Like many film stars, Tony Curtis was already pretending to be someone else
before he landed his first Hollywood role. As a Jew raised in the New York
Upper East Side district that he later called “Nazi land”, Bernard Schwartz
already knew what the Second World War was about before he went to it. He
emerged from the war with his first professional credentials already
established. He had kept his buddies laughing. A further education in drama
was made possible by the GI Bill: once again he was the class clown.
As an apprentice Hollywood leading man, under his new name of Tony Curtis, he
caused more laughter for his accent and his hairstyle, but his box-office
appeal for a young audience was immediate. The rest of the story – mainly
about his long and eventually successful quest for credibility – is told in
a better than average ghosted autobiography ( Tony Curtis, 1993).
Necessarily it leaves out the wider context, which would concern just how
the equivalents of Curtis in European countries failed to make the same
impact internationally. American cultural imperialism might look like the
answer, but the term explains nothing in itself. American dominance of the
world’s big screens worked by consent.
The effort that went into the product was hard to match. Part of it was the
quality of the human material that was actually on view. Behind the camera
there were refugees from all nations, but most of the faces on screen were
Americans. The newer faces, however, knew more about the world than any
previous generation. The war changed everything, even the pitch of
performance from the established leading men.
James Stewart came home from the war a more naturalistic actor than he had
been before he left, and the younger men, for whom the war had been not an
interlude but an overture, avoided histrionics from the start. Paul Newman
and Lee Marvin were conspicuous examples. This naturalism was apparent even
in the otherwise frenetic exuberance of Curtis. In his first movies, he
looked human even when he hammed it up. He had “only in America” written all
over him. But also written all over him was “America is everywhere”, and
that infinitely exportable quality of confident savvy stayed with him to
provide the basis of his charm in the distinguished roles of his later
career.
His most famous line came in The Black Shield of Falworth: “Yonder lies
the castle of my father,” though of course Curtis did not write it. It was
written by the otherwise unsung screenplay writer, Oscar Brodney. But Curtis
said it, in the accent of the only recently reconstructed Bernie Schwartz,
and nobody ever forgot the high-flown speech bubble from a chivalric comic
book recited in the cadences of the Bronx. “Yonder lies duh castle of my
fuddah.”
Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney I heard him say it, and I didn’t
laugh. Along with the girls in the audience, I was too struck with his
beauty. I had already guessed that only America was big enough to produce
Gene Kelly, and here was another living god, not quite as good-looking
perhaps, but with an even more acute case of the stylish energy that the
Americans had so much of that they could hand it out virtually free to the
less lucky nations. I even liked the way he said the line. I was practising
his intonation when I went home to my muddah.
Actually there were already good reasons for admiring Curtis’s way with the
words. He might not yet have been getting some of the consonants right, but
he was always spot on with the emphasis and the impetus.
In the last year of the war, trapped in the Pacific on a submarine tender,
Curtis had entertained his fellow sailors by supplying voices for the movies
that they were running with the sound off because they were sick of them.
For men whose expectations of life varied between endless boredom and a
kamikaze attack, he must have been good to have around, if harder to stave
off than a Japanese suicide plane flown by someone with a different idea of
glory. Bernie Schwartz was relentless. Like the character in the epigraphs
to The Waste Land,he did the police in different voices.
The practice stood him in good stead. With due allowance for the castle of his
fuddah, his work in the movies was always marked by his precise way of
pointing a line. When he made the whole world laugh in Some Like It Hot,
it was surprising to find that some of the critics were surprised. He was
also very funny in Operation Petticoat. Playing opposite Cary Grant,
no mean speaker himself, Curtis held his own in a mentorprentice interchange
that was worked out in dialogue as much as in action.
Curtis always excelled as the apprentice: he was in the same relationship with
Burt Lancaster in two more films, Trapeze and The Sweet Smell of
Success. Since Lancaster was a genuine athlete and Curtis knew how to
look like one, the first film is ridiculous only when Gina Lollobrigida
pretends to fly; and the second film is a masterpiece, with Curtis, in his
role as the hustling press pimp Sidney Falco, raising sleaze to the status
of poetry.
Lancaster once told me in an interview that as co-producer of The Sweet
Smell of Success he had come close to firing the director. He was
Alexander Mackendrick, who worked meticulously with the director of
photography James Wong Howe to give the film’s visual style a fluency unseen
since the heyday of Max Ophüls, who set the standard for filming a whole
scene in one elaborate – and therefore expensive – take. But such
workmanship took time, and Lancaster, who was counting the financial cost,
grew impatient. If he had fired Mackendrick, he would have removed the only
force that could rein him in. Lancaster gave a controlled performance
because for once someone else was in control.
But Curtis needed no control. His Sidney Falco is one of the definitive
performances of the American cinema: the galvanic answer to the perennial
question of what makes Sammy run. There is something marvellous about the
way he varies the pace of his dialogue between the cockiness that he parades
among his fellow grifters and the servility he lavishes on Lancaster’s
magisterially ruthless J. J. Hunsecker.
It takes a lot of self-discipline to develop such possibilities, and they are
mainly developed through his way of pointing the line. Doing so, Curtis
helped to found a classic school, in which serious delivery avails itself of
comic timing: words first, emotion second. Robert De Niro, coming from the
Method school, works in the opposite direction. Though he can turn in a
precise verbal performance when tightly directed – Wag the Dog
is a good example – he can swallow the script when left to himself,
especially when he doesn’t trust it. The two different emphases are
glaringly on view in that wreck of a blockbuster, The Last Tycoon.
Curtis’s cameo as the swashbuckling hero of silent movies who has lost his
confidence works perfectly in two registers: he falls apart when he is
closeted with the studio boss, and he jumps in and out of powerful
automobiles when he is on public view. De Niro works in one register, and
the puzzled audience spends the whole picture trying to figure out which one
it is. The effect is of Curtis giving De Niro an acting lesson. Alas, the
ingénue, Ingrid Boulting, who really did need an acting lesson, was never
given one. But she might have got one later, when she saw Curtis up there
showing what can be done with a few lines.
When it comes to Some Like It Hot,Billy Wilder’s justly celebrated hit
comedy of 1959, we find out why a screen star such as Curtis is worth all
that money. First of all, there is what he does on screen. Again, his way
with dialogue is the key factor. Hobbling in a pair of 1920s high heels
along the station platform, he looks as funny as Jack Lemmon, but so would
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Not even Lemmon, however, could deliver the lines like Curtis. By that stage
Lemmon was already indulging himself with the stuttering false-start
technique that less funny actors have since made the mistake of thinking
funny in itself.
Curtis delivers his lines with a clean bite that would have made Cary Grant
proud of his pupil. When Curtis is actually imitating Grant, in the
seduction scene opposite Marilyn Monroe, his story about the two astigmatic
lovers whose bodies had to be brought up from the canyon by mule is a
copybook example of how to pace and point a comic extravaganza. Billy Wilder
and I. A. L. Diamond, his screenwriting partner, must have been hugging each
other as Curtis brought it off. He would have had to bring it off many
times, because Monroe is often in the two-shot.
Her presence reminds us of the second reason why Curtis was worth his money.
As Wilder told him that with Monroe on the case there would be multiple
takes, and he, Curtis, would have to get it right every time, because the
take when she finally got it right would be the one they would print. Like
Lemmon, Curtis had to keep on delivering the goods over and over in every
scene that involved Monroe throughout the movie. Curtis’s scenes with her
are far more complicated than Lemmon’s.
In private, Curtis execrated Monroe for her lack of professionalism, but on
the set he never wavered. He might easily have been worn down. Marlon
Brando, a kind of male Marilyn Monroe when it came to the actual business of
learning the lines or getting the shot, always dominated the screen no
matter how strong the cast, but he dominated it for a single reason: he
needed so many takes that the other actors got tired. He just wore them to a
frazzle. Opinions differ about whether he did it deliberately. There is only
one opinion about Monroe: she was helpless. But Curtis wasn’t, and he is the
actor at the centre of one of the funniest pictures ever made.
After that tour de force, some of Curtis’s later triumphs should not have come
as a revelation, but they always did. When he dominated the screen in The
Boston Strangleror stole it in Insignificance, there were always
otherwise intelligent critics who congratulated themselves for originality
by calling him talented. Nobody would ever have called him anything else had
he been less disarming. Like the eloquent man who gets no points for the
poetry he writes because he talks well anyway, Curtis was always downrated
for his accomplishment because of his screen presence.
Throughout his career, he has been one of the most convincing proofs that the
secrets of screen stardom must always lie beyond complete analysis. There
are actors such as Alan Arkin who can do anything except dominate the
screen, and there are other actors who dominate the screen yet can do almost
nothing.
To the extent that screen stardom can be broken down into separate gifts,
however, Curtis, apart from a physical beauty that was built to last, had
another gift that was rare and precious. He was a writer’s actor. When he
spoke it, the language came alive. Somewhere under the quiff and eventually
the rug, Tony Curtis weighed a line for its rhythm and melody, and said it
as if it could be said in one way only, and no uddah.
Extracted from 'Cultural Amnesia' by Clive James, published by Picador and
available from BooksFirst
priced £23 (RRP £25), free p&p
