Remembering Tony Curtis: The Best of Everything

The slick, sophisticated star of Sweet Smell of Success and Some Like It Hot was a driven actor who never gave up the game

By Richard Corliss Thursday, Sept. 30, 2010
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    Actor Tony Curtis

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    Burt Lancaster had an idea. Another refugee from the New York streets, and one of the first postwar actors to produce his own movies, Lancaster hired Curtis to play his aerial rival in the 1956 Euro-production Trapeze , then cast him in Sweet Smell as Sidney, the publicist trying to get his clients' items in the gossip column written by Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker. In the script, by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, Sidney's status floats between villain and victim — he peddles flesh and secrets, and pins the Commie label on an innocent young musician, before getting climactically framed by J.J. — but Curtis was the victor in the movie. It's easy to imagine that, that when the actor first read this script, he thought exultantly, "That's me all over!" A shark in the Broadway aquarium, Sidney looked like a million bucks, all counterfeit. "Look at the way Sidney looked," Curtis told Lancaster biographer Kate Buford. "So...perfect. Great-looking, lean, silk shirts, tapered trousers. Couldn't get out of that environment. He's there forever."

    Though the character was supposed to be Mulberry Street Italian, Sidney is pure Garment District ambition and aggression; Curtis' spitting or purring of Odets' aphorisms sounds like Damon Runyan translated into Yiddish and back again. His mouth luscious and sneering, Curtis is all bustle and rancor, ever moving, biting his nails, full of unfocused nervous energy. His performance may not have been career-making — the film was a financial flop and received no Oscar nominations — but it was actor-making. It expanded and forever defined what we mean by "Tony Curtis": the slick shtarker, oily and irresistible.

    The mass of moviegoers ignored Sweet Smell , but by the late '50s they surely recognized Curtis as a star for his starring roles in the war movie Kings Go Forth , with Frank Sinatra, and the Nordic adventure The Vikings , with Leigh and Kirk Douglas. He packaged his aggression smartly as the racist jail-breaker handcuffed to Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones , for which both actors earned Oscar nominations (Curtis' only Academy acknowledgment). Then came Some Like It Hot , Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond's loose adaptation of the 1951 German comedy Fanfarem der Liebe , and Curtis's second role of a lifetime.

    Joe (Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon) are two Prohibition-era Chicago musicians on the run from gangsters after witnessing the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Disguised as women — Josephine and Daphne — they join an all-girl band, get friendly with the sexy vocalist Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) and bump into the gangsters again. Monroe was the erotic object of the piece, but Curtis managed to exude a steamy sexuality as a man and a woman. In one early scene, as Joe pours on the high-calorie honey to a suspicious ex-flame, Jerry murmurs, in a voice of schoolgirl adulation, "Isn't he a bit o' terrific?" He is, too.

    Curtis takes on three characters here: Joe, Josephine and the Shell Oil heir, all with issues of sexual conquest and surrender. It was his idea to play the millionaire as a cut-rate Cary Grant — a lovely notion, since Grant's screen persona was a suave blend of the regally masculine and the flirtatiously effeminate. But Curtis also took to the Josephine side of the role, perfectly registering the hauteur, the pursed mouth and the subtle sashay of a period vamp who knows how to handle men with too many hands. At the end, as Josephine, he walks onstage after Sugar has finished the torch song "I'm Thru With Love" and gives her a long, tender smooch. It's one of the great movie kisses, boy-girl or girl-girl, and Curtis nicely drops the Lothario persona in what may be Joe's first-ever honest emotional encounter.

    Curtis turned 35 when Some Like It Hot opened, and he must have thought it was the start of a high plateau in his career. In fact, his roles and performances would never again reach the Olympian levels of Sweet Smell and Some Like It Hot . In 1960 he made fetching slave meat for Laurence Olivier's decadent Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus , but was irrelevant to the main story of Kirk Douglas' slave revolt. He won praise in a trio of bio-pics: as the Native American war hero Ira Hayes in The Outsider (1961), the conman Fred Demara in The Great Impostor and the killer Albert De Salvo in The Boston Strangler . For the most part he coasted through the decade in medium-good or medium-bad sex comedies (with titles like Paris — When It Sizzles, Goodbye Charlie and Not With My Wife You Don't ) and a couple of overinflated period-car comedies ( The Great Race and Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies ). The slick threat of his prime days gave way to a perfectly respectable, replaceable actor named Tony Curtis.

    After his divorce from Leigh he married five more times and fathered four more children. For a half-century after his glory days, Curtis was still displaying his craft, appearing on TV shows and in minor films. His last role was in the Israeli film David & Fatima , in which he played an old Jew named Mr. Schwartz. A salesman has to keep selling his product — himself — to the end. Once he had the best of everything; finally he just had the habit. Curtis, no less than Sidney Falco, loved the game too much to give it up. "Couldn't get out of that environment. He's there forever."

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