From Acrobat to Actor

Why I printed this one out is baffling. Sure, I very much like Lancaster's acting and his movies, but why I went back to a 2000 book review is a puzzle. Nonetheless. And, searching for it, I found Molly Haskell's review of the same book.

Buford, Kate.(2000). Burt Lancaster: an American life. New York: Knopf.

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; From Acrobat to Actor, Embracing Risks All the Way
By MEL GUSSOW - Published: April 6, 2000

The popular image of Burt Lancaster is that of a handsome, abrasive tough guy, a former circus acrobat who tumbled through action movies with an athletic grace. That Lancaster turns out to be far more than that -- in fact, one of Hollywood's most versatile stars and an actor with a conscience and an artistic sensibility -- is a tribute to Kate Buford, the author of ''Burt Lancaster: An American Life.''

Ms. Buford's illuminating biography is an almost complete portrait, ''almost complete,'' because Lancaster was, from all testimony, a man who withheld himself emotionally. Ms. Buford quotes the director Sydney Pollack as someone who ''knew and loved Lancaster as well as anyone ever did, which is to say only partially.''

Then looking back on a man he considered to be a mentor, Mr. Pollack offers a clue to his character: ''He knew who he was, what he was worth -- knew himself better than anyone I've ever met. So he was, in a curious sense, fearless.'' Lancaster was, of course, physically fearless, performing almost all his own stunts (as in ''Trapeze''). He was also daring in his acting choices, challenging convention and the demands of stardom, sometimes stubbornly choosing the most offbeat roles, like ''Birdman of Alcatraz.''

As is pointed out in the book, his career was cumulative and went through many changes, from his first riveting appearance on screen in ''The Killers'' through his gangster-grown-old in ''Atlantic City,'' the capstone of what had been an extraordinary career.

Along the way, the author corrects a few misapprehensions. Lancaster was not always an imposing figure. Growing up in Manhattan, he was small for his age, ''a short sissy,'' until he suddenly grew tall at 13. His interest in acting began early, and he had a long theatrical apprenticeship at the Union Settlement House before he stepped on the professional stage. Eventually he became something of a closet intellectual.

He directed only one film, ''The Kentuckian,'' but with his producing partners Harold Hecht and, later, James Hill, he was responsible for many films (including ''Marty'') in which he did not appear. He had a comprehensive knowledge of filmmaking and aimed to be a perfectionist, in itself the source of some of his clashes with directors.

Interestingly, some of the people with whom he initially had conflicts came to be his greatest admirers, foremost among them Luchino Visconti. By talking back to the great Italian director, Lancaster gained his respect. Nevertheless, Visconti called him ''the most perfectly mysterious man I ever met.'' That the actor was underappreciated in ''The Leopard'' and many other films is characteristic of his career. His biographer demonstrates how shortsighted Hollywood, the public and critics could be, how quick they were to pigeonhole him and how so many of his movies seem to have improved with time. As Roddy McDowall observed, Lancaster had the ability, rare in Hollywood, to ''discard what . . . defined him and change.''

After briefly studying at New York University, he quit to join the circus with his childhood friend Nick Cuccia. Cuccia became Cravat and Lancaster shortened his name to Lang. As Lang and Cravat, they polished their double act, which they were to resurrect years later in ''The Crimson Pirate.'' Lancaster always retained a measure of what his biographer calls ''the old circus mountebank.''

In 1945, on terminal leave from the Army and in uniform, he went to visit his wife-to-be (his second wife) in the theatrical office where she worked, and he was instantly discovered. In his Broadway debut in ''A Sound of Hunting,'' he became the center of attention. One movie talent scout reported that Lancaster, playing an Army sergeant, had the ability to ''bounce off that stage'' with the vitality of ''a mountain cat.'' That vitality quickly proved to be transferable to movies. Cast in ''The Killers,'' he demonstrated what the director Robert Wise called ''a gene for the screen.''

The producer Hal Wallis initially wanted to change his name to Stuart Chase, and at the beginning of his film career, Lancaster rejected an offer to play Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway premiere of ''A Streetcar Named Desire.'' No regrets: Lancaster thought he had talent but not genius. Much later, however, he wanted to play Don Corleone in ''The Godfather'' but lost out to Marlon Brando. Another role that he wanted to play but didn't was the gay hairdresser in ''Kiss of the Spider Woman.''

One of many differences between him and Mr. Brando (and many other film stars) is that Lancaster did not denigrate his profession. He loved being an actor. As Ms. Buford says, acting offered him an opportunity to try on ''different identities like an artist shifting into different periods.'' Because of that quest, he exhibited a much wider range than many of his peers and whenever possible he made films with social content.

Think of his characters: solitary gangster, self-mocking pirate, hypocritical preacher, cowboys, con men, a depressed suburbanite and an arrogant gossip columnist. At an older age, he played older variations of the roles he had created.

Marred only by an overly visceral writing style -- too many references to Lancaster as a colossus, a golem and a volcano, as if the author were reaching for a verbal equivalent of Lancaster in action -- the biography puts the actor in perspective. Questions are raised about his obsessive womanizing and his possible bisexuality, his fear of flying (and even of swimming) and his temperamental outbursts on set.

In contrast to those actors who thrive on ego and are vanquished by failure, Lancaster was still working in his late 70's and survived with his integrity intact. He acted in more than 70 films, and a healthy percentage of them were of value. Wisely, he followed his wife's advice to make one movie ''for the bank'' and one for his art, thereby achieving an equilibrium.

Lancaster once said of the director Robert Aldrich and himself: ''We're all forgotten sooner or later. But not the films.'' He concluded, ''That's all the memorial we should need or hope for.'' Lancaster's memorial is in, among other movies, ''From Here to Eternity,'' ''Sweet Smell of Success,'' 'Ulzana's Raid'' and ''Atlantic City.''

March 19, 2000
High-Wire Artist Burt Lancaster was more daring and multidimensional than many gave him credit for.

First Chapter: 'Burt Lancaster'

To fly through the air with the greatest of ease is what we expect of the young man on the flying trapeze; to enthrall women sexually in the name of the Lord is the dubious gift of the religious revivalist. Yet Burt Lancaster, onetime circus performer (see him swing through ''The Crimson Pirate'' in 1952 and ''Trapeze'' in 1956) and Oscar winner for his Bible-thumping evangelist in ''Elmer Gantry'' (1960), was neither a natural athlete nor a natural seducer. He had a great many qualities -- leonine beauty, acrobatic dexterity, physical strength, street smarts, serious ambition, a political conscience and, by the end of his career, a number of good and a few great performances under his belt. But ease, natural ease, eluded him; too often he had a deliberate, overheated quality on the screen, mirrored, it seems, in the way he played golf: he never managed the relaxed swing essential to the game that attracted and frustrated him.

He had charisma -- in many scenes, as Kate Buford points out in this splendid biography, he is the only person you watch on the screen. But not being able to blend in with one's fellow actors is hardly an unqualified asset. That sort of megawattage defines star cinema, and Lancaster, who had it in spades, almost could not not be a star. But charisma, with its overtones of divinity, is one thing; charm on the human scale is something else. A few stars have both, the blast of star power and the quieter lure of intimacy, but Lancaster was like those Olympians who bestrode the earth and laughed at puny mortals, whose gestures were larger, whose words were weightier and whose diction was more precise than anybody else's.

Indeed, and not just incidentally, in the many interesting descriptions quoted by Buford from friends, directors and journalists, phrases like ''golem,'' ''Adam,'' ''young Sun god,'' ''sculptural,'' ''Greek hero,'' ''hyper-man'' and ''wounded colossus'' are used, and the people most often doing the describing in this biography are men. Lancaster's was a male ideal of power and grace, classical in form: the sculptured physique, the exultation in the body, the sense of being complete without a woman.

At least that was how he appeared to us in the 1950's -- strenuously physical, preeningly patriarchal, decidedly uncool, almost an embarrassment, or, as Buford says in the prologue to her first book, ''too earnest to be chic.'' But as time went on, that earnestness paid off. In the retrospective view that ''Burt Lancaster: An American Life'' invites, his career now looks infinitely more interesting -- richer and more ambitious on the whole than Brando's, the more gifted contemporary who beat him out for coveted roles like Stanley Kowalski and the Godfather but languished in middle and old age. Lancaster used his autumn years not just to make a few bucks or stay in the game but to explore new facets of his character and come to terms with age itself, to risk losing his fans in wildly unconventional roles. Not only did he allow himself to be Luchino Visconti's alter ego as the Sicilian aristocrat of ''The Leopard'' (1963) and the fussy professor of ''Conversation Piece'' (1975) and, no less perversely, Bernardo Bertolucci's randy landowner in ''1900'' (1976), but he wanted desperately to make a film of ''Kiss of the Spider Woman'' and play the gay hairdresser!

Descended from Protestant Irish immigrants, Lancaster (1913-94) grew up in a raffish East Harlem neighborhood like that of another pugnacious Irishman, James Cagney. Along with other kids in the area, he was a lucky protégé of the Union Settlement House, that extraordinary church-run institution that got young people off the streets with a range of activities, from sports to theatricals, and helped the immigrant poor organize within their communities. Encouraged by an artistic, opera-loving mother and two inspirational pastors, he discovered a talent for acting -- balanced always by the more ''masculine'' love of sports.

Preferring to express himself physically rather than emotionally (he would later block love scenes carefully, according to one co-star, in order to ''hide his feelings from the camera''), he was disdainful of Stanislavsky's Method, which was overtaking the New York theater and its settlement offshoots, and felt that acting the same role night after night was ''sissy.'' He had ''no intention,'' Buford adds, ''of playing dour Russian peasants when he could dream of emulating Douglas Fairbanks'' in ''The Mark of Zorro.'' But from the settlement-house ethic he also developed the progressive and reformist impulses that would characterize his leftist politics, from his mostly staunch solidarity with the Hollywood targets of the witch hunt in the 50's to the underdog sympathies of his films to major personal and financial contributions to the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations in his later life.

Lancaster figured out what was needed in postwar Hollywood and was way ahead of the game as an independent, forming his own production company in 1945 with the agent and onetime actor Harold Hecht as his partner. Called Norma Productions after his wife, it was one of the first and most successful of its kind, boosting the fortunes of all concerned. With different studios (they eventually put United Artists back on the map), Lancaster and Hecht made offbeat movies like ''Marty'' (1955) and serious adaptations like ''Come Back, Little Sheba'' (1952) and ''The Rose Tattoo'' (1955), as well as more profitable adventure pictures. Lancaster always insisted he was making movies, not films, and if a picture didn't score with an audience it was by definition a failure. Yet best regarded today are not the ambitious ego trips, one-man shows like ''Elmer Gantry'' and ''Birdman of Alcatraz'' (1962), but the less pretentious movies that did not become box-office hits. The cult classics and acknowledged masterpieces are the noirish pictures in which the smiles are few, Lancaster's ''Chiclet'' teeth are least visible and the endings bleaker than a cold moonless night.

In ''The Killers'' (1946), he makes one of the most dazzling debuts on film, lying in the shadow, awaiting death, his bare arms by his side, the muscularity in repose implying both strength and sensitivity. In ''Criss Cross'' (1949), also directed by Robert Siodmak, his bank guard gone bad greets death almost passively, the noir antihero as fallen idol. As J. J. Hunsecker, the malicious gossip columnist in ''Sweet Smell of Success'' (1957), he scored a critical triumph and gave Tony Curtis the role of his life. As the hawkish and half-mad General Scott in ''Seven Days in May'' (1964), he played his own philosophical opposite. Closer to his real-life character was the shrewdly tolerant American Indian scout in Robert Aldrich's brilliant ''Ulzana's Raid'' (1972), who dies in the end, victim of a massacre, while lighting a cigarette.

There was gossip about his unorthodox sex life (on which the omnipresent Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a running file), and Buford reports the rumors as such. Through many affairs -- he was a compulsive womanizer but not a ladies' man -- he nevertheless remained dutifully with his alcoholic wife and their five children until circumstances finally drove them apart. However, by all accounts, he nevertheless lived on the wild side, took advantage of the multiplicity of offerings -- orgies, sharing women with his associate James Hill, forays into homosexuality. He was a man of broad appetites and black rages, difficult and sometimes impossibly rude. Siodmak was so disgusted with his behavior on location for ''The Crimson Pirate'' that he left Lancaster and Hollywood for good. Yet he could be kind and generous, loyal to friends and indifferent to the Hollywood power game, rarely cultivating the socially important and unconcerned with what people thought.

He could make fun of his own virility and though Mad magazine might parody him and Gary Cooper in ''Vera Cruz'' (1954) as ''Lambaster'' (who takes forever to die) and ''Chickencooper,'' the two stars were already halfway there in this entertaining buddy tale of two laconic he-men cowboys outhustling each other. It was his coming to terms with growing old and the loss of masculine power that makes his later films so engaging, even moving. In ''Atlantic City'' (1981), coming full circle back to his runaway felon in ''The Killers,'' he plays a has-been mobster who voyeuristically ogles, then befriends, Susan Sarandon's croupier-in-training. Sarandon describes how difficult it was for Lancaster, whose instinct was to take a woman by force, to accept the idea that the woman ''gave herself to him.'' The man who had shocked audiences of ''From Here to Eternity'' (1953) by making graphic love to Deborah Kerr on the sand had never really exposed his emotional vulnerability. Now that the famous torso was past displaying, and the emperor had to wear clothes, there was, after all, as Kate Buford's biography makes clear, more to him than met the eye.

Molly Haskell's most recent book is ''Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Men and Women, Films and Feminists.''