"Like many of these, this movie qualifies for me partly because it was an unexpected thrill when I first saw it in the early seventies. I’m neither much a Tony Curtis nor a Burt Lancaster fan, and I’d never heard of Alexander Mackendrick (he made half his relatively few films, including The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, in the UK; a later, strong U.S. job was A High Wind in Jamaica). Sweet Smell of Success, again, too, is quasi-noir. It’s a black-and-white, urban, small film about people’s bad luck and bad character, set in the Broadway cubicles and show-biz restaurants of New York’s sleazy show-world underbelly. Despite my prior relative indifference to the actors in it, they’re perfectly cast—against their standard types—in this, and do terrific jobs, and the script, by the highly skilled and literate Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, is spectacular. James Wong Howe shot the cold-ass thing."

"Alexander Mackendrick is probably the least well-known genius director to ever live. Nowhere is his brilliance more evident than in the down-and-dirty depiction of high-class gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker and lowlife press agent Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. The great James Wong Howe films the gritty streets of New York in the style of the tabloid newspaper photographs that the protagonists traffic in. The movie was shot entirely on location, a rarity in 1957 but probably allowed due to the triumph of Kazan’s On the Waterfront just a few years prior. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis give career-best performances in this noir that depicts the fall of the mighty Hunsecker (Lancaster) and the sniveling, conniving Falco (Curtis) as the former tries to retain his crown and the latter tries to make it to the top of the heap of garbage he so aspires to reign over. The screenplay, by giants of the trade Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, crackles with what is commonly considered some of the best dialogue in the history of cinema. I just love every single thing about this gem of sleaze. Also featured on the disc is a great documentary, Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away, about how the director, fed up with Hollywood, took a job teaching film at the then nascent CalArts and became a great influence on his students—among them James Mangold, who is featured in an interview here"

"A magnificent example of European filmmaking, totally undramatic and hypnotically watchable thanks to the extraordinary visual beauty of the photography by Giuseppe Rotunno, the set design by Mario Garbuglia, and the costumes by Piero Tosi, all under the superb control of a great director, Luchino Visconti. An extended time-travel visit to another world, the film is comprised of two major events are a family’s trip from the city to a summer residence and a forty-minute attendance at a ball. It’s probably the finest physical production ever filmed anywhere in Europe or America, a relic of a time when taste, intelligence, and artistry were still in operation, but perhaps even then only in Italy, and only with Visconti. The undisputed master of the costume film (he made only six), this is his masterpiece, dominated by the extraordinarily majestic performance of Burt Lancaster. The tall, athletic, handsome Irish American from 116th Street in Manhattan brought a dignity, strength, and reserve to the part of a Sicilian prince that no one else could have played better. Without him, it would be hard to imagine the film as good."

"Ernest Hemingway’s superb eight-page short story is the jumping-off point and inspiration for these two essential and very different movies (Stacy Keach reads the story magnificently in one of the DVD extras). I don’t understand why more people don’t know the 1946 Siodmak film. For my money, this is not only the best noir movie of all time but is just about my favorite Hollywood drama from the 1940s. The complex narrative structure begins as a jumbled Rubik’s Cube, and, slowly but surely, each piece falls into its precise place by movie’s end (the stuff Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of). The moody atmosphere provided by Siodmak and his technicians is a marvel. The cinematic execution of a heist has never been better. Here marks the birth of two glorious stars: Burt Lancaster (a beautiful caged animal, all teeth) and Ava Gardner (wow). Paul Schrader’s seminal essay on film noir, as a DVD extra, is invaluable. For those of you who wonder why Siegel’s 1964 violent, stylish, quirkily entertaining B version (the first TV movie ever made) is on this list, I have two words for you: Lee Marvin. There has never been a star like him before or since. Words simply cannot do justice to the magic of this guy—the timbre of his voice, the calm, paranoid, roughneck danger in his physical moves. In a spectacular extra on this DVD, fellow actor Clu Gulager gives a very moving (and, one feels while watching it, very truthful) account of working with Marvin, Siegel, and Ronald Reagan (who hated the movie—yet another reason to see it!)."