Avidly

Tony Curtis was the kind of actor that Tom Cruise would kill to be. Their early career paths were not all that dissimilar: like Cruise, Curtis broke into movies when he was in his twenties and rapidly rose to box office stardom on the basis of his youthful energy and good looks. In his early starring roles, in movies that hardly anyone (myself included) born since 1960 has seen but whose titles (The Prince Who Was a Thief, The Blck Shield of Falworth) have long been punch lines to movie junkies, he was amateurish and gauche, not that his fans could have cared less. He was paying attention and learning as he went along, though, and in interviews he gave later, he would claim to have been looking forward to getting a shot at playing a character he could relate to. That character turned out to be Sidney Falco, the febrile New York press agent in Sweet Smell of Success--directed by Alexander Kendrick from a script adapted by Ernest Lehman from his own short novel and overhauled by Clifford Odets, and released in 1957, almost thirty films into Curtis's career. Again, the role gave Curtis a chance at onscreen liberation in a way that made it roughly comparable to the part that Richard Price wrote for Cruise in The Color of Money, the biggest difference being that, in Curtis's case, when the resulting performance made your jaw drop and your mouth hang open, it wasn't because you had to vomit.

Curtis, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Bronx, not learning English until he was six. His mother was an abusive schizophrenic, the family so poor that Curtis was briefly housed in an orphanage because it was the readiest alternative to starvation. He may have seen Falco as one possible version of himself, a hustler who wasn't fated to be at center stage and so had to get his gratification by promoting other people behind the scenes, and who had to push that much harder because of it--and he definitely understood what made Sidney run. Unapologetically sleazy and desperately overcaffeinated, he incarnated big-city street energy in a different way than any movie star before him, even James Cagney, and he was more than up to the challenge of Odets's dialogue. The lines were so ornately yummy they were like gorgeously overdecorated pastries, and Curtis's delivery of them felt like a loving caress, even as he bit into them so hard that icing practically spattered the walls.

It would have been a great performance of it had come from Joe Pesci, but it also served notice that Curtis had learned to use his extraordinary looks to cunning effect. In his New York Times obituary, Dave Kehr points out that "Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity", notably in his drag performance in Some Like It Hot (in which he also unveiled his impression of Cary Grant, who he idolized as a premier example of someone who lifted himself high above a hellish, blighted childhood with nothing but his talent, looks, and some luck) and as the object of Laurence Olivier's desire in Spartacus. ("A singer of songs?" Oliver purrs, examining the younger man's CV. "For whom did you perform this wondrous talent?") A major style influence of Elvis Presley, Curtis wasn't merely handsome but beautiful, in a provocative way, and as an actor, he was both aware and in control of its effect on people: The oyster scene in Spartacus isn't something that the writer and director slipped in under his radar, like the homoerotic undercurrent that Gore Vidal and William Wyler smuggled past Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. It's a major shame that, Some Like It Hot aside, Hollywood could offer Curtis nothing in the way of sex comedies beyond the likes of Sex and the Single Girl and Not with My Wife, You Don't! Somewhere out there in the ether, filed in the archives of the library of unmade movies, are the eye-popping comedies that the Curtis of the '50s or '60s could have made with the Pedro Almodovar of the '80s or the Bertrand Blier of the '70s or maybe even Marco Ferreri, possibly with a little input on the script from Joe Orton or Charles Ludlam.

On more than one occasion, I've heard Curtis say that the performance he was proudest of was as the title character in the 1968 The Boston Strangler. It was a funny thing to hear, given that it was an uncharacteristically joyless piece of work in a fairly grim, colorless movie. But Curtis makes his entrance late in it, having gained weight for the role and submitted to being outfitted with one of the least flattering (and least convincingly-looking fake noses in the history of movie prosthetics, and maybe he felt that he must have been doing the best work of his life because he was enjoying himself the least. After that, Curtis began doing a lot of TV--starring in such series as The Persuaders and the embarrassingly short-lived McCoy and playing a hotel owner named "Phil Roth" in the Robert Urich vehicle Vegas$--at a time when prominent exposure on the small screen was understood to mean that one had officially received one's gold watch as a movie star. His kind of delicate-featured androgynous beauty does not generally improve with age, and as the level of films he deigned to appear in sank past the level of Casanova & Co., Sextette (starring an octogenarian Mae West), The Manitou, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training, and The Mirror Crack'd to pictures so devoid of interest (and, in most cases, release dates) that they don't have their own Wikipedia entries, his face kept getting thicker and his hairpieces kept getting sillier. But he still burned with charisma and bubbled over with humor, and if he couldn't animate whatever part he was playing, you likely couldn't get it to twitch if you put five thousand volts through it.

The fact that Curtis, who received the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995, never won an Oscar, not even one of those special lifetime achievement award dealies, might best be seen as Hollywood's revenge on anyone who would pay it the compliment of taking its honors seriously. It's easy for Hollywood to respect someone like Daniel Day-Lewis or Terrence Malick, who seems to have something on his mind other than taking whatever job is available and keeping in the public eye no matter what. Curtis, spending his last decades in show business as a busy C-lister, must have had a ferocious need to stay famous and get attention, but he also had something that seems like a lost blessing in our reality-show age: a genuine desire to give pleasure through his performances, to make people enjoy watching him, so they'd be glad when they saw him again. In fact, when you look at him today in the work he left behind, whether it's in Sweet Smell of Success or Lobster Men from Mars, his uncomplicated pride in his work, and in knowing that he's a treat to watch, look almost like a state of grace. Denied the full measure of respect that he deserved, he had to settle for the love and affection of all those with hearts that pump blood and eyes that see. Boo fucking hoo, right?

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