Like a journalist with a nose for the blues, this film sniffs out a perverse reality behind the fantasy world of Broadway, where personalities are made, and characters assassinated, with the stroke of a pen. Coming late in the witch-hunt era, it is a scathing indictment of the misuse of the all-powerful word to destroy lives and dreams. Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis are brilliantly cast in unlikely roles—Lancaster as the indomitable gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker, who needs the dirty lowdown on his friends and enemies like a junkie needs a fix, and Curtis as Sidney Falco, the ingratiating press agent who delivers it on a silver platter. Curtis-as-Falco must have frightened his fans with a knowing portrait of this “man of forty faces, not one of them pretty.”

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Lehman. Photographed by James Wong Howe. With Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Martin Milner. (96 mins, B&W, 35mm, From MGM)