The look is as lurid as black and white cinematography ever got, New York after dark “Photographed,” the title tells us, in a novel way of giving credit, by the great “James Wong Howe.”

The music is jazz at its sleaziest — brassy, brazen, squawking in protest to be heard over the din of the dialogue. And those words pure poetry, straight from pens dipped in poison.

 “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one. None too pretty, and all deceptive.”

And then there’s the best dismissal in the history of the movies — “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Maybe “Sweet Smell of Success” isn’t Hollywood’s highfalutin version of Shakespeare in 1950s New York. It’s more Moliere — cruel, quippy, lacerating with characters as venal as any the screen ever served up, one and all as mean as hell, and quotable in the bargain.

“Stop tinkering pal, that horseradish won’t jump a fence.” “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Based on a novella by famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest,” “Sabrina”), it was turned into purple-in-the-face prose — 1950s Broadway-ese — by Lehman and revolutionary playwright Clifford Odets (“Waiting for Lefty,” “Golden Boy,” “The Country Girl”).

“Match me, Sidney.” “Come back, Sidney! I wanna chastise you!”

Lehman, a former assistant to a columnist and press agent, ensured that “Success” is a sizzling Cabaret Life portrait of Manhattan when it sizzled, when Broadway/showbiz newspaper gossips like Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons and Dorthy Kilgallen published daily accounts of who was stepping out with whom, was at this play or that concert, dining at The Stork Club or tying one on at Toots Shor’s.

Ethically slippery, morally amoral, these high-and-mighties would sit in said nightclubs at their own booth and have singers, comics, actors, politicians and boot-lickers pay homage and fealty and hope to get noticed and “in the column.”

And lot of this intel and club owner promotion and bon mots attributed to the famous and want-to-be-famous was served up to those columnists as “tips” from press agents. If the columnists were “monsters,” willing to do anything for a scoop, to build this unknown up or knock that famous personage down, press agents were the monsters’ minions, paid to “place” attention-garnering tidbits in the columns by clients who hoped that it’d lead to a bigger crowd, a better gig or a new role.

“It’s a dirty job,” one disgruntled comic grips,” but I pay clean money for it.”

Tony Curtis, in one of his finest performances, plays nervous, nail-biting eager-beaver press agent Sidney Falco, a guy with an office that has his bedroom right behind it, handy for a night owl prowling the clubs for clients and working the phones and the club booths to get something “in the column.”

Sidney’s “so pretty” that you’d think he was a star. But he’s a hustler on the margins. He skips wearing a hat and coat out to save “tips” to every hat-check in every club that’s part of his rounds. Sidney needs the attention of a “monster” he calls his “friend,” J.J. Hunesecker.

Burt Lancaster, the ostensible lead and producer of this film, gets a real “star entrance” over 20 minutes into the picture, photographed from below, his glasses adding a sinister shadow to his eyes, his voice a pitiless, unfiltered insult of brusque dismissal. Senator or showgirl or groveling Sidney, J.J. makes no distinction.

“I love this dirty town,” he growls. It’s people he’s not crazy about.

But his MUCH younger sister (Susan Harrison), 19 and living in his big apartment, has taken up with the guitarist (Martin Milner) of The Chico Hamilton Quintet. And J.J. isn’t having it. Sidney’s been given the task of busting them up, and he’s failing.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is about what Sidney will do for the all-powerful/grudge-holding J.J. to bust up this “innocent” girl and this jazz man of “integrity, and what it will cost everybody involved.

The great Scottish director Alexander MacKendrick keeps the picture on the move and the banter, monologues and debates push it towards a sprint at times, with the legendary cinematographer Howe empashizing the darkness of the street scenes and shadowy tight-quarters of the clubs, with every conversation rendered more violent by the close-ups and dense compositions.

You don’t have to meet the dirty cops, get lectured on the unsavory connection between “lying” press agents and compromised columnists to smell and feel the corruption.

Curtis and Lancaster set off sparks, and all by himself Curtis keeps a bright sheen on smiling and backbiting Sidney, who always finds new depths of sleazy, self-serving narcissism to get him closer to his goal, a life of ease and being “Somebody.”

Pimping out that cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) and regular booty call? He doesn’t give it a second thought.

“Sweet Smell of Success” sounds as modern as a 1950s drama can while still being very much a time capsule — newspapers and typwriters and cigarettes and “high balls” at “my regular table” where a phone is brought each time someone who knows how to reach J.J. or Sidney makes a call.

MacKendrick is best known for his classic British (Ealing) comedies “The Man in the White Suit” and “The Ladykillers.” Delightful as they are, this American outing his has to be his best film.

Lancster and Lehman and Burt’s producing partner James Hill knew what they were doing when they enticed MacKendrick and DP Howe, Lehman and Odets and Curtis and The Chico Hamilton Quintet into taking this on, and talked club owners into letting them into the legendary locations that this masterpiece preserved forever on film.

There never was a better portrait of “this dirty town” in this, one of its many gilded ages, than the movie that gives us just a whiff of the “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Rating: approved

Cast: Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, David White, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater, Martin Milner and The Chico Hamilton Quintet.

Credits: Directed by Alexander MacKendrick, script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, based on the novella by Lehman. An MGM/United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube. etc. .

Running time: 1:36