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Burt Lancaster
Tony Curtis
Susan Harrison
Martin Milner
Sam Levene
Barbara Nichols

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Columnist J.J. Hunsecker can make or break a career with a single newspaper item, and has no qualms with so doing. Press agent Sidney Falco aspires to be the next Hunsecker and has cast off morals to do Hunsecker's bidding, including breaking up the romance between Hunsecker's sister and a young musician. An excellent, memorable script highlights this look at the symbiotic relationship between two hearts of darkness.

01/19/2013 (0 of 0 found this helpful)

Sweet Smell of Success review

“Dog eat dog…every dog has it’s day” - Sidney. One of those highly acclaimed classics and stunning cast that left this critic puzzled about the overall output. The story of press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) and J.J. Hunsecker's (Burt Lancaster). Score was wonderful and settings well researched.

A typical "talkies" flick with a lot of moving around. Wonderfully scored coupled with amazing performances. Screenplay was fair with lines: "In brief, from now on, the best of everything is good enough for me." "Dallas, your mouth is as big as a basket and twice as empty! " Sweet Smell of Success maybe popular and recognized, for this rater there just no immediate impact and interesting figures to enjoy from. For media personel related movies, this critic prefers Network, Broadcas...

Rating of
2.5/4 

12/31/2011 (0 of 0 found this helpful)

"Sweet Smell Of Success" by Yojimbo

This pitch black hearted noir was something of a flop on its release, and it's not difficult to see why. Not through lack of quality, but rather the fact that its unrelenting cynicism and bleak outlook is certainly not for the faint hearted. Tony Curtis turns in easily his best performance as Sidney Falco, an obsequious press agent who is perfectly willing to sell his soul to get on top, and Burt Lancaster is similarly superb, brilliantly cast against type as a cold-hearted tyrant (even describing an attack on his character as an attack on his country, the cry of despots throughout the ages) who controls all around him through contemptible manipulation. The core of the film is the creepily ambiguous relationship between he and his sister; at one point he refers to her "apron strings", an ...

Rating of
3.5/4 

04/07/2008 (0 of 0 found this helpful)

"You're a cookie full of arsenic."

Quite simply the best Billy Wilder film that Billy Wilder never made. As nasty and acerbic a film as you're likely to come across, with an outstanding, eminently quotable screenplay from Clifford Odets and the wonderful Ernest Lehman (Sabrina, North by Northwest, The Sound of Music). While the supporting performances are all solid, this film belongs to Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis as the press' answer to Leopold and Loeb. Lancaster (of whom I've never been terribly fond) delivers the performance of a lifetime as J.J. Hunsecker (a not-so-thinly veiled Walter Winchell), a bilious columnist who finds his only happiness in blithely ruining the careers of performers and politicians. Curtis is similarly excellent as the slimy Sidney Falco, a press agent who makes his living getting pieces...

Rating of
4/4