Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), from a screenplay by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is being returned to Film Forum for an extended run after its recent successful two-week revival. Please see it if you haven’t already, and don’t be put off by its cult status after failing at the box office on its initial release. At the time, my friends and I were startled most by the brilliant performance of Tony Curtis in his much-ridiculed "my foddah, da caliph" period. Mr. Curtis’ Sidney Falco feeds items to Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, a power-hungry right-wing gossip columnist modeled after Walter Winchell. Acting honors go also to Emile Meyer as a crooked police detective at least a decade before his time. Falco and the detective form an uneasy alliance to frame jazz musician Martin Milner on a drug rap to end his relationship with Hunsecker’s nubile sister, played by Susan Harrison. The intimations of covert incest on the part of Hunsecker toward his sister was another taboo-breaker. But 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.