Member Movie Night: Sweet Smell of Success

(Alexander Mackendrick, US 1957, 96 min., 35mm)

"I'd hate to take  a bite out of you, Sidney, you're a cookie full of arsenic" is one of numerous memorable lines in a brilliant American cult picture that is, with Touch of Evil, the last of the great films noir, and among  the sharpest, most uncompromisingly dark Manhattan street movies—specifically of the old Times Square district—ever made. The setup is simple: Burt Lancaster—a powerful, Walter Winchell-like newspaper and TV gossip columnist named J. J. Hunsecker—has a latent incestuous obsession  with his younger sister; when she becomes serious about a jazz musician (Martin Milner), he gets an  ambitious press agent called Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) to spread dirt on the fellow to destroy him.