Both were easy marks with both sexes while being basically straight. While Lancaster certainly had a high opinion of himself, no one in Hollywood-- and I mean no one-- deserved that crown more than Curtis. He liked to say that he was a mascot on films and with other actors but he was always such an obvious sycophant and serial suckup. (Don't take my word for it... it's all there for you in his two autobiographies.) Because Lancaster had his own production company and was always on the lookout for capital, he could be a bit shameless himself in this department, but he didn't rival his friend.
Lancaster became a star with his debut film and he went out the same way. Curtis, on the other hand, had to pay his dues. He did more schlock at Universal than anyone should have to do and his film career in the last few decades had petered out though he kept working. Luckily, he had painting as a passion. In the last half of the fifties, however, he was most impressive in a handful of films. He had become the actor he wanted to be.
It's funny... Curtis's first film was a Lancaster film and his first important film came from Lancaster as well.
Lancaster was finishing off a contract he had with producer Mark Hellinger who did his work at Universal. It was a robbery caper, a film noir called Criss Cross. One day Curtis was walking down a studio street when director Robert Siodmark approached him and asked him if he could dance. He lied... he said he could.
Criss Cross (1949)
This film noir stars Lancaster as a mug who is trying to win back his ex-wife played by Yvonne De Carlo. It was the actor's ninth film in three years. At the top of her game in 1949 and enormously popular by studio people and the public, De Carlo is now married to thug Dan Duryea who is planning the robbery. Lancaster gets more involved than he wishes while determined to win back his ex-wife. These actors knew their film noir.
Curtis's single scene has him doing the rhumba with De Carlo. He was glad they shot him from the waist up and as he charmingly but smugly said... I knew they would.
It turned out to be a better flick than Lancaster had anticipated. He and De Carlo took a liking to Curtis and the threesome would occasionally get together for a bite to eat and gossip. In time Curtis would join the same gym that Lancaster belonged to and they attended a number of the same parties.
Criss Cross was the last of a series of film noirs Lancaster did at the dawning of his career... The Killers, Brute Force, Desert Fury, I Walk Alone, All My Sons, Sorry Wrong Number and Kiss the Blood Off My Hands were the others. All were successes.
Trapeze (1956)
This one came about because, as a former circus acrobat in real life, Lancaster had always kept an eye open for a script dealing with circus life. I don't recall why he didn't do The Greatest Show on Earth five years earlier although he had been encircling it briefly. When Trapeze was brought to the attention of his production company, Hecht-Lancaster, the actor knew he'd found what he was looking for.
He would hire the cast as well. It wasn't a stretch considering Curtis to costar because the two were probably talking about it at the gym. Curtis, in fact, wanted the part so badly that he did some high-flying practicing and took in a circus or two. Of course, he turned on the high-wattage Curtis charm... the eyes twinkled, the lips could move both seductively and comically. This would become Curtis's most important movie to date.
Lancaster has said he had a devil of time getting Universal to release Curtis from its clammy hold but Lancaster was not one to take no for an answer. He had his ways. Curtis knew he just had to play Tino Orsini and he was ecstatic when he got it. He and wife Janet Leigh were thrilled to be going to Paris.
Gina Lollobrigida was not the first consideration but that's as much because they didn't know her so well and didn't think of her at first. But as others didn't work out, Lollo came on board. It would be her biggest American film to date and she was excited about it. She didn't know the name Tony Curtis but she was already imagining Burt Lancaster's strong arms around her. He, in turn, thought about the European dollars Lollo's presence would generate.
Lancaster would also hire Katy Jurado as an equestrian performer. He knew her very well and thought she'd be a comfort to him on location.
The film opens with a youthful Curtis ambling into the 103-year old (at that time) Cirque d'Hiver. He is seeking out former flyer Mike Ribble to teach him the triple. Mike, though crippled from a fall and working ever since as a rigger, is the only one Tino feels can teach it to him.
Though Mike mightily resists, Tino is determined and soon gets the circus owner (Thomas Gomez) to see the value of hiring on the team. He sees it, too, but insists that the sultry Lola (Lollobrigida), part of an act that he has just let go, be made the third member on the trapeze. She vamps both men for the job... Mike says no but Tino says yes.
Of course she becomes the wedge between the two men, more than obvious on the ground and potentially perilous in the air. She really loves Lancaster and he is uncomfortable that he loves her as well. He decides to set it up where Tino discovers what the pair is up to, thus setting the tone for Lola to go. However, it backfires when Tino decides to leave the act when he sees he's been betrayed. Ah yes, but what about that triple? Of course it occupies the film's last act. I loved it, especially when I was a kid seeing it for the first time. What happens to the act and any possible coupling is held to the last scene. I loved it, too.
All three of the principals did some of their own trapeze work but especially the men and more so Lancaster. All doubles, Curtis has said, had doubles. One of Lollobrigida's stunt doubles died in a 40-foot fall and another broke her nose.
The film is based on a novel, The Killing Frost, and Lancaster made the decision to have a central gay element of the story removed. It would certainly have changed Trapeze, as we know it, but it would be great if someone would film it again with that element intact.
The three leads all got on well... they laughed together, dined out often and who knows what else (you've heard about those location movies) and that enormous vitality that all three possess as actors shows so clearly. Perfect casting. It's almost de rigueur to bum-rap circus movies. I get it, too, although I do like my circus movies and seriously now, this is a good one. You know what I say about a type of flick on those Sunday afternoons.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
If Burt and Tony could turn my head in a circus movie, then they should be able to do it again in film noir. By 1957 I was already totally captivated by the genre but let's face it, there are going to be the occasional misses. This was one of them. I saw it once many years later and still couldn't relate. Then maybe it was another 10 years and that movie must have changed (!) because all of a sudden I saw all kinds of intriguing things. And in watching it again yesterday, knowing I was gonna write about it here, I put on my rose-colored glasses and found it a real kick. Hey, go figure, eh?
One thing remains steadfast from 1957 to 2019 is this is an unpleasant movie. It's a study in sleaze. Both lead actors play scumbags who traffic in malice. There may be the sweet smell of success but there's a stench that lingers on the road getting there. One is assured Curtis' character would sell his mother into white slavery if the price were right and Lancaster could easily have someone killed.
Let's deal with some background. Lancaster's character, J. J. Hunsecker, is a vicious Broadway columnist who is clearly based on a real-life, vicious Broadway columnist named Walter Winchell. He started working at the Daily Mirror in 1929 and his column, On Broadway, was read by everyone who could. As Winchell became more and more influential, it seemed his driving force was to ruin reputations of those he wrote about... actors, musicians, politicians.
He held court every day at The Stork Club. He had his booth, everyone knew he would be there and every ass-kisser in town stopped by. He was friendly with FDR and considered himself a good friend of J. Edgar Hoover and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. He had mob connections until after Prohibition. The only thing that ever seemed to rattle him was that his daughter had a relationship with a reputed loan shark who Winchell detested.
With this in mind, writer Ernest Lehman (you know his work... he adapted West Side Story and The Sound of Music) detailed Winchell's story in a novella. He never said that it was about Winchell but everyone knew. Burt and Tony were hoping to work together again and when Burt came across Lehman's book, he knew they'd found such a project. His production company, now called Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, would co-produce with Curtis' Curtleigh Productions.
Lancaster's Hunsecker sits in his booth as a demigod. He has no scruples, he is a bully with the morals and demeanor of a gangster. He never smiles, is methodical and oh so unctuous. No one courts him more than press agent, Sidney Falco (Curtis), who wants to get his clients mentioned in Hunsecker's column. We see immediately that Sidney is aggressive, scheming and vicious... he would do anything for and to Hunsecker if his clients could get even the slightest mention.
Hunsecker considers Sidney nothing more than a bug to be squashed and he knows intuitively that he can get Sidney to do anything he wants him to. And what he wants is for Sidney to break up Hunsecker's sister's relationship with a jazz musician. Hunsecker's beef isn't as much with the young guy as it is that his sister doesn't give him the attention she once did. He loathes that they aren't as close as they once were. He doesn't particularly care how Sidney disposes of the problem.
How that happens becomes the focus of the end of the film but beyond it we have no doubt that something has got to happen that turns Sidney and Hunsecker into enemies. And it's all so cleverly worked out.
Why did it take me so long to notice that this was such a good film? For sure my youth was against me at first but years later I realized that Clifford Odets cowrote the screenplay with Lehman and it's been said the finished work is nearly all Odets. I adore the man's words. He infused Sweet Smell with a dialogue that is goosebump material. The richness of his words are what makes this film so invigorating. If one would claim the movie has no action, a counter offer is that all the action is in the dialogue.
Sidney Falco is actually the main character and therefore, despite his second-place billing, Curtis is the star. It is entirely possible it's the best work he's ever done (although thoughts of The Defiant Ones and Some Like It Hot are floating in my head). Lancaster is again playing against type... quiet and reserved... unusually practicing that old maxim that less is more. Both actors' performances are gripping. To their credit, each brought a darker side of their own personalities to their parts. Curtis really was a suckup and Lancaster really did make life so difficult for others.
Susan Harrison (who died this past March) is not known to most of the movie-going public. I'm still not sure how I feel about her performance. She seems like she's sleepwalking rather than acting but maybe she had no chance to do more when confronted with the likes of Curtis and Lancaster. Martin Milner, as her steadfast boyfriend, had one of his better roles in those days.
For characters who live in a moral twilight, it is perfection that the dark, wet, mean streets of New York City are featured more as a character than a location. The city that never sleeps is shown as dirty, uncompromising and dangerous. The brilliant cinematographer, James Wong Howe, gives the city a dark look that says what can go wrong in New York will. Aided in every way possible is Elmer Bernstein's urgent, wired score that makes one think the characters should hurry inside.
Little-known director Alexander Mackendrick came aboard after others failed to work out. He loved the screenplay and was delighted with the assignment and is responsible for the critical success the film has achieved. He only made three films after this one... perhaps it was because he suffered at the hands of megalomaniac Lancaster who had directors for lunch.
The List of Adrian Messenger (1963)
A writer believes that a series of supposedly unrelated, accidental deaths are not at all what they seem. He asks a friend, a former intelligence officer, to look into them with the belief they are actually related murders.
I think that short paragraph sounds like an interesting premise for a movie and knowing that the esteemed John Huston was directing, off I went. The hell with the early reviews which saw the film as a bit of an untidy mess. Unfortunately the reviews were right but I found this cast irresistible. George C. Scott, as the investigating friend, Dana Wynter and Clive Brook are the actual stars. What is misleading and maddening, too, is that big star names are used in the advertising when they actual have little more than cameo roles.
Kirk Douglas plays more than one part and has a larger role without being the star. Robert Mitchum, Frank Sinatra and our boys, Curtis and Lancaster, who have no scenes together, all not only have very small parts but are totally unrecognizable in heavy makeup and wigs. That's been done other times, too, and I have never understood why one would hire a name star and then have him made up so we don't know who it is.
If that's not enough, Huston thought it would be cute at the end of the film to have these actors pull off their disguises.
Next posting:
A movie biography
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