DAVID LEVINSON files an appreciation of Alexander Mackendrick's “Sweet Smell of Success”.

"THE CHARACTERS of Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 Manhattan melodrama look as if they'd melt if exposed to sunlight," remarks Dave Kehr. What's most interesting is the way the film appropriates the mechanics of noir without a single crime taking place. Besides, as they say, once you've been smeared, you're as good as dead. This is a film that wraps itself within the nocturnal folds of a city where information is king, and those who hold it can make or break you.

Scuttling through its venal core – and barely coming up for air – is Sidney Falco, a press agent who's in charge of feeding nightclub columnists with hot items. His current assignment involves breaking up the relationship between J.J. Hunsecker's (a columnist) sister and a nightclub musician – the reasons for which are rather vague, to say the least. And as he navigates a labyrinth of human interdependence that ultimately has its hand on the press floodgate, all it comes down to is talkin' the right talk in that boom-boom-boom bass line voice of his.

As J.J., Burt Lancaster commands with a steely, grisly menace, that occasionally gives way to inner combustion. He also interlocks perfectly with Tony Curtis' Falco, who veers between "ice-cream" faced charisma and pure aggressiveness, and much of the joy lies in simply observing the two interact.

The transition from public to private is minor here because the line between the two barely even exists anymore. And unlike your slew of pictures about people who steadily fall-from-grace – sucked in and chewed up and spat out by the "system" – these two exist on a continuum that finds it impossible to divorce them from what they do (and what they will do). If anything, they're just another pocket fueling the system. And it's only a matter of time before J.J. succumbs to its own principles, crushed beneath the projection of his own piling anxieties concerning his sister – an agitated obsession that never entirely leaves incest out of the equation.

Burning, rough-edged and apocalyptic, this is further proof that they sure as hell don't make 'em like they used to.