Sweet Smell of Success (Faber and Faber Screenplays)

The Faber Classic Screenplay Series presents the very best writing from the history of cinema.

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 wprld of creeping hysteria and acid disenchantment. Tony Curtis playing the Scuttling press agent Sidney Falco, and Burt Lancaster as the colimnist J.J. Hunsecker, gave the performances of their careers.

With a specially commissioned introduction by Lehman, and an appreciation of the film's director, Alexander Mackendrick, by James Mangold.