Sweet Smell of Success: Paranoia in the 50s, part 2… Where Kiss Me Deadly hinted at the hangover from McCarthyism, Sweet Smell of Success openly addresses the culture of paranoia and excess of which McCarthyism was an exponent. Released two years after Kiss Me Deadly and Senator McCarthy's own self-destructive spiral, Success presents a thinly veiled attack on Walter Winchell, a powerful gossip columnist who became strongly anti-communist after WWII and supported McCarthy's Red hunts.
 
By the 50s Winchell's power and reach were on a downslope as television began to replace the radio and print world that Winchell was part of. Winchell, who was Jewish, underwent a familiar evolution from FDR supporter, interventionist, and civil rights advocate to a quasi-reactionary who waged battles for both political and petty reasons. One of Winchell's clashes of this period was with Josephine Baker, whom he labeled a communist after Baker complained of racist service at the Stork Club, Winchell's base of operations. His quips were examples of epigrammatic form: "Hollywood's a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors."
 

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