Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1957 noir drama of hustling, fame, and corruption, "Sweet Smell of Success."

It was directed by Alexander Mackendrick, who also contributed to the screenplay by playwright Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, whose 1950 novelette "Tell Me About It Tomorrow" provided the story.

"Sweet Smell of Success" stars Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, and Martin Milner, with support from Jeff Donnell, Sam Levene, Emile Meyer, Barbara Nichols, and Joe Frisco.

Sidney Falco is a New York City publicity agent who hustles to get his clients' names placed in the newspaper gossip columns that play a prominent role in determining who's in and who's out of the city's restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and social and political circles.

But he's in a difficult spot because the city's most prominent and influential columnist, J.J. Hunsecker, refuses to run any of the items Falco feeds him.

Falco is on the outs because Hunsecker has asked him to break up his younger sister Susan's relationship with Steve Dallas, a guitarist with an up and coming jazz group, something Falco has so far failed to do.

Desperate to appease Hunsecker, Falco plans to place a blind item smearing Dallas in a rival newspaper, but has trouble finding a columnist to run it, despite attempts at blackmail.

When the item finally does run and Dallas's combo loses its gig at a popular nightclub, Susan takes him to see her brother before his syndicated radio broadcast.

Hunsecker pretends to side with Dallas and makes a telephone call to get the jazz group reinstated.

But when Dallas denounces Hunsecker's tactics and his malignant influence on American culture, Susan is forced to choose between Dallas and her brother.

She reluctantly sides with Hunsecker, and Falco finds himself back in the columnist's good graces.

But Hunsecker is not satisfied just to break up Susan's relationship with Dallas.

He wants Steve Dallas destroyed, and he wants Falco to make it happen.

American director Alexander Mackendrick enjoyed a long and successful career at London's Ealing Studios helming such films as "The Man in the White Suit" in 1951 and "The Ladykillers" in 1955.

But when Ealing Studios was sold that same year, Mackendrick found himself without steady employment and returned to the United States after many years living in Scotland.

He was first attracted to Burt Lancaster's movie company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster Productions, by the the chance to make a film based on George Bernard Shaw's 1897 play "The Devil's Disciple."

When that project fell through, Mackendrick was reassigned to a film adaptation of Ernest Lehman's novelette based on his experiences as an assistant to New York press agent and Hollywood reporter columnist Irving Hoffman.

Mackendrick had concerns about the screenplay and worked with Lehman to make it better suited to the big screen.

When Lehman became ill, Mackendrick recruited playwright Clifford Odets to revise the script.

Mackendrick later wrote in his notes on "Sweet Smell of Success," "What Clifford did in effect was dismantle the structure "of every single sequence in order to rebuild situations "and relationships that were much more complex, "had much greater tension, and more dramatic energy."

What was supposed to be a two-week rewrite took four months.

Due to cast members' other film commitments, shootings started before the rewrite was complete with some films written, typed, and shot all within a few hours.

But this rapid turnover didn't prevent further refinement of the script before it was shot to give it the pace and rhythm typical of a particular group of New York City types.

Mackendrick later explained, "We cut the script there on the floor with the actors "just cutting down lines, making them more spare, "what Clifford would've done himself, really, "had there been time."

Location shooting in New York City took place in late 1956 with all the problems that entailed.

The primary difficulty was restraining the hoards of young Tony Curtis fans anxious to see their idol.

Oscar-winning cinematographer James Wong Howe, a master of the use of shadow, relied on experience gained from his long history of shooting movies, extending back to 1923 in silent films, to produce the moody scenes of nighttime New York so essential to the film's impact.

Tony Curtis, born Bernard Schwartz on June 3rd, 1925, had his first uncredited movie role in the 1949 noir crime drama "Criss Cross" dancing with Yvonne De Carlo, who starred in the film with Burt Lancaster.

Under contract at Universal Studios, Curtis appeared in small parts in a wide variety of movies, including swashbucklers, Westerns, sports films, and as the title character in "Houdini" with his then-wife Janet Leigh in 1953.

But then it was back to B films, including the medieval saga "The Black Shield of Falworth" in 1954, again with Janet Leigh.

Incidentally, he never actually uttered the Brooklyn-accented line supposedly from that picture, "Yonder lies the castle of my father."

By 1956, Curtis was anxious to break out from pretty boy roles and prove his chops as an actor.

He fought hard to win the part of Sidney Falco, a role Universal Studios executives feared would ruin his good guy image.

United Artists, distributor for the film, wanted Burt Lancaster to play J.J. Hunsecker because he had just worked successfully with Curtis in "Trapeze."

Lancaster, who began his career playing hapless victims in film noirs like "The Killers" with Ava Gardner in 1946, soon moved on to roles exhibiting what critic Foster Hirsch calls "an extreme hardness."

Hirsch continues, "He's especially sinister "in the late noir drama 'Sweet Smell of Success,' "wielding authority with satanic power, "his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, "his set expression radiating contempt, "his voice icy and cutting.

"Lancaster's maniacal, incestuously fixated character "is truly chilling."

Apparently, Lancaster was an intimidating presence on the set as well.

Film composer Elmer Bernstein later said, "Burt was really scary.

"He was a dangerous guy.

"He had a short fuse."

His brooding menace carries over into his performance as Hunsecker, who Mackendrick described as "a scholarly brute."

The character of J.J. Hunsecker in Lehman's novelette was clearly modeled on gossip columnist and broadcaster Walter Winchell.

A former vaudevillian, at the apogee of his fame Winchell wrote a newspaper column that appeared in over 2,000 newspapers around the world.

His weekly radio show reached 20 million people from 1930 until the late '50s.

By 1940, he was the highest paid man in America.

He also brutally ended a relationship between his daughter Walda and a Broadway producer named Bill Cahn.

Walda supported Cahn with money from an allowance given her by her parents.

Walter thought Cahn was taking advantage of her.

He once charged into her apartment waving a pistol saying he would rather shoot her than allow her to marry Cahn.

She became hysterical and her parents institutionalized her.

Cahn soon disappeared, but was later tried and convicted for tax evasion purportedly at the direction of Winchell's good friend J. Edgar Hoover.

The character of J.J. Hunsecker in "Sweet Smell of Success" resembles the real-life columnist in much the same way Charles Foster Kane in 1941's "Citizen Kane" resembles William Randolph Hearst.

As critic Gary Giddins wrote in his notes for the Criterion Collection release of the film, "Lancaster plays a brooding celibate "who casts his shadow over this dirty town, "but enjoys few of its Arabian nights enticements "beyond the narcotic of power "and an elite table at the 21 Club.

"He's physically and temperamentally "the reverse image of Winchell, a yapping, short, bald, "fedora-wearing, womanizing, feuding, "avaricious soothsayer."

To Winchell's glee, "Sweet Smell of Success" did not enjoy the sweet smell of financial success on its initial release, although "Time" and "The New York Herald" included it on their 10 best lists for 1957.

But the film's reputation and stature have grown over the years.

In 1991, David Denby of "New York Magazine" called it, "The most acrid and the best of all New York movies "because it captured better than any film I know "the atmosphere of Times Square and big city journalism."

Gary Giddins argued in 2011 that the movie takes ideas and motifs from earlier films about Broadway, about newspapers and press agents, about nightclubs, jazz musicians, and brutal cops, and combines them into an noxious brew producing, he said, "A uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Goodnight.