Sweet Smell of Success. 1957. USA. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. Screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. With Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison. DCP. 96 min.
Curtis’s career took another leap forward in the mid-1950s, when Burt Lancaster, another star who had survived a difficult New York City childhood, took the young actor under his wing, casting him first in the Hecht-Lancaster production Trapeze (1955) and then taking him on as costar and co-producer for Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a film noir Faust in which Curtis’s Sidney Falco, a conniving young press agent, sells his soul to Lancaster’s satanic Broadway columnist J. J. Hunsecker. Making his American debut, Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick (The Ladykillers) allows Curtis to deepen and darken his established persona, as a hustling outsider suddenly forced to face the moral consequences of his ambition.