"“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” -thus says Burt Lancaster towards the end of Visconti’s masterpiece. Wise words."

"How cool is it to see Burt Lancaster flip Hume Cronyn off the wall? I love prison films, and this is one of the best. Bravo, Jules!"

". . . because it’s Visconti, one of my favorite directors and one I wish I had met. Brilliantly acted by Burt Lancaster, who modeled his performance on his nobleman director, Visconti."

"Tony Curtis as a terrible man and Burt Lancaster as something even worse, in one of the greatest showbiz movies ever made. James Wong Howe’s gorgeous cinematography and Elmer Bernstein’s jazzy score (with an assist from the great Chico Hamilton Quintet) all contribute to the alluring nocturnal Manhattan ambience. Alexander Mackendrick also directed great Ealing comedies, including The Ladykillers and The Man in the White Suit."

"Few films handled Burt Lancaster’s unique brand of ceaseless virility as well as this release from 1957. Lancaster made many wonderful movies but at times almost seemed to be biting the camera lens with his crisp forcefulness. In Sweet Smell of Success, as in pictures like Birdman of Alcatraz, Lancaster sits on his patented intensity and delivers astonishing results. The gleaming, indefatigable J. J. Hunsecker is probably Lancaster’s best acting. Burnished. Terrifying. Add to that the wonderful costar turn by Tony Curtis, the photography of the legendary James Wong Howe, and a screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. Fifties film noir at its best."

"Perhaps the noirest of noir films, and for my money one of the three best American films of the postwar period (the others being Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard). Featuring amazing performances from Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, and a knife-edge bitterness rare in any Hollywood film, it is at once a tribute to nighttime New York City and a devastating portrait of the power of a big-time columnist like Walter Winchell."

"Love this film, partly and somewhat irrationally because it preserves in amber the Times Square part of Manhattan as it was when I first knew it, with glimpses of fondly remembered theaters, dance halls, pool halls, the Camel sign, etc., etc. Not the gaudy, blinding array of plastic junk that area is now. You can even see the late and fondly remembered Hotel Astor. Burt Lancaster has never thrilled me, but he’s awfully good in this, and the movie does thrill."

"The ultimate film noir that’s not about violent crime, it’s just character assassination at its most brutal. Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster are beyond iconic in their performances; they become the embodiments of a rancid spirit that can sometimes be found in New York, in show business, in every business everywhere, where money talks and I’ll walk over your body to get some. “I’d hate to take a bite outta you, Sidney—you’re a cookie full of arsenic.” I like to say that to my wife."

"This whirlwind cautionary tale, which explores the dark dynamic between powerful newspaper columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and the obsequious lapdog of a publicist Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), is a cinematic marvel—especially for the jaw-dropping dialogue of the screenplay, which was cowritten by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman and adapted from Lehman’s autobiographical novelette about his early experiences working for a Broadway publicist. With its high-contrast, black-and-white cinematography and jazzy Elmer Bernstein score, the film conveys a certain kind of mythical 1950s New York City more vividly than any other film I can think of. And the on-location street scenes are to die for."