Excellent, smart action film.

A Brilliant Conflict

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Burt Lancaster is a ruthless newspaper columnist, J.J. Hunsecker, and Tony Curtis is press agent Sidney Falco who needs his clients featured in Hunsecker's column. The film starts with Falco trying to get in touch with Hunsecker who has refused to feature any news about Falco's clients for the past month. As a result, Falco's clients are upsetting and firing him left and right. He needs to get back in Hunsecker's good graces. It turns out that Hunsecker wanted Falco to break up the romance between his sister, Susan Hunsecker, and Steve Dallas, a local jazz musician. Falco failed in his first attempt to break them up, thus Hunsecker is punishing him. Hunsecker gives Falco one more chance to break up Susan and Dallas. Falco decides to plant a false rumor in a competing column as a means to hurt Dallas' reputation. Then Hunsecker will defend Dallas in his column, in which Dallas will dismiss Hunsecker's attempts to smooth things over and in effect, he will look bad to girlfriend, Susan. That's the plan anyway... First thing. I loved the music in this movie. It was great rowdy, raunchy jazz music that I love and it fit the aesthetic and the mood of the film perfectly. I also loved the cinematography in this film. I thought the black and white looked great. I also liked how some characters would be presented in an extreme close-up, but also at an angle. There's a shot like this of Falco in the beginning. I think it is supposed to symbolize this character's corruption and uneasiness. Extreme closeups can be somewhat uncomfortable for the audience (at least for me anyway, it almost seems a bit claustrophobic, if that makes sense). I also loved the New York settings. In addition to the music and camera work, I thought Curtis and Lancaster were excellent in their roles. While I didn't dig Lancaster's crew cut, I thought it worked well for his character who seems like he's pretty much all business all the time. He kind of had a Hank Hill thing going on in this movie--but of course, he's smarter and more shrewd than Hank Hill could ever be. I also really liked Curtis in this movie. Before I kind of dismissed him as a big of a lightweight actor (though I do really like him in Some Like it Hot), but this film demonstrated that he was adept at drama. I thought he was great as Falco, the agent who would stop at nothing to be successful. I didn't care much for the actress who played Susan. She wasn't bad, but I didn't like how she talked. She ov-er e-nun-ci-ate-d her words. I thought this was a great film.

................that runs throughout this one-of-a-kind film and pulls it together in all of its hard-edged, creepy, dark and riveting auteur driven brilliance is the camera work of the man who single-handedly invented/developed (out of the necessity to light other more forgettable films) the film noir genre - James Wong Howe. He is one of the few geniuses produced by the Industry and his influence dominates the movies to this day......especially through Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams and George Lucas. From the Silent Era right up to "Solo" the viewer can "feel" him in virtually every movie ever made, good or bad, since the mid-1920's. Don't believe it? Just look at his filmography! He was casually innovating ideas that other cinematographers took as their own "important" ideas years later. Case in point - Gregg Tolands' groundbreaking "deep focus" camera work on Citizen Kane can be directly traced to Howes' "Transatlantic" camera work 10 years before. All this said, "Sweet Smell........" is one of the 10 best movies ever made and worthy of seeing over and over.

Sweet Smell of Success tells the story of a young press agent Sidney Falco. He is always getting the bitter taste of failure from all the sides. And he is going to the great extend to get the Sweet Smell of Success. But, as he thinks he won, and ready to enjoy the sweet smell, everything goes to the bitter taste again.Tony Curtis has done a great job in the movie. Especially the character with a negative touch during that time should have been a real challenge. All the other cast did perfect job. This is another classic movie that excels in all aspects, cast and crew.

"Sweet Smell of Success" follows scummy people doing a scummy job and exploits them for what they do. Sidney Falco is a publicist who works for a newspaper writer named J.J. Hunesecker. Sidney Falco has almost no regard for other human beings, and that's because his job demands it. It's a job that rewards his greed, selfishness, and backwards morals. He plays everyone against everyone, no one is truly his friend, but somehow no one is truly his enemy. Everyone is just viewed as a tool he can use to rise to the top.J.J. Hunesecker keeps everyone below him, because in order to stay on top in his job, he has to. J.J.'s fatal flaw, however, is that he cares about one person and let's that person control (or influence) his actions. And the fact that his fatal flaw is that he cares about someone more than himself obviously shows the business him and Sidney work in and the kind of person J.J. had to be to rise to the position he's in. But J.J. gets carried away in the one person he let's himself care about, and he becomes obsessed with her to the point that he won't let anyone else have her. But eventually J.J. ends up bringing everyone else down with him. The film satirizes the media by showing that they are even worse than the people that they chastise, and we listen to them because we blindly believe that whatever we see in the news is fact. This creates a cycle where they keep getting paid to be jerks because we keep buying their papers, and the more we buy, the more they can get away with.The film's fast dialogue and general fast pace resembles how fast Sidney's world moves and how fast he needs to think in order to survive in his job, and one of the major strengths of the film is how there is always something happening in it. This film isn't dull for a second and the fast, witty dialogue make it genuinely entertaining from beginning to end, which is something I can't say for most films. But beyond pure entertainment, nearly every character in the film (and there are many) is interesting and follows a believable character arc, and on top of that, it's commentary on the media makes it truly one of the best film noirs of all time.