Richard Chandler’s review published on Letterboxd:
"I'd hate to take a bite outta you; you're a cookie full of arsenic."
With Sweet Smell of Success, his first stab at Hollywood filmmaking after a decade spent unhappily in the British film industry, American-Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick came away with a genuine classic, though unfortunately this was not reflected in its meager box-office performance at the time. Its inauspicious reception did little for the director who remained a journeyman throughout his troubled career.
Human cockroach Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) serves as a press agent for an ever-dwindling roster of third-tier entertainers who grow progressively frustrated over his inability to put their names in bright lights (or at the very least in the sordid newspaper columns that serve as commercial stepping stones). A bit of a skinflint in the best of times, Sidney is now ducking his tailor's bill and braving the New York City winter with no topcoat in order to save tips because he's found the wrong side of his powerful sometime benefactor, the acidic columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster).
As Sidney explains at one point, "A press agent eats a columnist's dirt and is expected to call it manna," but Sidney is expected to do much more than simply genuflect; as a sycophantic errand boy for the despotic J.J.'s more disagreeable tasks, Sidney has thus far failed in his charge to bust up the romance between J.J.'s pathologically fearful sister Susie (Susan Harrison) and Steve (Martin Milner), her priggish square boyfriend (in a film full of logical fallacies, none is greater than the idea that this sanctimonious chump would be professionally engaged as a jazz guitarist—a tax auditor would be more like it). In order to re-board the gravy train (such as it is) the unctuous Sidney is more than willing to resort to baseless innuendo, but the limits of his depravity are challenged when J.J. enjoins him to collude with a venal cop to destroy the stodgy jazzman.
Sweet Smell of Success effectively blends the more corrosive elements of media satire and noir, which marry into a delightfully overheated psychodrama. Behaviorally there's not an ounce of realism on display in the reductively Manichaean world of the film, but there is much in the way of gloriously real location photography (from master DP James Wong Howe) of the tight Theater District social radius that bounds the action. This is more than just sparkly eye candy; it serves to moor the overwrought performances to a sense of the real, something the hysterically caustic script from Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets (of Group Theatre fame) actively avoids. The orotund Lancaster gives vent to his congenital bombast, and his grandiloquent tirades are a thing to behold. Curtis conveys a nauseating, rodent desperation in what is easily the best performance of his career. Harrison is passable as the timid Susie, but Milner risks killing the vibe every second he's onscreen in what amounts to my only real gripe.
Some stray notes:
-RIVOLI SIGHTING!
-MAY I RENT YOU OUT AS AN ADDING MACHINE?
-YOU COULD HELP WITH TWO MINUTES OF SILENCE
-DON'T YOU GET MESSAGES, EYELASHES?
-YOU'RE DEAD, SON—GET YOURSELF BURIED
-HE'S GOT A HALF DOZEN FACES FOR THE LADIES
-MY BIG TOE WOULD MAKE A BETTER PRESIDENT
-I LOVE THIS DIRTY TOWN
-BE WARNED, SON—I'LL HAVE TO BLITZ YOU
-IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK
-HE'LL USE ANY SPICE TO PEPPER UP HIS DAILY GARBAGE
-I'D GO A MILE FOR A CHUCKLE
-SOMETIMES "TRICKY OTIS"
-CONSTERNATION REIGNS
-YOU'RE A SNAKE, FALCO
-HOW MANY DRINKS DOES IT TAKE TO PUT YOU IN THAT TROPICAL-ISLAND MOOD?
-RELAX, LUMP
-WHAT DOES THIS MEAN, "INTEGRITY"?
-I DON'T RELISH SHOOTING MOSQUITOS WITH AN ELEPHANT GUN
-STOP TINKERING, PAL—THAT HORSERADISH WON'T JUMP A FENCE
-MAYBE I LEFT MY SENSE OF HUMOR IN MY OTHER SUIT
In my Top 100 list.
In my New York movies ranked list.