After the first preview of Sweet Smell of Success at a San Francisco theater, Lancaster seemed delighted with the picture, but producer James Hill stood in a corner muttering, "I hate, hate, hate this picture!" According to Mackendrick, the effect of the movie on the preview audience was "like dripping lemon on an oyster. They cringed with the body language of folding arms, crossing legs, shrinking from the screen."

In the film, Martin Milner's character plays with a combo made up of real jazz musicians, notably Chico Hamilton. However, although the film is set in New York, the musicians were largely associated with the West Coast jazz scene. Among them are Frank Rosolino, Carson Smith, Curtis Counce, Buddy Clark, Paul Horn, Conte Candoli and Jim Hall.

Rita, the cigarette girl callously used by Sidney Falco is played by former stripper Barbara Nichols. In the same year as this film, she also appeared in a much different movie, the Doris Day musical The Pajama Game (1957). Both films made Time magazine's Ten Best list for the year.

Similar to the character she plays in Sweet Smell of Success, Nichols was also subjected to some off-screen abuse as well. One day during the scripting and casting process, producer James Hill asked writer Ernest Lehman to compose a sweet note to go with the three dozen roses He had just ordered for the actress. According to Lehman, Hill had interviewed Nichols for the part, wined, dined and slept with her, told her he loved her, and left her apartment at 2 a.m. On his way out, he picked up another woman, who also lived in the building, and accompanied her back upstairs to her apartment. Suddenly Nichols, a friend of the woman, showed up needing a serious heart-to-heart chat, discovered Hill there, and became hysterical. "If you want her in this picture, you'd better write that note," Hill told Lehman. The writer later said he felt like he was trapped in his own screenplay.

Martin Milner (the jazz musician Steve Dallas) later became known for his TV work on the series Route 66, from 1960 to 1964, and Adam 12, which ran from 1968 to 1975.

When Lehman's novella was accepted for publication by Cosmopolitan magazine in 1950, editor Herbert Mayes had it re-titled "Tell Me About It Tomorrow" because he objected to the word "smell" in the original title. The publication of the story caused outrage among Lehman's colleagues. The writer had worked as an assistant to leading New York press agent Irving Hoffman, who felt readers would identify Hunsecker as the powerful columnist Walter Winchell and himself as the toadying Sidney. As a result, he refused to speak to Lehman for two years. When they were reconciled in 1952, Hoffman ran a whole column in the Hollywood Reporter praising Lehman's writing skills and urging the Hollywood studios to sign him up. Lehman later admitted HE had actually written the column. But it worked. Less than a week after it appeared, Lehman was called by Paramount and began a successful screenwriting career that included Sabrina (1954), The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), West Side Story (1961), and Who╒s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). He also directed the movie Portnoy's Complaint (1972).

The night of the film's premiere, Lehman said, Walter Winchell lurked across the street to judge the reaction of the departing audience. Irving Hoffman milled around the lobby to gather dirt for Winchell and tell everyone who would listen how boring the film was. It wasn't until nearly six months after the film's release that Winchell even acknowledged it, and then only to report that HHL would lose half a million dollars on it. He later revised that figure to $2 million.

By an odd coincidence, the original Cosmopolitan illustration for the character of Sidney Falco resembled Tony Curtis, a relatively unknown actor at the time who would be cast in the role seven years later.

Co-writer Clifford Odets had been a successful playwright in the 1930s. His move to Hollywood screenwriting in the 1940s was seen by many -himself included - as having abandoned the high ideals of New York's legendary Group Theater. By the time he began work on this picture, his fortunes had decreased markedly, fueling the angst for which he was well known. Holed up in Manhattan's Essex House writing the script under tremendous deadline pressures, he found one problem after another with his surroundings. First he complained he wasn't given a room in the front facing Central Park, so the management moved him. Then he was worried about all the sunlight streaming in and insisted on heavy curtains, which remained closed, blocking out his beautiful view. John Turturro captured some the notorious Odets angst in his interpretation of Barton Fink (1991), the critically acclaimed film by the Coen Brothers .

After the failure of Sweet Smell of Success, director Alexander Mackendrick made only four more feature films over the next ten years (one of them uncredited). His last picture was Don't Make Waves (1967), which starred Tony Curtis. He later became dean of the film department at the California Institute of the Arts.

Cinematographer James Wong Howe was nicknamed Low Key Howe for his penchant for low key lighting, which helped establish the distinctive look of Warner Brothers pictures of the 1940s. He was one of the first to use hand-held cameras and deep focus long before they became standard technique. He won Oscars for his work on The Rose Tattoo (1955), which also starred Burt Lancaster, and Hud (1963), and he was nominated seven other times.

Hunsecker's apartment building is actually the show-business office tower at 1619 Broadway, also known as the Brill Building, which housed pop songwriters and music producers for decades.

MEMORABLE QUOTES from SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

HUNSECKER (Burt Lancaster): "I'd hate to take a bite out of you. You're a cookie full of arsenic."

HUNSECKER (holding an unlit cigarette): "Match me, Sydney."

FALCO (Tony Curtis): "Watch me run a 50-yard dash with my legs cut off."

HUNSECKER: "You see that grin? It's part of his helpless act. He throws himself upon your mercy."

FALCO: "In brief, from now on the best of everything is good enough for me."

HUNSECKER: "What's this boy got that Susie likes?"
FALCO: "Integrity - acute, like indigestion."

STEVE (Martin Milner): "The next time you want information, don't scratch for it like a dog, ask for it like a man."

HUNSECKER: "You're dead, son, get yourself buried."

FALCO: "A press agent eats a columnist's dirt and is expected to call it manna."

HUNSECKER: "Sidney lives in moral twilight."

HUNSECKER: "President? My big toe would make a better president."

HUNSECKER: "My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in 30 years."

RITA (Barbara Nichols): "What am I, a bowl of fruit? A tangerine that peels in an instant?"

RITA: "Here's mud in your column."

FALCO: "You were interviewed?"
RITA: "In his apartment."
FALCO: "Where was his wife?"
RITA: "I don't know; it's a big apartment."

HUNSECKER: "With the simple flick of a switch, I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men."

FALCO: "Starting today, you can play marbles with his eyeballs."

STEVE: "Mr. Hunsecker, you've got more twists than a barrel of pretzels."

HUNSECKER: "I don't relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun."

FALCO: "Maybe I left my sense of humor in my other suit."

HUNSECKER: "Here's your head, what's your hurry?"

FALCO: "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river."

HUNSECKER: "I love this dirty town." Compiled by Rob Nixon