No matter how famous he became, no matter how much money he earned, Tony Curtis was always Bernard Schwartz, an insecure and damaged Jewish kid from the Bronx.

As the son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, Curtis didn’t speak English until he was five or six years old.

His father was a tailor and the entire family lived in the back of the shop. His mother was schizophrenic who frequently abused young Curtis. His brother Robert was also mentally ill and was placed in an institution. As Curtis explains in his memoir, he was responsible for his younger brother Julius. But Julius was hit and killed by a truck and Curtis shouldered the guilt for his entire life.

Raised in grinding poverty, Curtis was a street urchin who ran with a gang of petty thieves. But a kindly neighbor enrolled Curtis in the Boy Scouts and it was this experience that, according to Curtis, saved his life.

Inspired by the Cary Grant film Destination Tokyo (1943), Curtis enlisted in the submarine service. After the war, using the GI Bill, Curtis studied acting and at age 23 made his way to Hollywood where his stunning good looks landed him a contract with Universal. (more…)

If you head South on the Hollywood Freeway, there’s a nice-sized mural of Tony Curtis to greet you as you pass under Sunset Boulevard. Why Tony Curtis? Who knows. With so many screen legends available for such an honor, why the man who was born Bernard Schwartz in the Bronx in 1925? No doubt there’s a story behind it, but I was always glad this singular honor was there for an actor and movie star who was respected but never seemed appreciated quite enough.

I discovered Tony Curtis as a kid in the ’70s on the Saturday Afternoon Movies. My dad was a fan and everything in the house stopped cold whenever ”Houdini” or “The Great Imposter” aired. As for my sister and I, we loved the somewhat infamous Technicolor swashbuckler “The Black Shield of Falworth.” Back then there was no such thing as home video or cable television, so you watched what was on. One of the advantages of the Vacuum Tube Age was seeing films like these. Unlike the classics, these programmers were most likely cheaper for local television stations to rent so you were exposed to all kinds of terrific films you might not have normally bothered with had all of today’s choices been available.

Janet Leigh and husband Tony Curtis, holding Daughters Kelly Lee and Jamie Lee.

Which isn’t to say Tony Curtis didn’t star in classic films. He most certainly did, and a respectable number of them: “Sweet Smell of Success,” “The Defiant Ones” (incredibly, his only Oscar nomination), “Some Like it Hot,” “Operation Petticoat,” “Spartacus,” and “The Boston Strangler.”

It’s become cliche to make fun of Curtis’s New Yawk accent which popped up occasionally in period films like “Spartacus” and “The Vikings,” (and “Falworth”), but I’m biased and choose to blame the directors. Curtis himself had considerable chops and nowhere did he prove this more than in “Sweet Smell of Success,” where he more than holds his own on screen where many a lesser actor was blown away — next to The Mighty Burt Lancaster.

“Success” would make any list of mine naming the films I re-watch the most. As J.J. Hunsecker, a ruthless columnist who holds court in all the best Manhattan night clubs, Lancaster’s a marvel of passive aggressive evil, but the movie really belongs to Curtis’s Sidney Falco; a sniveling, needy little grasping press agent caught in a trap of his own making. Other than his stunning good looks, Curtis was also known for characters filled with boundless energy and can-do American optimism. Through Falco, Curtis showed us the dark side of those qualities, what can happen when they bump up against the reality of a harsh world. (more…)

Mary Pickford's rich and lustrous hair was the paradigm of female beauty in early Hollywood.

I’ve been looking at portraits of Hollywood stars from the 50’s, a time when the studio system was finally collapsing, and I noticed a few things.

The quality of studio portrait photography was dismal.

The images are, for the most part, bland, with little creative inspiration. Everyone seems bored—the photographers and the stars. Hollywood once employed geniuses like George Hurrell and C.S. Bull, whose iconic photography helped mold the G-d-like images of Hollywood’s golden age.

But as the studios were shrinking in power, they drastically cut back on their still departments. And because actors were no longer under long-term contract to the studios, the technocrat executives who replaced the original passionate moguls had no stake or ability to carefully shape and control the images of their most promising thespians.

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The life story of a Black star in a White world, a man who arguably was the world’s greatest entertainer, will not be coming to a theater near you anytime soon. If ever.

During a recent interview on my radio program “The Andrea Shea King Show”, Hollywood conservative Burt Boyar, longtime friend and biographer of the late great Sammy Davis, Jr., said he’s concerned that the true story about the talented entertainer who fought and broke through racial barriers will never be seen on the silver screen. Two years ago, Boyar had negotiated a deal to sell his two biographies to filmmakers who were all set to tell the story on celluloid.

Reflection: Sammy Davis Jr. snaps a photo of himself and Jerry Lewis posing in the reflection of a mirror.

What entanglements are keeping the former member of the Rat Pack’s compelling life from being made into a movie?  A life studded with Tinseltown’s glittering constellation of stars whose orbits intersected his?   Luminaries like Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin, Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Liz and Burton, Paul Newman, Berle, Bacall, Bennett, Damone… when Hollywood was at its most glamorous?

Who is Burt Boyar? And why does he care?

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Match me, Sidney.

8pm PST - Sweet Smell Of Success (1957) – A crooked press agent stoops to new depths to help an egotistical columnist break up his sister’s romance. Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Susan Harrison, Marty Milner Dir: Alexander Mackendrick BW-96 mins, TV-PG

You could fill pages about the complete greatness of this film, but when all is said and done what impresses most is how so much character and so many plot turns all fit into 96 minutes. As Burt Prelutsky points out in this essay, the all important art of pacing has pretty much vanished in Big Hollywood. When raunchy sex comedies start clocking in at 126 minutes, the canary in the coalmine to warn you something’s gone horribly wrong is long, long dead. (more…)