Now this is savvy writing, and a beautiful appreciation.
Marvelous Invention of Movie Make-Believe
By A. O. SCOTT
What is a movie star? It may be more appropriate to phrase the question in the
past tense, as an acknowledgment that the old breed is dying out and also as a
valedictory tribute to one of its finest specimens. Because whatever the
definition — a great performer; a larger-than-life personality; a sex symbol —
the picture next to the dictionary entry might as well be ofTony Curtis in his
prime, with his dark eyes, full lips and lush head of hair.
Mr. Curtis, who died late Wednesday, was among the purest and most authentic
examples of what a movie star in postwar Hollywood could be. Which is also to
say, of course, that he was fundamentally — brazenly — impure and inauthentic,
an artificial, hybrid creature synthesized out of ambition, good looks and
canny publicity. Tony Curtis was a marvelous invention, right down to the name,
which replaced Bernard Schwartz, the one he was born with. Somewhere in the
afterlife, Mr. Schwartz is surely hobnobbing with the likes of Roy Harold
Scherer Jr. , Norma Jean Baker and Archibald Leach, his peers, co-stars and
role models better known as Rock Hudson, Marilyn Monroe and Cary Grant.
The legend is that one of Grant’s movies inspired the young Bernard Schwartz,
who came up rough in a poor section of the Bronx, to join the Navy and, after
service in World War II, to try his hand at acting. That story is an apt
illustration of the paradoxical power of movie make-believe and the twofold
imitation it can inspire: you dream of being both the character and the person
behind the character. Cary Grant commanded a submarine in “Destination Tokyo,”
and Cary Grant was also, whatever else he happened to be doing (espionage,
paleontology, journalism) Cary Grant. He could pretend to be just about
anything without letting go of the essential, irreducible fact of his
personality.
And in a different register — with a little more erotic fire, a rougher finish
and broader vowels — Tony Curtis managed a similar feat. Among the big-ticket
commercial genres of his era were westerns and sword-and-sandal epics, and he
appeared in a bunch of those, “Winchester ’73” and “Spartacus” among them, with
enough of the Bronx still in his voice and manner to provide a memorable spark
of incongruity.
He was not a methodizer, burrowing deep into each role to find its hidden,
essential psychological truth, but his art was deep and his professionalism
thorough. He was capable of intensity when it was called for, but his best,
most characteristic work always carried an element of play.
His Sidney Falco, the fast-moving press agent in “Sweet Smell of Success,” is
certainly a player, though not exactly the master of the game. He hustles
through the picture with aggression, slick dishonesty and just enough heart to
make his ultimate moral awakening credible and moving. Sidney, a New York press
agent in the thrall of J. J. Hunsecker, an imperious, black-hearted gossip
columnist played by Burt Lancaster, is one of the fastest talkers in movies, a
bundle of bravura and anxiety.
Sidney is ethically adaptable, even sleazy, but with an underlying niceness
that subverts the film’s relentless and florid cynicism. “I’d hate to take a
bite out of you,” Hunsecker says. “You’re a cookie full of arsenic.” It’s a
tangy line in a movie that is full of them, but the audience knows that it
isn’t quite accurate — a matter of projection more than insight on Hunsecker’s
part. Sidney’s sweetness may be curdled by the sour, pressured atmosphere of
life in Manhattan, but he is hardly poisonous. He is untrustworthy,
hypocritical and self-deluding, but also, underneath it all, somehow sincere.
And that kind of doubleness was Mr. Curtis’s calling card. He was able to
retain a guileless, handsome-is-as-handsome-does innocence even in situations
that embroiled him in all kinds of interesting ambiguities. There is a famous
scene in “Spartacus” — deleted in 1960 and restored three decades later — in
which Mr. Curtis and Laurence Olivier discuss the gustatory merits of oysters
and snails. All the insinuation comes from Olivier and Anthony Hopkins (who
dubbed his voice for the 1991 restoration), but the scene’s teasing sexual
power resides in Mr. Curtis’s literal-minded response to innuendo-laden
questions. He makes it all seem so dirty by insisting on being so clean.
Nowhere is this capacity for ambiguity, sexual and otherwise, more splendidly
evident than in “Some Like it Hot,” a comedy now more than 50 years old that
does everything but show its age. In it, Mr. Curtis and Jack Lemmon blithely
plunge into a whirlpool of double entendres and gender puzzles, and navigate it
while tossing off bons mots by the bushel. And of course doing quite a bit of
that in drag, embodying contrasting but equally hyperbolic versions of
womanhood.
Mr. Curtis’s Joe is a more natural woman, his mastery of feminine wiles more
instinctive, based on a surer intuition into the real thing. This may be
because Joe is — as the six-times-married, many-times-lucky Mr. Curtis was — a
tireless ladies man. In their coming-out scene, on a train platform, Mr. Lemmon
stumbles and flails in his skirt and heels, while Mr. Curtis, his mouth drawn
into a comely pout, takes small, dainty steps, keeping his feet close together
to increase the lateral sway of his derrière — which the camera can’t resist
checking out.
But that cross-dressing — by which Joe becomes “Josephine” — is only a warm-up
for Mr. Curtis’s real tour-de-force of drag impersonation, in which Joe turns
up in spectacles and yachting garb as “Shell Oil Jr.,” a rich swell who is
someone’s idea of Cary Grant. The idea is that, by undertaking this travesty of
class, he will seduce Sugar Kane Kowalcyk, the fetching ukulele virtuoso played
by Marilyn Monroe.
The comedy that results is almost indescribably rich, to some degree because of
the layers of imposture involved. Within the movie, the man pretending to be a
woman is now pretending to be a different man, one whose notionally
heterosexual libido is so deeply buried that even the strenuous efforts of
Marilyn Monroe herself can barely awaken it. And yet the purpose of this double
disguise is to coax Sugar into falling for the man he really is, the regular
Joe.
Who could object to being tricked in this way? The audience, knowing more than
Sugar does, is rendered dizzy by the vertiginous spectacle of one movie star so
shamelessly “doing” another. It’s not, technically, a first-rate impression.
The accent is wobbly, and nobody is really fooled. But that is the point.
Archibald Leach had already fooled the world — Bernard Schwartz included — into
believing in someone called Cary Grant. To pay tribute to that achievement
while also mocking it and duplicating it: only Tony Curtis could have done that.
“Some like it hot,” he says, while still in the Shell Oil Jr./Cary Grant role.
“I prefer classical music.” Could anyone else be so completely fake and yet so
genuine?
Of course Tony Curtis liked it hot. Tony Curtis was hot. He was also classic,
in the sense that he belonged to a class of which he was the only and
definitive member.
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