Sweet Smell of Success is credited as "the closest Hollywood came to acknowledgingthe blacklist while it was in full swing; the two gossip mongers conspire todestroy the career of a young jazz musician with false accusations of Communistsympathies (as well as drug use)." (TA, NB) Brilliantly playing againsttype, Tony Curtis is Sidney Flaco, an unscrupulous New York publicity agent (a"man of forty faces not one of them pretty") who will sink to anydepths for a mention in the all-powerful J. J. Hunsecker's (Burt Lancaster)gossip column. A scathing critique of character assassination with the stroke ofa pen, Sweet Smell of Success was written by the Communist playwright CliffordOdets, a "combative witness," and Ernest Lehman. J. Hoberman terms it"an example of crypto anti-McCarthyism that, appearing a good three yearsafter the demagogue's fall, reeks of self-disgust."