Imploding in Atlantic City

Moral ambiguity is a quality that director Louis Malle knows very well. Maybe this has something to do with his awareness, as a part-Jewish child at a Catholic boarding school, of a 1943 Nazi raid that sent a close friend and a teacher to Auschwitz. (The memory ultimately led to Malle’s monumental 1987 film, Au Revoir, les Enfants.) Though most of his movies were made in France, he tried his hand at America-set dramas too, including 1981’s My Dinner with Andre. Malle’s most notorious American movie is surely Pretty Baby (1978), in which a eleven-year-old Brooke Shields plays a child prostitute in 1917 New Orleans whose virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder. But he received major awards nominations for his next film, 1980’s Atlantic City, which became perhaps star Burt Lancaster’s last major film role.

 The snowy-haired Lancaster plays Lou, a small-time crook hunkered down in a rapidly decaying resort town where classic hotels are being imploded to make room for modern gambling casinos. Though Lou likes to boast about when he and Bugsy Siegel were prison cellmates, he makes a living—such as it is—as a numbers runner in a poor part of town, while also serving as full-time valet and part-time bedwarmer to a neighbor, a bedraggled former beauty queen who’s the widow of a mobster type. His only true pleasure, it seems, is spying on another neighbor, the luscious Sally (Susan Sarandon), who works at an oyster bar by day and sponges off her body with a freshly cut lemon come evening time.

 Pretty soon, Sally’s world will be rocked by the reappearance of a Canadian ex-husband, Dave, who shows up with her hugely pregnant sister and a whole cache of stolen cocaine. Before long, Dave will be pulling Lancaster’s amiable Lou into his orbit while he tries to make a lucrative drug sale. But of course some really bad guys are soon after Dave: there’s a marvelous chase scene, followed by a murder.

 From there, things get truly complicated. Sally and Lou draw closer together, while he enjoys spending on her the drug money the mobsters didn’t manage to collect from Dave. But ultimately, the thugs are still out there, looking for a big payday.  I won’t go into what happens, other than to say that Lou—a fascinating mix of generosity and self-preservation—ultimately makes a heroic gesture, while at the same time reveling in an unfamiliar sense of his own powers   as a tough guy. It’s a marvelously nuanced Lancaster performance, delivered when he was almost 70 and well past the athletic vigor of earlier star turns like his Oscar-winning role in Elmer Gantry. And Sarandon (only five years after her ingenue role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) matches him with a portrayal that is fierce,  poignant, and sensuous.  At the close of the film we wish them both well, but aren’t quite clear about where either one of them will land. Both were Oscar-nominated for their portrayals, as was Malle as director, but this was the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond.

 Curiously, despite Atlantic City’s very American setting, it was not technically a U.S. film, but rather a French and Canadian co-production. (Outside of the leads, most of the performers hailed from Canada, like Kate Reid as the blowsy onetime beauty queen and a mesmerizing Robert Joy as the manic ex-husband.) Still, the film has enjoyed a rare All-American accolade. In 2003 it was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, so I guess it belongs to all of us now.

 

 

A Tale of Three Swingers: “Trapeze”

When I was a kid, I was entranced by the ads for Trapeze, a circus drama featuring lots of high-flying action and three bona fide Hollywood stars : Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobridgida. The sets and spangly costumes looked dazzling to a small girl. I wouldn’t have much cared that the film’s director was Carol Reed, a Brit who’d helmed such taut masterworks as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949). (In 1968 he was to have his big Hollywood moment, winning the Best Director Oscar for his work on a delightful film musical, Oliver!)

 Flash forward to 2025. After watching 1957’s Sweet Smell of Success, produced in part by Burt Lancaster’s own company, I read that Tony Curtis was cast as the ambitious young press agent kowtowing to Lancaster’s sinister gossip columnist largely because Lancaster had enjoyed working with Curtis on Trapeze. So, thanks to the goodly supply of vintage films on DVD at my local library, the time seemed right to check it out.

 The story of Trapeze is simple enough: every character is in love with the drama and the spectacle of the circus. This particular troupe is based in Paris, and boasts the usual combination of clowns, animals, dancing girls, and acrobats. We immediately get to the heart of things as aerialist Mike Ribble (a buff-looking Lancaster) climbs to the rafters to swing into a daring triple somersault. Once he’s performed the dangerous stunt, he’s supposed to be caught by the waiting hands of a second trapeze artist. But something goes awry, and he falls, bouncing out of the safety net and onto the ground. All of this happens before the opening credits: when we next see Mike he’s an embittered man, working for the circus as a rigger and effortfully walking with a cane. 

Along comes Tony Curtis as brash, bouncy Tino Orsini, American son of an old-school aerialist. He’s heard that Mike is the only flyer in the world who can teach him the triple somersault. Refusing to accept Mike’s rejection, he uses his talents and his easy charm to worm his way into the older man’s heart. (One of the film’s most endearing moments shows the two walking down a Paris street. The irrepressible Tino upends his body to continue walking on his hands. That’s when Mike, not willing to be totally upstaged by his new protégé, does the same. The scene fades out on the two of them, side by side, traversing the Paris trottoir upside down.)  Tino wants to learn; and Mike discovers he wants to teach. What could be better? 

 But of course there has to be a fly in the ointment. And Lola, as played by Italian “it” girl Gina Lollobrigida, is a pretty fly indeed. Originally the only female on a team of Italian acrobats, she slithers her way into the aerial act by using her sex appeal to alternately romance both Tino and Mike. Of course it all comes to a head on the night when American impresario John Ringling North is visiting, looking for acts to import.

 Frankly, I was rather disappointed by the big aerial climax when, without a net, the triple somersault is once again attempted. After all the build-up, I’d expected something far more spectacular. But the film has an effectively rueful ending in which some achieve greatness and some turn it down. Lancaster and Curtis once again make a memorable team. As for the busty, glamorous Lollobrigida, I couldn’t really decipher what her character was about. Maybe, simply, a combination of Eve and the serpent. 

 

The Sour Stench of Success

My deep dive into the career of Burt Lancaster would not have been complete without reference to The Sweet Smell of Success, the 1957 noir in which everyone is more or less rotten. Hollywood filmmakers love to delve into the venal side of the entertainment world, often happily focusing on the crass materialism of their own industry. (See, off the top of my head, elements of Sunset Boulevard, Inside Daisy Clover, A Star is Born, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and the recent Babylon.) The Sweet Smell of Success, though, is based in Manhattan, mostly the glitzy stretch of Broadway between 42^nd and 57^th Streets. Lancaster’s character occupies an elegant penthouse apartment, and is a regular at swanky nightspots like the 21 Club, places where gossip is gospel.

 Lancaster plays J.J. Hunsecker, a media personality modeled after Walter Winchell. He writes a hot gossip column for the New York Globe, and is also a star attraction over the airwaves. The man is all-powerful: he knows just who is canoodling with whom, and can make even a congressman quake when he spots an inappropriate dinner companion. The comparison to today’s media climate is an interesting one: we gather he’s not on the payroll of any political party, but he still has a firm sense of how the world should work, and will gladly punish anyone who tries to cross him. We gather he has no intimate attachment of his own, but puts all his energy into overseeing the love life of his much younger sister, Susie, who has fallen hard for a clean-cut but independent-minded jazz musician (Martin Milner).

 Lancaster’s Hunsecker is unforgettable, but the film really belongs to Tony Curtis. (The two had earlier starred together in a box-office hit, 1956’s Trapeze)  Curtis, sick of accepting nice-guy roles, here plays a slippery press agent, one who’ll do just about anything to get his clients’ names in newspaper columns. Young and hungry for success, he’ll hustle, scheme, and try to blackmail the powerful into publicizing those on his roster. He feels he has a special “in” with Hunsecker, thanks to his willingness to clean up a certain small mess by any means necessary, and part of the energy of the story goes into seeing him twist himself into pretzels to please the man who holds the keys to the kingdom. Says Hunsecker, with a mix of scorn and appreciation, “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

 Sweet Smell of Success started out as a differently titled story in a 1950 issue of Cosmopolitan. It was written by a young Ernest Lehman, and reflected his own experience as an assistant to a New York publicist. Eventually Hollywood got wind of Lehman’s writing skills, and he started to rack up jobs as a screenwriter. Among his credits prior to the film version of Sweet Smell of Success were Sabrina, Somebody Up There Likes Me, and The King and I. Later, his major screenwriting hits included North by Northwest, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and Who’s Afraid of  Virginia Woolf? But when it came to Sweet Smell of Success,  the dialogue-heavy script required a substantial rewrite that Lehman was too ill to handle. So the gig eventually went to one of Broadway’s most esteemed playwrights, Clifford Odets, who both restructured the story and heavily revamped the details, resulting in some taut, terse dialogue. Here’s one example I like: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”  And I’ve got to put in a word for the great James Wong Howe’s spectacularly moody black-&-white cinematography.

 Dedicated to fellow biographer Beth Phillips, who knows everything there is to know about Clifford Odets.

 

 

 

 

For The Birds: “Birdman of Alcatraz”

Birdman of Alcatraz? As a youngster, I was fascinated by this intriguing title. And I knew that Burt Lancaster had won plenty of kudos for his portrayal of Robert Stroud, who—sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement for committing two murders—became a world authority on our avian friends. I didn’t know the movie was based on a sympathetic biography of the still-living Stroud by Thomas E. Gaddis. On the strength of this biography, Gaddis became a character in the 1962 film, and (portrayed by Edmond O’Brien) serves as its narrator.

 Biographers have always had an interesting relationship with the film industry. At a recent conference of the Biographers International Organization, I heard Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer Kai Bird talk about the thrill of seeing his book on J. Robert Oppenheimer brilliantly translated to the screen. And right now my longtime friend Jack El-Hai is eagerly awaiting the release of Nuremberg, based on his The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Other serious biographers are less happy about what Hollywood has done to their well-researched work. But it’s also true that there’s a place for biographers in sharing with the moviegoing public the behind-the-scenes facts related to popular films.

 My colleague Kate Buford is the author of Burt Lancaster: An American Life, as well as Native American Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe. Because of her scholarly reputation, as well as her skills as a public speaker, Kate has been asked to do audio commentary on several of Lancaster’s major films. When I recently watched Birdman of Alcatraz for the very first time, I was dazzled by Lancaster’s complex performance as well as by the moody black-&-white cinematography of Hollywood veteran Burnett Guffey. I also appreciated the supporting performances of such classic Hollywood actors as Karl Malden, Thelma Ritter, and (in an Oscar-nominated role) Telly Savalas as a likable fellow inmate. I don’t usually have the time to re-watch a film while listening to a commentary track. But when I saw Kate Buford’s name on the screen, I knew I had to pay attention.

 Given her exhaustive research, Kate was able to put Birdman of Alcatraz into context for me. She helped me to understand how much this film was a product of Lancaster’s personal and social values. It was he, as honcho of Norma Productions, who chose relative newcomer John Frankenheimer to direct, after firing British director Charles Crichton (known for comedy classics like The Lavender Hill Mob). And he imbued the material with his own dedication to progressive social concerns. The evolution of Stroud from crazed killer to gentle soul devoted to nurturing canaries is heightened in the screen version, but Kate makes clear that the actual Stroud never entirely lost his volatile edge. Part of the reason for his abrupt transfer from Leavenworth (where he had a full aviary and research lab) to the new, modern, and very stringent Alcatraz was that he was secretly using some of his equipment to concoct alcohol for his own pleasure. And his real-life aggressive homosexuality (never hinted at in the film) helps explain why over the years of his confinement (from 1909 until his death in 1963) he was so stringently guarded.

 The film makes for such powerful viewing that I would have thought it earned a fistful of Oscars. There were four nominations (including for Lancaster and Guffey), but no wins. Not a surprise, really. This was a year for inspirational projects like The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Longest Day, and big winner Lawrence of Arabia. So the camels beat out the birds in 1963. 

 

“Field of Dreams”: If You Shoot It, Will They Come?

It’s hard to imagine how many truly idiotic projects have been launched, over the years, based on a hit movie’s promise that “if you build it, they will come.” To be honest, 1989’s Field of Dreams doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Just exactly WHY do the 1919 Chicago White Sox, in perennial disgrace for their role in throwing that year’s World Series, emerge from an Iowa cornfield because a young farmer who misses the Sixties has constructed a baseball field on his back forty?  Why does this farmer idolize baseball, and long-ago White Sox batting champ Shoeless Shoe Jackson in particular, to the point that he’ll jeopardize his family’s economic future by taking direction from a mysterious voice? (And, come to think of it, why does his feisty wife put up with her husband’s fiscal craziness even though they might well find themselves homeless in future?)  

 But logic is not what Field of Dreams is all about. It’s about dreams, and in particular about the American male’s dream of a father/son bond symbolized by the idea of tossing around a baseball with your dad on a warm summer’s day. The give-and-take implicit in a simple game of catch seems to be craved by many men. At least, it is this element of the film’s climax that apparently turned many male moviegoers into emotional puddles when Field of Dreams screened in cineplexes across America in 1989. The movie attracted critics as well as audiences. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay; in 2017 it was welcomed onto the National Film Registry.

 Before I rewatched Field of Dreams this past week, I of course remembered primarily Kevin Costner as the dreamy farmer with father issues and a great abiding love for America’s game. And I fleetingly remembered Amy Madigan as Costner’s supportive wife as well as Ray Liotta (always a distinctive actor) as the shadowy incarnation of Shoeless Joe. I did not recall Burt Lancaster in a small but key role as Archie “Moonlight” Graham, an actual long-ago outfielder who played only a single game in the major leagues before attending medical school and embarking on a long, distinguished stint as a smalltown doctor. Lancaster’s role, the last of his stellar career, allows him to hint that there are other kinds of glory than those found on a baseball diamond.

 I also didn’t remember that Field of Dreams contains a major supporting role for James Earl Jones, the legendary actor with the basso profundo voice who left us just a few weeks ago at the age of 93. Jones played Terence Mann, a successful novelist who found fame in the Sixties, but now contends with small-minded readers who seek to ban his books. In the course of the film, Mann’s character is discovered to have a secret passion for baseball. Eventually he delivers a long, wonderful speech about baseball and its connection with America past and present. In the up-and-down history of our nation, says he, “the one constant through all the years has been baseball.”  It is baseball that signifies “all that once was good, and could be again.”

 The extras that accompany the DVD of Field of Dreams contain many clips of the film’s actors, producers, and writer/director Phil Alden Robinson. Almost all of them talk about their personal passion for baseball, and share memories of ballgames played with their dads. Jones is the exception: he never played catch with his absentee father. Still, he considered baseball a key part of his DNA, and his joyous performance here proves it. 

 

Listing the Deceptions in “Adrian Messenger”

 

The List of Adrian Messenger, directed by John Huston in 1963, begins with a joke on the audience. We just don’t know, until the film is practically over, where it’s going. The film begins in classic thriller style, with a mysterious old man casing an ornate bank building that is closed for the night. Slipping inside the darkened lobby, he manipulates some levers, and an elevator comes crashing down. Someone, we gather, has just plunged to his death. Whereupon the old man slips out into the darkness and disappears.

 When the main titles come up, we’re surprised to see (against a swirling backdrop of distinctive faces) the names of some of the biggest male Hollywood stars of the mid-century: Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum,  Frank Sinatra. Then there’s another card: Starring George C. Scott. Say what? As we launch into a classic whodunit in which Scott (using an unconvincing British accent) investigates his friend’s death after a mysterious plane crash, the movie seems to be all about unearthing a revenge plot that may date back to the Burma campaign in World War II. But of course for the viewer the real mystery is this: when are those famous movie stars going to make an appearance?

 This was the era when Hollywood studios were desperately looking for ways to counteract the rising popularity of television. One idea was to dazzle potential moviegoers with spectacle; another was to give glimpses of major celebrities, the sort who wouldn’t be caught dead appearing on TV. I well remember the brouhaha surrounding the 1956 release of Around the World in Eighty Days, a blockbuster that was named Best Picture at the Oscars but is virtually unwatchable today. (I saw it at the Carthay Circle, an ornate movie palace that – alas – has long since been replaced by an office building. There were fancy theatre programs in the lobby, and even a special curtain designed to show off in comic fashion the movie’s various thrills.) This elaborate telling of the classic Jules Verne adventure tale, with David Niven in the leading role and a young Shirley MacLaine as the Indian (!) lovely he rescues, was not considered enticing enough to lure Fifties audiences. Instead, the film is crammed with 48 celebrity cameos – hey look! There’s Sinatra at the piano in that saloon!  And Marlene Dietrich at a table!

 Buoyed by the film’s success, other movies reached for the same gimmick. I remember something called Pepe, starring the Mexican comic Cantinflas, who’d been introduced to the English-speaking world as Phileas Fogg’s sidekick in Around the World in Eighty Days. In Pepe (1960) he journeys to Hollywood to retrieve a beloved horse, giving him the opportunity to hobnob humorously with legendary movie stars. And How the West Was Won (1962) used three directors, heaps of stars, and wide-screen technology to tell a vast frontier tale.  But The List of Adrian Messenger is different in that its famous faces are hidden behind elaborate makeup, only to be unmasked just before the final fadeout. Major kudos to Bud Westmore of the long-lived  Hollywood family for his false-face designs.

 To my disappointment, I’ve learned that the disguised cameos—much touted in the media upon the film’s release—were in some cases total fakes. Yes, we see the celebrities remove their phony faces at the end, but that’s not really Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster fooling the audience with facial prosthetics and exotic accents. Actor Jan Merlin, a latter-day Roger Corman alumnus, apparently stood in for Kirk Douglas in some of his disguises.

 Yes, the laugh’s on us.

 

Kirk Douglas, A Champion Indeed

In the classic western, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp worries about the health of a cantankerous dentist-turned-gambler, Doc Holliday. Holliday has a nasty cough that’s not getting better, and his serious boozing is not likely to cure it. It’s probable he doesn’t have long to live. Still, says Earp to Halliday, “You’re just ornery enough to live to a ripe old age.”

This line hit home for me, because it is delivered by Burt Lancaster (playing Earp) to someone who did indeed—despite several dramatic setbacks—live to a ripe old age. Doc Holliday, of course, is played by the late Kirk Douglas, who left us last week at the impressive age of 103.

Douglas’s up-from-the-gutter career began on the stage. Helped by his drama school classmate Lauren Bacall to land Hollywood roles, he won a featured part in his first film, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, in 1946. Other early films included the noir classic Out of the Past. I was surprised to find Douglas part of the ensemble of a rather creative (if sappy) 1949 romantic drama, A Letter to Three Wives, in which three female friends find their marriages endangered by a sexy rival. It’s not easy to buy Douglas, known for his on-screen macho intensity, as a meekly dissatisfied schoolteacher who feels threatened by his wife’s high-paying career. But his very next film, Champion, sealed his reputation: playing Midge Kelly, a ruthless young boxer who’ll do anything to succeed, he’s unforgettable. This film marked his first of three Best Actor nominations. The second honored his performance as a tough-as-nails Hollywood producer in 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful; the third recognized his ambitious but (to my mind) unconvincing turn as painter Vincent Van Gogh in 1956’s Vincente Minnelli extravaganza, Lust for Life.  

Douglas’s years of friendship with fellow star Burt Lancaster are reflected in the John Sturges western I mentioned earlier, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. This 1957 flick is a classic of its era. From the moment that Frankie Laine’s voice begins to warble the film’s mournful theme song while the camera sweeps across the Technicolor plains, we know we’re in good hands. The cast is filled with Golden Age standouts like Jo Van Fleet (as a bad girl with a heart of gold), Earl Holliman, and a very young Dennis Hopper (whom Lancaster tries to persuade to give up his gunslinging ways). But the film’s focus is on the gradual bonding of its two male stars: Lancaster as the noble, peace-loving, slightly sentimental Earp and Douglas as the erratic, self-destructive, but always gutsy Halliday. More than thirty years later, Lancaster and Douglas again shared the screen, this time in a slapstick comedy, Tough Guys, about ageing buddies who’ve spent three decades in the clink for trying to rob a train and now—upon their release—must figure out how to make their way in the modern world. It’s all pretty silly, but it’s striking how their roles haven’t changed much, with Lancaster still the romantic and Douglas the devil-may-care goofball.

Not everyone liked Kirk Douglas in his prime. I know a woman with longtime industry connections: in speaking of  why she mistrusted Douglas she was wont to say, “He really is Midge Kelly.” Maybe so, but late in life (following some serious physical and emotional challenges) he devoted himself to religious exploration, meeting regularly with a noted L.A. rabbi to study the faith of his fathers. After two major strokes, he wrote and worked on behalf of stroke victims, and was known for building playgrounds for needy L.A. kids. All hail!