At one point in Sweet Smell of Success, the phone rings and Falco says, "If that's for me, tear it up." Scripter Clifford Odets used the same line earlier in two of his plays, The Silent Partner and Golden Boy.

Director Barry Levinson is a big fan of the movie. In his film Diner (1982), a character keeps quoting lines from the film. And the autistic character played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (1988) stares at the movie on a TV screen in a hotel.

Film writer Ben Brantley wrote about the lasting impact of the film's sleazy archetypes: "Even today, I've heard theater publicity representatives speak wryly of going into their "Sidney Falco mode."

At one point in the early eighties, a gender remake of Sweet Smell of Success was planned with the possible casting of Faye Dunaway as the Hunsecker character and Bette Midler in the Falco part but nothing came of it.

by Rob Nixon & Jeff Stafford