Reaction
A preview screening of Sweet Smell of Success was poorly received, as Tony Curtis fans were expecting him to play one of his typical nice guy roles and instead were presented with the scheming Sidney Falco. Mackendrick remembered seeing audience members "curling up, crossing their arms and legs, recoiling from the screen in disgust". Burt Lancaster's fans were not thrilled with their idol either, "finding the film too static and talky".
The film was a box-office failure, and Hecht blamed his producing partner Hill. "The night of the preview, Harold said to me, 'You know you've wrecked our company? We're going to lose over a million dollars on this picture,'" Hill recalled. According to Lehman, Lancaster blamed him, claiming that: "Burt threatened me at a party after the preview. He said, 'You didn't have to leave – you could have made this a much better picture. I ought to beat you up.' I said, 'Go ahead – I could use the money.'"
Variety estimated the film lost at least $400,000 on its initial run.
Although he and Hecht would fire Mackendrick from The Devil's Disciple for the same painstaking (and costly) approach, Lancaster was quoted as saying that he felt Mackendrick had done a fantastic job for Sweet Smell of Success and that it was not his fault the film lost money. He also believed that Curtis should have gotten an Oscar for his role as Falco.
Sweet Smell of Success premiered in New York at Loew's State in Times Square on June 27, 1957. Critical reaction was much more favorable. Time magazine said the movie was "raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction ... superb camera work ... and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue". Time and the New York Herald included the film on their ten-best lists for films released in 1957. The film's critical reputation increased in subsequent decades. David Denby in New York magazine later 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".
Sweet Smell of Success holds a 98% rating based on 61 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes; the critical consensus explains, "Sweet Smell of Success boasts a top-notch cast, sharp direction, atmospheric cinematography, and an appropriately jazzy score, making it one of the best noir crime thrillers ever made." At Metacritic it has a weighted average score rating of 100 out of 100 based on 5 reviews. According to The Guardian, British press assessed it a perfect 10/10 based on reviews from multiple British newspapers. A. O. Scott wrote in March 2002 for The New York Times: "Courtesy of Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, a high-toned street vernacular that no real New Yorker has ever spoken but that every real New Yorker wishes he could". Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer, again in 2002, wrote, "the main incentive to see this movie is its witty, pungent and idiomatic dialogue, such as you never hear on the screen anymore in this age of special-effects illiteracy". Pauline Kael wrote: " ... the film is a slice of perversity—a study of dollar and power worship ... Alexander Mackendrick has a crisp film-noir style: the production is shaped by a zest for the corrupt milieu, the pulsating big-city life (what used to be called 'the symphony of a city')—the streets, the nightclubs, the cynical types, the noise and desperation. His temperament enables us to respond to the vitality in this decadence." Eddie Muller wrote that the film "emerged from the cutting room a perverse, unpleasant, brilliant, and profound film. Arguably the best work of everyone involved."
