Worried that he had been typecast as a comedy director, Mackendrick leapt at the chance to direct Ernest Lehmann and Clifford Odets' famously hard-bitten script about a dangerous megalomaniac newspaper columnist and the unscrupulous publicist who acts as his toady. Burt Lancaster, who was also one of the film’s producers, gives the film its nervous pulse, delivering an unsettling performance as a power hungry media star driven by a frightening instinct to destroy all enemies and protect his younger (and not so innocent) sister at absolutely any cost. Mackendrick’s first American film announced his return to his native land with a breathtakingly authentic and electric vision of New York in the age of Walter Winchell, shaped by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe's genius with noirish shadows and jazzy camera angles. Sweet Smell of Success reveals the nightmare side of Mackendrick's comic dreams, ruthlessly crushing the idea of anarchic innocence that buoys his Ealing comedies.

An affectionate homage to Los Angeles, Mackendrick's last film offers a sunny dream of mid-1960s Malibu as a small town of surfers, bodybuilders, real estate agents and movie stars. Tony Curtis returns, in a softer version of Sweet Smell's desperate huckster, as a transplanted New York salesman who lands in the romantic comedy landscape of speculative real estate and romance, caught between a radiant Claudia Cardinale as a giddy Italian actress and a tragically beautiful Sharon Tate as a beach blanket beatnik. Mackendrick’s underappreciated satire of California hedonism and the war between the sexes remains one of his broadest and most accessible comedies.