Screenplays

Do not combine this screenplay with the novelette it's based on. With lines so sharp you could shave yourself with them, Sweet Smell of Success is the smartest, most cynical American film of the 1950s. Written by Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, The Sound of Music) and the celebrated leftist playwright Clifford Odets, it is a vicious dissection of the world of public relations and journalism which conjures up a world of creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment. Tony Curtis playing the scuttling press agent Sidney Falco, and Burt Lancaster the Walter Winchell-like columnist J. J. Hunsecker, gave the performances of their careers. With a specially commissioned introduction by Ernest Lehman, and an appreciation of the film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, by James Mangold.