Reaction
A preview screening of Sweet Smell of Success did not go well, as Tony Curtis fans were expecting him to play one of his typical nice guy roles and instead were presented with 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. However, Lancaster blamed Lehman, who remembers a confrontation they had: "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.'"
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 said that the movie was "raised to considerable dramatic heights by intense acting, taut direction ... superb camera work ... and, above all, by its whiplash dialogue". Both it and the New York Herald included the film on their ten-best lists for 1957. The film's reputation improved over time, with David Denby in New York magazine calling 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 100 percent "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes and a 100 metascore at Metacritic. Though Mackendrick's direction of the actors and his staging of the scenes are at times extraordinary, in recent years critics have praised only the film's dialogue, "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", A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times. Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer 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".
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