"It’s the city I grew up in. Sweet Smell Of Success has got the spirit of the city."

- Martin Scorsese on his favourite film set in New York.

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis star in Alexander Mackendrick’s classic New York noir, a sharp satire on the grasping world of newspaper gossip columns.

Unprincipled press agent Sidney Falco (Curtis) has fallen out of favour with monster gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster), a man incestuously obsessed with destroying his kid sister's (Susan Harrison) romance with a jazz guitarist (Marty Miller). Totally under Hunsecker's thumb, Falco sets out to break up the relationship, seeding the public newspapers with rumour, innuendo and paranoia in a campaign to tarnish the musician's reputation by fair means or foul. But will it prove enough to get him back on side?

Featuring a script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets and the noirish neon cityscapes of Oscar®-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, this tale of corrupt and self-serving newspapermen is one of the most acerbic films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Savage in its portrait of a mercenary press this is intelligent Hollywood cinema at its finest - and a damning portrait of human nature gone sour.

With thanks to Park Circus.

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