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Sweet Smell Of Success, directed by Alexander Mackendrick, from a screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, based on Lehman's novel, premieres in New York at Loews's State Theater. Burt Lancaster is J. J. Hunsecker, a powerful, muck-raking, nationally syndicated gossip columnist who inveigles Tony Curtis' Sidney Falco, an obsequious, low rent press agent who worships at Hunsecker's feet, to break up Hunsecker's sister's romance with a jazz musician. A lacerating portrait of mendacity and power at its most corrupt, with Lancaster and Curtis spitting out some of filmdom's most quotable one-liners and insults. Elmer Bernstein's dissonent score stalks James Wong Howe's noirish monochromatic Manhattan nightscapes with palpable menace.
