You're Missing Out: A National Film Registry Podcast
Jun 4, 2026 · 1 hr 39 min · 15 segments
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) is one of the most visually ruthless films Hollywood ever made — and one that doesn't show up in the conversation as often as it should. We dig into James Wong Howe's New…
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Mike NataleHost
Tom LorenzoHost
[laughs] So I guess I want to start, uh, honestly by talking about, like, you know, because we don't, we obviously we don't have a guest here or anything like that.
Um, it definitely wasn't in school or anything, but I remember being in school, having my first jobs, and that's when I started collecting discs and stuff.
And Sweet Smell of Success was one of the earlier, uh, Criterion Blu-rays that I bought.
And I remember picking it up and watching it and being like, "Oh wow, this rocks." And then we did watch it in, in a class in, in college, and I was like, "Oh, I've already seen this.
I could get to watch it again." And, um, uh, it, it just rocked my shit, uh, the s- the first time I saw it.
Uh, the light or the dark side of, of journalism, but they always just, uh, tend to get their hooks into me.
And I do think this is one of those early movies in my burgeoning, uh, filmdom, my film fandom of trying to branch out and watch other stuff, other eras and whatnot, that makes you go, "Oh, we're not really being given the exact sense of what old black and white American movies could be." Not to say that this was indicative of everything in the '50s, for sure.
That's a big part of this movie's backstory is that it was an absolute bomb at the time it came out.
But the fact that it could have come out w- was sort of an, a, a mind-opening thing of, "Oh, okay, so maybe there are other movies like this that snuck through the cracks, or other movies similar to this that did maybe have an element that was able to push them into success." Um, you know, a movie that I o- I tend to think of in pairs with this movie is Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
[laughs] So I guess I want to start, uh, honestly by talking about, like, you know, because we don't, we obviously we don't have a guest here or anything like that.
Um, it definitely wasn't in school or anything, but I remember being in school, having my first jobs, and that's when I started collecting discs and stuff.
And Sweet Smell of Success was one of the earlier, uh, Criterion Blu-rays that I bought.
And I remember picking it up and watching it and being like, "Oh wow, this rocks." And then we did watch it in, in a class in, in college, and I was like, "Oh, I've already seen this.
I could get to watch it again." And, um, uh, it, it just rocked my shit, uh, the s- the first time I saw it.
Uh, the light or the dark side of, of journalism, but they always just, uh, tend to get their hooks into me.
And I do think this is one of those early movies in my burgeoning, uh, filmdom, my film fandom of trying to branch out and watch other stuff, other eras and whatnot, that makes you go, "Oh, we're not really being given the exact sense of what old black and white American movies could be." Not to say that this was indicative of everything in the '50s, for sure.
That's a big part of this movie's backstory is that it was an absolute bomb at the time it came out.
But the fact that it could have come out w- was sort of an, a, a mind-opening thing of, "Oh, okay, so maybe there are other movies like this that snuck through the cracks, or other movies similar to this that did maybe have an element that was able to push them into success." Um, you know, a movie that I o- I tend to think of in pairs with this movie is Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
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