 Sweet Smell of Success holds a 98 percent " fresh " rating based on 45 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes and a 100 metascore rating based on 5 reviews at Metacritic . Though Mackendrick 's direction of the actors and his staging of the scenes are at times extraordinary , in recent years critics have praised only the film 's dialogue , " courtesy of Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets , a high @-@ toned street vernacular that no real New Yorker has ever spoken but that every real New Yorker wishes he could " , A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times . Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer wrote , " 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 " . 
