My 150 Favorite Movies - #93

The Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

Starring Burt Lancaster as powerful Broadway columnist, J.J. Hunsecker (reportedly based on Walter Winchell), and Tony Curtis as a press agent and Hunsecker's lackey, The Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most memorable movies about New York ever made. Containing bits of dialogue, such as: "I'd hate to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie full of arsenic," it happens that the rest of the screenplay is equally as brilliant, written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, and director Alexander Mackendrick, from Lehman's novella. Andrew Sarris, writing in The New York Observer, "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."