AWARDS & HONORS:

In 1993, Sweet Smell of Success was chosen by the National Film Preservation Board to be preserved in the Library of Congress National Film Registry.

It also won the British Academy Award Best Foreign Actor nomination (Tony Curtis) and received Golden Laurel Award nominations for Top Male Dramatic Performance (Tony Curtis) and Top Female Supporting Performance (Barbara Nichols).

The Critics' Corner on SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

"Pulsating dialogue, brisk direction, good performances and photography that captures the sights and sounds of Manhattan's Bistro Belt make the meanness of this singular "success" story fascinating a good part of the way. Alexander Mackendrick, the British director, and James Wong Howe, his cinematographer, who shot a good part of their film hereabouts, have gotten a fair portion of our town's fast tempo, its night spots and its sleazy aspects into their production. A viewer cannot blame Hunsecker too much when he happily exclaims, "I love this dirty old town." It's harder, of course, to fall for the characters in Sweet Smell of Success. They are mighty interesting but rarely lovable." - A.H. Weiler, The New York Times, June 28, 1957

"Lancaster, his cold eyes enlarged to inhuman size by magnifying spectacles, is magnificent and horrific." - News Chronicle, 1957

"Burt Lancaster is so heavily sinister he could at any moment have whipped off his glasses and revealed himself as a Nazi spy." - Sunday Express, 1957

"For his American debut, Ealing director Mackendrick upped the ante on the palpable darkness that had informed his gently anti-social comedies such as The Lady Killers. His work dared to expose the rotten core at the heart of Broadway and the American entertainment press industry. But the real muscle of the film is the bristling lead performances. Sweet Smell Of Success is a magnificent, sobering work with a heart of darkness." - Jason Wood, BBC Online film reviews, 2001

"The two men in Sweet Smell of Success relate to each other like junkyard dogs. One is dominant, and the other is a whipped cur, circling hungrily, his tail between his legs, hoping for a scrap after the big dog has dined. The dynamic between a powerful gossip columnist and a hungry press agent is seen starkly and without pity. The rest of the plot simply supplies events to illustrate the love-hate relationship. Odets and Lehman pull off the neat trick of making the film seem hard-boiled and realistic while slipping in dialogue as quotable as it is unlikely. Sweet Smell of Success is one of those rare films where you remember the names of the characters because you remember them - as people, as types, as benchmarks. The film stands as the record of one of the most convincing and closely observed symbiotic relationships in the movies." - Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

"This dark 1957 drama is so quick-witted and well-composed that it comes across as more of an observation than a meditation on ambition, deceit, and revenge. James Wong Howe creates another cinematographic wonder with his stark lighting of Broadway at night; in fact, all aspects of this film coalesce to strike a minor, though not discordant, chord in the American dream." - Clay Smith, The Austin Chronicle video reviews, 1996

"Packed with lines that crackle like an uprooted electric cable flashing in the night. The film is a masterpiece, intelligent Hollywood cinema at its best." - Philip French, London Observer

"The creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment of Sweet Smell of Success have more background in Mackendrick's British films than seemed the case at the time. No other American director has come as close to the scathing clarity of Nathaniel West or, at that time, had looked so straight at corruption. The accurate observer in Mackendrick was evident in the way both Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis were admitted to previously locked parts of themselves." - David Thompson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 1994)

"If the story of the columnist J.J. Hunsecker and the press agent Sydney Falco had teeth in the days of Walter Winchell, just feel the force of its bite now; imagine the ride the two of them would take down the information superhighway. Sweet Smell of Success is a formidable achievement, and it leads one to the conclusion that America made Mackendrick a serious artist. He himself would have disputed this, being no great fan of the film, yet it rings out far beyond the sleaze of Broadway, with an effortless resonance that mocks even the best of his other productions." - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, January 31, 1994

By Rob Nixon