RIP Tony Curtis

Another of Hollywood’s Golden Age elite died last week.  Tony Curtis was 85 and six times married - his last wife was 46 years his junior - so perhaps it’s no classical tragedy.  On the other hand, for movie buffs the loss will be keenly felt.  Curtis was the last surviving cast member of “Some Like it Hot” (1959), a film that’s as good a candidate as any for the title of greatest American sound comedy ever.

The careers of most stars can be reduced in retrospect to a handful of key titles.  This is especially true of Curtis whose best work was concentrated in the late 1950s.  After suffering at the hands of critics for his anachronistic Brooklyn accent in the lamentable “The Black Shield of Falworth” (1954) Curtis established his leading man credentials in two movies with Burt Lancaster: the circus melodrama “Trapeze” (1956) and “The Sweet of Success” (1957), a powerful film noir set in the sleazy underworld of New York newspapers.

Curtis’ role as a desperate promoter forced to grovel before Lancaster’s amoral, egotistical columnist is perhaps his finest dramatic achievement though his solitary Oscar nomination came a year later for playing the white man chained to Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer’s convicts-on-the-run racial allegory “The Defiant Ones”.  The film isn’t as heavy handed as this sounds: both stars deliver shaded performances at odds with the standard stereotypes of the day.

Whatever the worth of these films and Curtis’ later successes - he was particularly good as a cowardly Boston Strangler in the late 1960s - it is in “Some Like it Hot” that he achieved immortality.  He and Jack Lemmon play a couple of jazz age musicians forced into hiding after witnessing the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  Curtis not only gets to dress and act in drag but does a wicked impersonation of Cary Grant, assuming his one-time co-star’s voice and persona in the pursuit of a never-more-voluptuous Marilyn Monroe.

Of working with Monroe Curtis once infamously said it was “like kissing Hitler”.  He later qualified the remark, describing how she enjoyed teasing him erotically during take after take of a seduction scene.  Life wasn’t that tough for Tony Curtis.