The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (97 page)

Tony Curtis
(Bernard Schwartz), b. Bronx, New York, 1925
Curtis was for years one of the test cases cited to illustrate the follies of the cinema. How, it was asked, could this Bronx kid with greasy hair dripping over his forehead be taken seriously? After the Navy and various drama schools, he made his debut in Siodmak’s
Criss Cross
(48) and was soon signed up by Universal slave market of young talent.

Two came through: Rock Hudson and Curtis. One benefit of the system was that it enabled Curtis to make a lot of movies in a short time—mostly enjoyable hokum:
City Across the River
(49, Maxwell Shane); Enright’s
Kansas Raiders
(50); a bit part as a cavalryman in Anthony Mann’s
Winchester 73
(50); and then a succession of leads in quickie adventure spectaculars—a rapid historical wind-up for Bernie Schwartz:
Sierra
(50, Alfred E. Green); Rudolph Maté’s
The Prince Who Was a Thief
(51); a first clear success in George Marshall’s
Houdini
(53), costarring with his wife, Janet Leigh;
Son of Ali Baba
(53, Kurt Neumann);
The All-American
(53, Jesse Hibbs);
Forbidden
(53) and
The Black Shield of Falworth
(54), both for Maté;
Beachhead
(54, Stuart Heisler);
The Purple Mask
(55, Bruce Humberstone);
Six Bridges to Cross
(55, Joseph Pevney);
The Square Jungle
(56, Jerry Hopper); and
The Rawhide Years
(56, Maté).

Perhaps it was a test of endurance, but Curtis wore tights and uniforms honorably and never took himself as solemnly as some of his scolds chose to. In 1956, he began earnestly to improve himself with Carol Reed’s
Trapeze
, a film that carefully blended the athletic and the sentimental. But he came into his own when readmitted to a modern urban world, and in
Mister Cory
(57, Blake Edwards) and as Sidney Falco in Mackendrick’s
Sweet Smell of Success
(57) he was able to show some of the things a Bronx Ali Baba had learned about life. In the latter, he gave one of the first portrayals of unprincipled American ambition and of the collapsible personality that goes with it. He was man on all fours some years before America really noticed the posture. The script has many cutting things to say about Falco that are like cigarettes put out in Tony’s “ice-cream face.” In response, Curtis was hurt, brave, and bitter—a terrific performance.

Curtis did not escape flabby costume films:
The Vikings
(58, Richard Fleischer);
Spartacus
(60, Stanley Kubrick); and
Taras Bulba
(62, J. Lee Thompson). But he next adventured into comedy, thrust there first by Billy Wilder in
Some Like It Hot
(59). He is the subtlest thing in that outrageous film: more cunningly feminine than Lemmon and throwing in a superb impersonation of Cary Grant as a bonus. Blake Edwards immediately cast him with Grant in
Operation Petticoat
(59) and Curtis was now a comic Falco, still convincing but several shades rosier. After
Who Was That Lady?
(60) for George Sidney, he gave one of his best performances as the chronically flexible
Great Imposter
(60, Robert Mulligan), an underrated film that owes a lot to Curtis’s fallible grasp of himself. He was now cast in the comedian’s mold in Jewison’s
Forty Pounds of Trouble
(62); Quine’s
Paris When It Sizzles
(64); and
Sex and the Single Girl
(64); Minnelli’s
Goodbye Charlie
(64); and Edwards’s
The Great Race
(65) before the zest began to trickle away. The comedies became more contrived and further from Curtis’s territory:
Boeing Boeing
(65, John Rich);
Drop Dead, Darling
(66, Ken Hughes); Mackendrick’s wretched
Don’t Make Waves
(67);
The Chastity Belt
(68, Pasquale Festa Campanile) in Italy; and
Monte Carlo or Bust
(69, Ken Annakin), God knows where. Working his way through marriages and psychiatrists, Curtis toppled into the gravity that had always lain in wait: it led him to make
The Boston Strangler
(68, Fleischer), which he no doubt thought was a significant movie. He worked in England on a TV series,
The Persuaders
, and was disappointing as
Lepke
(74, Menahem Golan); a rogue in
The Count of Monte-Cristo
(74, David Greene); an insecure actor in
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan); a stooge in
The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
(78, John Berry);
The Manitou
(78, William Girdler);
Sextette
(78, Ken Hughes);
Casanova and Company
(78, François Legrand);
It Rained All Night the Day I Left
(79, Nicolas Gessner);
Little Miss Marker
(80, Walter Bernstein); as David O. Selznick in
Moviola: The Scarlett O’Hara War
(80, John Erman);
The Mirror Crack’d
(80, Guy Hamilton);
Inmates
(81, Guy Green);
The Million Dollar Face
(81, Michael O’Herlihy);
Portrait of a Showgirl
(82, Steven Hilliard Stern);
Brainwaves
(82, Ulli Lomel); as Joe McCarthy in
Insignificance
(85, Nicolas Roeg);
Mafia Princess
(86, Robert Collins);
Der Passagier
(88, Thomas Brasch);
Tarzan in Manhattan
(89, Michael Schultz);
Lobster Man from Mars
(89, Stanley Sheff), as a movie executive looking to make a tax-loss picture—some of these are movies such as Sidney Falco might seek out, clinging to the dark, waiting for the heat to pass.

There are more films, strictly from hunger, as Sidney would say:
Midnight
(89, Norman Thaddeus Vane);
Prime Target
(91, David Heavener and Phillip J. Roth);
Center of the Web
(92, David A. Prior);
The Mummy Lives
(93, Gerry O’Hara);
Naked in New York
(94, Daniel Algrant);
The Immortals
(95, Brian Grant);
Hardball
(97, George Erschbamer); the voice of God in
The Blacksmith and the Carpenter
(07, Chris Redish);
David & Fatima
(08, Alain Zaloum).

One other thing: in 2008, Tony published a memoir,
American Prince
, that claimed a sweet romance with Marilyn Monroe from 1948. Well, good luck. But then in 2009, he coauthored
The Making of “Some Like It Hot,”
and said there was a second affair during the production. Tony? Kissing Hitler? Some ad-libs are sacred and some memoirs leave a smell!

Michael Curtiz
(Mihaly Kertesz) (1888–1962), b. Budapest, Hungary
1919:
Die Dame mit dem Schwarzen Handschuhen; Der Stern von Damaskus; Göttesgeissel; Die Dame mit Sonnenblumen
. 1920:
Herzogin Satanella; Miss Dorothy’s Bekenntnis; Labyrinth des Grauens
. 1921:
Miss Tutti Frutti; Wege des Schrecken
. 1922:
Sodom und Gomorrha
. 1923:
Samson und Dalila
. 1924:
Die Sklavenkönigin
. 1925:
Der Junge Medardus; Der Spielzeng von Paris
. 1926:
Fiaker N13; Der Goldene Schmetterling; The Third Degree; Red Heels; The Road to Happiness
. 1927:
The Desired Woman; Good Time Charley; A Million Bid
. 1928:
Noah’s Ark; Tenderloin
. 1929:
The Gamblers; The Glad Rag Doll; Hearts in Exile; The Madonna of Avenue A
. 1930:
Bright Lights; Under a Texas Moon; Mammy; The Matrimonial Bed; River’s End; A Soldier’s Plaything
. 1931:
God’s Gift to Women; The Mad Genius
. 1932:
Alias the Doctor; The Woman from Monte Carlo; The Strange Love of Molly Louvain; Doctor X; The Cabin in the Cotton; 20,000 Years in Sing Sing
. 1933:
The Mystery of the Wax Museum; The Keyhole; Private Detective 62; Goodbye Again; The Kennel Murder Case; Female
. 1934:
Mandalay; Jimmy the Gent; The Key; British Agent
. 1935:
The Case of the Curious Bride; Black Fury; Front Page Woman; Little Big Shot; Captain Blood
. 1936:
The Walking Dead; The Charge of the Light Brigade
. 1937:
Stolen Holiday; Kid Galahad; Mountain Justice; The Perfect Specimen
. 1938:
Gold Is Where You Find It; The Adventures of Robin Hood
(codirected with William Keighley);
Four Daughters; Four’s a Crowd; Angels with Dirty Faces
. 1939:
Dodge City; Daughters Courageous; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex; Four Wives
. 1940:
Virginia City; The Sea Hawk; Santa Fe Trail
. 1941:
The Sea Wolf; Dive Bomber
. 1942:
Captains of the Clouds; Yankee Doodle Dandy
. 1943:
Casablanca; Mission to Moscow; This Is the Army
. 1944:
Passage to Marseilles; Janie
. 1945:
Roughly Speaking; Mildred Pierce
. 1946:
Night and Day
. 1947:
Life with Father; The Unsuspected
. 1948:
Romance on the High Seas
. 1949:
My Dream Is Yours; Flamingo Road; The Lady Takes a Sailor
. 1950:
Young Man with a Horn; Bright Leaf; The Breaking Point
. 1951:
Jim Thorpe—All-American; Force of Arms; I’ll See You in My Dreams
. 1952:
The Will Rogers Story; The Jazz Singer
. 1953:
Trouble Along the Way
. 1954:
The Boy from Oklahoma; The Egyptian; White Christmas
. 1955:
We’re No Angels
. 1956:
The Scarlet Hour; The Vagabond King; The Best Things in Life Are Free
. 1957:
The Helen Morgan Story
. 1958:
King Creole; The Proud Rebel
. 1959:
The Man in the Net; The Hangman
. 1960:
A Breath of Scandal; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. 1961:
Francis of Assisi; The Comancheros
.

The long career of Michael Curtiz began in the Budapest theatre in the last decade of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was an actor and a producer before beginning to work for the cinema in Sweden, Hungary, and Germany. He served in the First World War and then directed in Germany before being invited to Hollywood by Harry Warner. He remained Warners’ loyalest director until 1953. His thrillers are slacker than Raoul Walsh’s, but the Errol Flynn picture was really more Curtiz’s invention than the actor’s, and Curtiz’s status improved notably after
Captain Blood
. Thus he began to act and talk like a Hungarian star. There were more Curtiz jokes than films, and David Niven named a book after one of them—
Bring on the Empty Horses
.

Eventually, durability betrayed him, and by the 1950s his adventure films and biopics were uninspired throwbacks. But until about 1945 he was an admirable exponent of American genres and an enthusiastic orchestrator of actors and technicians.
The Adventures of Robin Hood
is a classic swashbuckler;
Yankee Doodle Dandy
is one of the most enjoyable of biopics;
Casablanca
is the best of wartime espionage movies; and
Mildred Pierce
is the most throbbing of Joan Crawford melodramas. None of those films survives as art, but Curtiz seems to have been intoxicated by Americana in those war years. Granted that the players make special contributions to all those films, still one must allow Curtiz the credit for making melodrama and sentimentality so searingly effective and such glowing causes for nostalgia for the 1940s. To adopt a musical term, in the early 1940s Curtiz achieved an outstanding vibrato, as if Hollywood’s swan song sensed its climax.
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Casablanca
, and
Mildred Pierce
are an unrivaled trinity of inventiveness transforming soppiness to such an extent that reason and taste begin to waver at the conviction of genre in full flow. He seemed to love lighting, fussy decor, and camera movement. Those things don’t make for style—but they do stylish men a treat. And when the melodramatic material is primed, no matter his comic language, he seems as American as the RKO floors in which Fred and Ginger are reflected. One has only to compare
Yankee Doodle Dandy
with Curtiz’s later biopics, or
Casablanca
with
White Christmas
, to gauge the real distinction of the earlier films. Nor is there any reason to scorn the craft of the wartime films, not even the flashback within a flashback within a flashback of the nutty
Passage to Marseilles
. It would be a happier cinema today if complex stories could be told as swiftly and clearly as
Casablanca
. Perhaps the shooting of
Casablanca
was only days ahead of the script; in which case, what clearer proof could there be of instinct?

John Cusack
, b. Evanston, Illinois, 1966
It seems as if John Cusack has been adorably promising for close to thirty years now, without quite establishing himself or seeming indispensable. But he is only in his midforties and he has acquired enough experience along the way to make a stand sometime soon. After all, by now there’s a whole new generation of fresh-faced young men, as sharp and smart as he was. So when is he going to be emphatically grown up? He is the younger brother of actress Joan Cusack, and he was with her in the Pivan Theatre Workshop. His films are
Class
(83, Lewis John Carlino);
Sixteen Candles
(84, John Hughes);
Grandview, U.S.A
. (84, Randal Kleiser);
The Sure Thing
(85, Rob Reiner);
Better Off Dead
(85, Savage Steve Holland);
The Journey of Natty Gann
(85, Jeremy Kagan);
Stand by Me
(86, Reiner);
One Crazy Summer
(86, Holland);
Hot Pursuit
(87, Steven Lisberger); very good in
Eight Men Out
(88, John Sayles);
Tapeheads
(88, Bill Fishman); delivering true charm, with Ione Skye, in
Say Anything
(89, Cameron Crowe); good again in
Fat Man and Little Boy
(89, Roland Joffe); lacking a little depth in
The Grifters
(90, Stephen Frears), and seeming a little too young;
True Colors
(91, Herbert Ross);
Shadows and Fog
(91, Woody Allen);
Roadside Prophets
(92, Abbe Wool);
The Player
(92, Robert Altman);
Map of the Human Heart
(92, Vincent Ward);
Bob Roberts
(92, Tim Robbins);
Money for Nothing
(93, Ramón Menéndez); funny in
Bullets Over Broadway
(94, Woody Allen);
Floundering
(94, Peter McCarthy);
The Road to Wellville
(94, Alan Parker); Pacino’s assistant in
City Hall
(96, Harold Becker); cowriter and coproducer on
Grosse Pointe Blank
(97, George Armitage); pretty much an outsider in
Con Air
(97, Simon West); kicking his heels in
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
(97, Clint Eastwood); doing a voice in
Anastasia
(97, Don Bluth);
The Thin Red Line
(98, Terence Malick);
This Is My Father
(99, Paul Quinn); too busy in
Pushing Tin
(99, Mike Newell); the puppeteer in
Being John Malkovich
(99, Spike Jonze); Nelson Rockefeller in
The Cradle Will Rock
(99, Tim Robbins); clever, but still only on the edge of breakthrough in
High Fidelity
(00, Frears);
America’s Sweethearts
(01, Joe Roth); and
Serendipity
(01, Peter Chelsom) where he’s no more or less boyish and impetuous than he was in
Say Anything
.