Venom for capitalism in general and the profit-mad press specifically can be found in Sweet Smell of Success, which has been out on video for years but is now also available on DVD (at La Boîte Noire).

The film has Tony Curtis beautifully portraying a sleazy, desperately ambitious agent who will stop at nothing to please hard-ass newspaper columnist Burt Lancaster. This is a brilliant potboiler, one co-written by legendary leftist writer Clifford Odets. The film is all the more remarkable for the year in which it was made; ’57 isn’t exactly a time when films which examined America’s faults were abundant. The best bits come with the dialogue. People keep accusing each other of having “the morals of a guinea pig,” and at one point someone responds to another’s lies by saying, “That’s four-day-old fish—I’m not buying it!”
Gawd bless those wacky types over at Rhino. They’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel again and struck gold. New to the label are a couple of DVD collections of Battle of the Planets, the insanely-cheap-looking-but-somehow-mesmerizing bit of ’70s anime (originally aired in Japan as Gatchaman). I never tire of hearing the silky smooth voice of Casey Kasem, either. :

--Matthew Hays