A fizzingly clever big-city satire and deeply strange late noir classic.
Comment
09/26/01
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
100
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:41
Fresh:41
Rotten:0
Average Rating:8.7/10
Consensus: 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.
Runtime: 1 hr 38 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Director Alexander Mackendrick breaks away from black comedy (THE LADYKILLERS) and goes for full-fledged noir in this spectacular hard-boiled tale of greed, corruption, and brutality. In the... [More]
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Martin Milner, Samm Levine
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Reviews for Sweet Smell of Success
Top CriticThe film is a masterpiece, intelligent Hollywood cinema at its best.
04/21/09
With some of the sharpest dialogue ever cut in Hollywood, only on the most superficial level is this a movie about gossip and publicity. We're talking show business. We're talking America. We're talking cast-iron classic.
12/30/06
Top CriticOne of the sharpest and corrosively perceptive films to emerge from Hollywood.
09/11/01
Top CriticA masterpiece.
04/21/09
Top CriticThe screen was rarely so dark or cruel.
06/24/06
Top CriticLoose, sleazy, brilliant and hyper-cool.
06/21/02
Still remarkably pungent.
01/01/00
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is an ascerbic, dynamic and intense film that exposes the diseased under-side of New York City's glamorous night life, revealing...
08/20/01
One of those rare films where you remember the names of the characters because you remember them -- as people, as types, as benchmarks.
01/01/00
Top CriticIt's about hype and, although it was made decades before the word was coined, it still has eye-opening things to convey about the slippery business of celebrity journalism. Such is the value of first-hand experience.
09/20/03
Its script posses some of the sharpest dialogue ever written, and even if it’s not exactly naturalistic, it’s stylized in the best sense.
03/05/02
Mackendrick's nighthawk landscape is compellingly, poetically bleak.
04/21/09
Uses every aspect of filmmaking to perfection.
04/12/02
Cruel and unflinching, this movie is partially responsible for bringing Winchell's career down. Excellent cinematography, acting, dialogue, and scoring -- a must see.
01/01/00
Lancaster is monumental.
12/16/02
Lancaster-Curtis saga of Manhattan's amoral media has spark and a wicked bite.
11/07/02
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.
04/18/02
A cruelly cynical take on the seamy side of New York City's swinging nightclub life.
02/11/05
Its pleasures are almost obscenely abundant.
03/15/02
Top CriticLatest News for Sweet Smell of Success
July 06, 2005:
Legendary Screenwriter Ernest Lehman Passes Away
Veteran screenwriter / producer Ernest Lehman passed away on July 2nd after a lengthy illness. Mr. Lehman was nominated for a half-dozen Oscars over the course of his... More...
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