarter-than-smart, hipper-than-hip dialogue of today (like all
that light weight mush from Kevin Williams and the beating-around-the-bush repetitions of Quentin Tarantino) is apple pie easy compared to having
to do it a) without pop culture references or cursing, b) in double
time, and c) with a perfectly balanced ear. The dialogue in this movie
is like jazz: it's syncopated, it's learned, it's clever, and it demands
more than one listen. 'The Sweet Smell Of Success' tops a short list of films from
roughly the same period ('The Asphalt Jungle' and 'The Killing' are
two) that form a last hurrah for the black and white movie with bite. Before things supposedly became so complicated in this world that
the movies forgot how to talk. PEOPLE WHO'LL LIKE THIS MOVIE: classic Hollywood fans; hard-boiled
fans; incurable Manhattan enthusiasts (like myself). PEOPLE WHO WON'T LIKE THIS MOVIE: it is in black and white, folks,
and Tony Curtis is in it.
Rating:
Summary: It doesn't get any better than this...
Review: As far as I'm concerned this is one of the very best films ever made in the US - right up there next to Citizen Kane: a brilliant quintessential stylization of New York in the 1950s: the electricity, the purple prose, melodramatic outlook, the overriding paranoia. The "21" & El Morocco & Schraffts & Grants on 42nd. The brilliant performances by the two great NY natives: Lancaster "You're a cookie full of arsenic, Sydney" & Curtis "The cat's in the bag & the bag's in the river". The way the characters go at each other incessantly like jackals with never enough carrion, everyone either a hustler or a commodity. Elmer Bernstein's goosebump jazzy score. It just does not get better than this!
Rating:
Summary: "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river."
Review: Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis at their best. Possibly the most cynical film to come out of the 1950s (with some stiff competition from Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place). Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick (The Man in the White Suit, The Ladykillers) didn't produce a black comedy or film noir as much as a unique combination of the two, and the script features some of the fastest and most furious dialogue ever written -- next to, say, All About Eve (Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets did the honors). It packs as much of a punch as Elmer Bernstein and Chico Hamilton's muscular jazz score. The great James Wong Howe provided the appropriately "Weegie-ish" cinematography (high contrast B&W).
Rating: 
Summary: See The Man
Review: Burt Lancaster is great as usual, and Tony Curtis plays his part like nobody else could have in this great, dirty little picture. SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is so good even Marty "Adam-12" Milner seems like a decent actor.
Rating:
Summary: Chomp chomp chew chew spit
Review: Chewing up and spitting out the reputations of those he doesn't favour, the columnist extraordinaire JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is one of the greatest portraits of the use and misuse of power ever put to film. It is also Mr Curtis' greatest role. He was born to play Sidney Falco who'd sell his mother to get his own column. Add to this coruscating dialogue, Mr James Wong Howe behind the camera, and the objective outsider's view of the American urban landscape, and you have one masterpiece of American cinema. The Chico Hamilton Quintet are an added bonus.
Rating:
Summary: A dark, bitter and prescient slice of postwar New York
Review: Cinematographer James Wong Howe washed the walls of a nightclub with vegetable oil to match the rain-slicked Manhattan streets outside. That's the kind of painstaking detail director Alexander Mackendrick packed into this noirish look at those "fabulous" postwar years in New York. Tony Curtis' finest hour was as Sidney Falco, an on-the-make press agent who has to survive by kissing up to powerful columnists (this, after all, was the heyday of Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, Elsa Maxwell, Louella Parsons, et al.). As J. J. Hunsecker, the always extraordinary Burt Lancaster outdid himself: sinister and insinuating, this superpatriot wields colossal clout that has rotted his soul away. (His unhealthy interest in his baby sister -- the lynchpin of the plot -- seems "dollar-book Freud" today, but no matter). When Lancaster exults "I love this dirty town!", it reflects not only the movie's (ambivalent) view but echoes as a prescient comment on today's venal web of public relations, "spin" and marketing that has saturated American, and world, culture. Black-and-white has never looked blacker.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic film. Mediocre DVD.
Review: I cannot add much to what has already been said about the amazing screenplay and acting in this film. The dialog is incredibly snappy and memorable, and the acting is first-rate. However, MGM/UA's DVD release is dissapointing. An otherwise clear print is marred in many places by long stretches of vertical scratches, and the sound is just so-so. But most troubling is the lack of any decent extras for this landmark film. Had these deficiences been addressed, I would have readily rated the film at 5 stars.
Rating:
Summary: MGM Let Down
Review: I love this excellent Film Noir. This transfer is fairly good. But the HUGE disappointment by MGM is that they released a film with such a great screenplay with no English Subtitles. Talk about cheap. I hope this review shames them into putting a little more effort into the DVD production of such a high quality classic film like this or Kiss Me Deadly in the future.
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