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SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS
1957
Director
Alexander Mackendrick
Starring
Burt Lancaster
Tony Curtis
Susan Harrison
Runtime
96 minutes
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It's a straightforward setup: Burt Lancaster—a powerful gossip columnist of monstrously Shakespearean proportions named J.J. Hunsecker—has a latent incestuous obsession with his younger sister. When she becomes serious about a jazz musician, he gets ambitious press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) to start spreading dirt on the guy to destroy him. Then things proceed to get messy—their collective scheming and backstabbing representing just a small pocket of the moral rot that's eating away at literally everything.
Shot with a neuoritcally energetic, black & white neon haze by legendary Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, and featuring endlessly quotable, blisteringly acidic dialogue ("You're a cookie full of arsenic") from a script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is a cracklingly cruel noir dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan.
“In its final moments of deafening solitude, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS becomes a brilliant foreshadowing to the abuse of information and perspective in the Internet age, a virtuosic, damning, and above all else, intoxicating portrait of American power lust.” - Glenn Heath Jr.
“It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS turned out to be a terminus where a whole host of movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply.” - Gary Giddens
Shot with a neuoritcally energetic, black & white neon haze by legendary Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, and featuring endlessly quotable, blisteringly acidic dialogue ("You're a cookie full of arsenic") from a script by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is a cracklingly cruel noir dispatch from the kill-or-be-killed wilds of 1950s Manhattan.
“In its final moments of deafening solitude, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS becomes a brilliant foreshadowing to the abuse of information and perspective in the Internet age, a virtuosic, damning, and above all else, intoxicating portrait of American power lust.” - Glenn Heath Jr.
“It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS turned out to be a terminus where a whole host of movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply.” - Gary Giddens