Sweet Smell of Success: The Meanest Dialogue in Cinema

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Most crime films kill people. Sweet Smell of Success prefers to ruin them, and it does the ruining with words, which is why more than half a century on it still feels like the cruellest film ever set loose on a city. Nobody gets shot in a dark alley here. The murder weapon is a newspaper column with sixty million readers, and the men wielding it talk in a language so serrated that you can practically hear it draw blood. This is the film with the meanest dialogue in cinema, and unpicking how it achieves that meanness is a masterclass in how writing, casting and light can combine into something genuinely poisonous.

Burt Lancaster - vo.rs

Sweet Smell of Success: The Meanest Dialogue in Cinema