Sweet Smell of Success is a 1957 American film noir satirical drama film directed by Alexander Mackendrick, starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, and Martin Milner, and written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, and Mackendrick from the novelette by Lehman.

The supporting cast features Sam Levene, Barbara Nichols, Joe Frisco, Edith Atwater, David White, and Emile Meyer.

The musical score was arranged and conducted by Elmer Bernstein and the film also features jazz performances by the Chico Hamilton Quintet.

The film tells the story of powerful and sleazy newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (portrayed by Lancaster and based on Walter Winchell) who uses his connections to ruin his sister's relationship with a man he deems unworthy of her.

Instead, Leo chooses exposure over compromising his journalistic integrity, which even his wife Loretta praises as his first decent act in years.

At his apartment, Rita balks at the implications of getting acquainted with Otis, but ultimately assents to Sidney's plan in order to stay employed.

Faced with potential unemployment from the sale of Ealing Studios to the BBC in 1954, director Alexander Mackendrick began entertaining offers from Hollywood.

[5] He rejected potential contracts from Cary Grant and David Selznick and signed with independent production company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, enticed by their offer to adapt George Bernard Shaw’s play The Devil's Disciple.

Harold Hecht refused and asked him to start work on another project – adapting Ernest Lehman’s novellette Sweet Smell of Success into a film.

Lehman forged a screenwriting career in Hollywood, writing Executive Suite, Sabrina, North by Northwest, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, The King and I, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

[10] The plot was largely intact, but in Mackendrick's biography he is quoted from Notes on Sweet Smell of Success: "What Clifford did, in effect, was dismantle the structure of every single sequence in order to rebuild situations and relationships that were much more complex, had much greater tension and more dramatic energy".

Returning to the city that had shunned him for going to Hollywood made Odets very neurotic and obsessed with all kinds of rituals as he worked at a furious pace, with pages often going straight from his typewriter to being shot the same day.

United Artists wanted Burt Lancaster in the role because of his box office appeal and his successful pairing with Curtis on Trapeze.

[12] He took multiple photographs of the city from several fixed points and taped the pictures into a series of panoramas that he stuck on a wall and studied once he got back to Hollywood.

[15] Cellist Fred Katz and drummer Chico Hamilton, who briefly appear in the film as themselves, wrote a score for the movie, which was ultimately rejected in favor of one by Elmer Bernstein.

[16] Mackendrick shot the film in late 1956, and was scared the entire time because Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had a reputation for firing their directors for any or even no reason at all.

[18] Mackendrick smeared a thin layer of vaseline on the lenses, preventing Lancaster from focusing his eyes and giving him a perpetually blank gaze.

Assisted by cinematographer James Wong Howe, Mackendrick intentionally filmed scenes with JJ from a low angle using a wide-angle lens and with overhead lighting directly above Lancaster, so that the spectacle frames cast shadows on his face.

Exteriors were shot in the busiest, noisiest areas with crowds of young Tony Curtis fans occasionally breaking through police barriers.

Mackendrick remembered, "We started shooting in Times Square at rush hour, and we had high-powered actors and a camera crane and police help and all the rest of it, but we didn’t have any script.

[17] A preview screening of Sweet Smell of Success was poorly received, as Tony Curtis fans were expecting him to play one of his typical nice guy roles and instead were presented with the scheming Sidney Falco.

Time magazine said the movie was "raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction ... superb camera work ... and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue".

[22] Sweet Smell of Success holds a 98% "Certified Fresh" rating based on 61 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes; the critical consensus explains, "Sweet Smell of Success boasts a top-notch cast, sharp direction, atmospheric cinematography, and an appropriately jazzy score, making it one of the best noir crime thrillers ever made.

[26] Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer, again in 2002, wrote, "the main incentive to see this movie is its witty, pungent and idiomatic dialogue, such as you never hear on the screen anymore in this age of special-effects illiteracy".

James Wong Howe: Cinematographer, a 1973 documentary about the film's director of photography, featuring lighting tutorials with Howe, a new video interview with film critic and historian Neal Gabler (Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity) about legendary columnist Walter Winchell, inspiration for the character J. J. Hunsecker, and a new video interview with filmmaker James Mangold about Mackendrick, his instructor and mentor.