Sweet Smell of Success

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Film Description

High powered New York columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster) is determined to prevent his sister from marrying jazz musician Steve Dallas. He hires sleazy press agent Sidney Falco (Curtis) to do the dirty work.

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DVD Extras

Trailer; Soundtrack options in 5 languages.

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Review by Richard Armstrong on 22nd March 2002

In 1957 the world was changing. The Atom Bomb, the ‘teenager’, action painting resounded in the American imagination. In Hollywood the moral complexity and liberal sexual mores of the European art film left their mark on the studio picture. Mainstream films like The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and The Apartment dared to treat themes of bodily and spiritual corruption as issues of everyday life.

The Sweet Smell of Success revolves around gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker’s attempt to destroy his sister’s musician boyfriend whilst press agent Sidney Falco grovels at his side. Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman’s Runyonesque banter is both as slick as the rainswept streets of midtown Manhattan and as suggestive as a Bergman chamber piece. Pulsing to Elmer Bernstein’s staccato jazz score, Mackendrick’s fresco of the New York media jungle remains one of the most fluent portraits of postwar America ever rendered by a European.

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This film is part of the following Film Collections

Film Noir

Including: Body And Soul, Body Heat, Brick, Call Northside 777, Chinatown, Crossfire, Dead Reckoning, Detour (1945), Double Indemnity, Fallen Angel.

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