The Swimmer (Frank Perry, 1968)

Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Janet Langford, Janice Rule, Joan Rivers, Tony Bickley, Marge Champion, Kim Hunter, Bill Fiore, Rose Gregorio, Charles Drake, House Jameson, Nancy Cushman, Bernie Hamilton. Screenplay: Eleanor Perry, based on a short story by John Cheever. Cinematography: David L. Quaid. Art direction: Peter Dohanos. Film editing: Sidney Katz, Carl Lerner, Pat Somerset. Music: Marvin Hamlisch.

The Swimmer evokes that common anxiety dream in which you're naked or in your underwear in a familiar place like work or school. The people around you don't seem to notice, but you suspect that they're secretly laughing at you. The dream is produced, of course, by something that you don't want other people to know about you. Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) isn't naked, but he's exposed, wearing swim trunks and barefoot, when we first see him walking through the woods. He comes upon a group of his neighbors gathered around their swimming pool. They greet him heartily, commenting on how long it's been since they got together, serving drinks and making small talk. Ned suddenly has an idea: All of his neighbors have pools. Why couldn't he swim his way home, moving from pool to pool until he reaches his destination? The group cheers him on. Ned is an athletic middle-aged man (Lancaster was in his mid-50s when the film was made, but looked perhaps ten years younger), and the day is sunny and warm. But as he continues his pool-hopping, he injures himself slightly and the day gets darker and chillier, and so does the reception of the pool-owners he encounters. We begin to discover that Ned is in financial trouble and that the marriage he initially portrayed as happy has fallen apart. The John Cheever story on which the film is based is often read as a fable about suburban hypocrisy and male anxiety, and the movie supports those and other interpretations. Lancaster is perfect casting, not only because of his physical fitness but also because of the signs of aging that the camera inevitably reveals -- camera angles, for example, sometimes show the thinning of the hair at the crown of his head. But the film version lacks the Everyman quality of Cheever's story, missing some of the shock of recognition by the reader, an inevitability in its translation to a visual medium. It also ran into some trouble with producer Sam Spiegel, who had many scenes recast and reshot, firing director Frank Perry and replacing him with Sydney Pollack. It was not a success at the box office, being a little too oblique for audiences and some critics, but it has gained stature with time. 

Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947)

 

Cast: John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster, Wendell Corey, Mary Astor. Screenplay: Robert Rossen, based on a novel by Ramona Stewart. Cinematography: Edward Cronjager, Charles Lang. Art direction: Perry Ferguson. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

Where there’s a desert there are going to be rattlesnakes, and the one in Desert Fury is full of them, hissing and showing their fangs. The opening scenes of the movie are so full of poisonous dialogue and hostile conversations that you wonder how anyone survives in the small Nevada town of Chuckawalla. Chief among the serpents is Fritzi Haller (Mary Astor), who runs a casino and tries to run the life of her rebellious 19-year-old daughter, Paula (Lizabeth Scott), who has a tendency to get involved with the wrong men. Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak) couldn’t be wronger, a gambler and racketeer whose wife recently died under suspicious circumstances and who also used to be involved with Fritzi. Now he makes a play for Paula, which not only upsets Fritzi but also irks his … well, what is Johnny Ryan (Wendell Corey)? Eddie’s sidekick? His factotum? His fall guy? When we see Johnny sitting on the patio with a shirtless Eddie we may get other ideas, especially when Paula shows up and Johnny treats her with contempt – as, we find out, he did Eddie’s late wife. The coded gay relationship only becomes more obvious when we find out that the two men first met in Times Square, where Johnny bought the down-and-out Eddie breakfast at the Automat and then took him home with him. The only apparent good guy in Chuckawalla’s nest of vipers is Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster), a former rodeo rider who after a disabling accident moved there and became a deputy sheriff. Tom is such a good guy that he takes off his badge before he slugs Eddie and refuses Fritzi’s offer to set him up with a ranch if he’ll marry Paula and get her away from Eddie. All of this is familiar film noir stuff, even in glorious Technicolor, but it would take a Douglas Sirk to figure out how to make it good. Lewis Allen is not up to the task, and he’s hampered by the acting limitations of Scott and Hodiak. Astor and Corey (making his debut in a film career that never quite panned out) are fine, and Lancaster does what he can with a fairly thankless role. But too often, Allen seems to be letting Miklós Rózsa’s somewhat overbearing score tell the story.

Come Back, Little Sheba (Daniel Mann, 1952)

Shirley Booth and Burt Lancaster in Come Back, Little Sheba

Cast: Shirley Booth, Burt Lancaster, Terry Moore, Richard Jaeckel, Philip Ober, Edwin Max, Lisa Golm, Walter Kelley. Screenplay: Ketti Frings, based on a play by William Inge. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Henry Bumstead, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Warren Low. Music: Franz Waxman.

Shirley Booth won an Oscar for her portrayal of Lola Delaney, a middle-aged frump married to an alcoholic chiropractor (Burt Lancaster) she calls "Daddy" or "Doc." We first see Lola coming downstairs in a ratty chenille robe to answer the doorbell; it's Marie Buckholder (Terry Moore), a college student answering an ad for a room Lola has for rent. Marie takes a look at the room and tells her she'll think it over. When Doc finds out that Lola has decided to take in a roomer, he's angry and forbids it. But when Marie returns to say she wants to rent the room, only Doc is home -- Lola has gone out to buy some orange juice for his breakfast -- and when he gets a look at the nubile Marie, he agrees to rent it, along with another downstairs room that Lola calls her "sewing room," though there's no evidence that Lola ever uses it for that. And so begins the film version of the first of William Inge's plays about sexual frustration. The movie would have us believe that Marie rouses a repressed desire in Doc and also makes him want to protect her, as if she were the child he and Lola lost, but as with most of the works by the closeted playwright, it has a strong gay subtext. When Marie, an art student, brings home a classmate, a young athlete named Turk (Richard Jaeckel), to pose for a poster she's creating, Doc is shocked to find the well-built Turk, in a track suit that shows off his muscles, in his living room. He immediately begins professing his concern for Marie's honor, her supposed virginity, but we can sense that he's more than a little aroused by Turk. We learn, too, that Doc was an only child, coddled by his mother and always shy around women, and that it was only because Lola was more than a little sexually forward that he got her pregnant and had to marry her. The real disappointment in the movie is the radical miscasting of Lancaster as Doc. He was 15 years younger than Booth, and no amount of gray at his temples can cover up his athletic vitality and make us believe that the two are supposed to be the same age. Still, despite the screenplay's disingenuousness about sexuality and the stagebound character of its action and dialogue, Booth's performance is worth savoring and there are moments of genuine feeling in the film.

The Crimson Pirate (Robert Siodmak, 1952)

Burt Lancaster and Nick Cravat in The Crimson Pirate

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Nick Cravat, Eva Bartok, Torin Thatcher, James Hayter, Leslie Bradley, Margot Grahame, Noel Purcell, Frederick Lester, Eliot Makeham, Frank Pettingell, Dana Wynter, Christopher Lee. Screenplay: Roland Kibbee. Cinematography: Otto Heller. Art direction: Paul Sheriff. Film editing: Jack Harris. Music: William Alwyn.

All flashing blue eyes and white teeth, Burt Lancaster swashbuckles in The Crimson Pirate like no one since the elder Douglas Fairbanks -- some of whose acrobatic gags were borrowed by the movie. It's one of those kids'  movies for all ages, with only just enough mushy stuff between Lancaster and Eva Bartok to hold adult interests. Actually, the real romance here is between Lancaster's Captain Vallo and Nick Cravat's Ojo, the latter a mute lieutenant to the dashing pirate captain. Some of the funniest sequences involve the movements in sync of the six-foot-one Lancaster and the five-foot-four Cravat -- the two once had a circus act together. There's perhaps more plot than the movie absolutely needs, involving the pirates coming to the aid of the anti-monarchical rebels on the mythical Caribbean island of Cobra. There Vallo, aka The Crimson Pirate, meets Consuelo (Bartok), the daughter of the rebel leader El Libre (Frederick Lester). Meanwhile, mutiny brews aboard Vallo's ship, fueled by his first mate, Humble Bellows (Torin Tatcher), disgruntled by the fact that Vallo's involvement in politics has got in the way of their routine piratical pursuits of treasure. Eventually, with the aid of a scientist, Prof. Elihu Prudence (James Hayter, Vallo and Ojo vanquish both the mutineers and the forces of the king, led by Baron Gruda (Leslie Bradley), by using the professor's scientific innovations, such as a hot-air balloon and nitroglycerin, as well as the theory that a capsized boat might hold enough air to be used as a kind of submarine. (That last gag was borrowed for the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. It was later proved unfeasible on the Mythbusters TV show.) The Crimson Pirate was the kind of hit it deserved to be.

Atlantic City (Louis Malle, 1980)

Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Susan Sarandon, Kate Reid, Michel Piccoli, Hollis McLaren, Robert Joy, Al Waxman, Robert Goulet, Moses Znaimer, Angus MacInnes, Sean Sullivan, Wallace Shawn. Screenplay: John Guare. Cinematography: Richard Ciupka. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Suzanne Baron. Music: Michel Legrand*.

Old gangsters, like old gunfighters, make good movie protagonists, witness the success of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (2019). There's something about a survivor's story that draws us in, giving veteran actors good roles to play at the waning of their careers. But director Louis Malle and screenwriter John Guare give us a special twist on the survivor's story, eventually revealing their old gangster to be a bit of a fraud, a hanger-on after all the big guns have been killed off, a has-been who is really a never-was. Hence the glee of the elderly Lou Pascal when he actually guns down two thugs -- something he never had the nerve to do when he was a bit player in the mob. Atlantic City works neatly with two kind of dreamers, both with impossible dreams. Lou's dreams are impossible because they're about an illusory past in which he was a big shot, whereas the dreams of the young, like Sally Matthews's, are impossible because they don't have what it takes to fulfill them. Burt Lancaster and Susan Sarandon got Oscar nominations for playing Lou and Sally, and the film itself racked up nominations in the three other categories in the "top five": picture, director, and screenplay. It won none of them, but like so many Oscar also-rans it has become more valued over the years than most of the winners: Who today remembers Chariots of Fire, which won for best picture and for Colin Welland's screenplay, or has the endurance to sit through Reds, for which Warren Beatty won best director? I cherish Atlantic City for the many unexpected angles through which it views its sort-of-lovable losers, for its use of the crumbling old Atlantic City as a metaphor for the ravages of time, and for lines like Lou's "You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days."

*A courtesy credit: Although Malle commissioned a score from Legrand, he decided not to use it. The only music in the film is diegetic, like Sally's tape recording of Bellini's "Casta Diva" and Robert Goulet' s rendition of Paul Anka's "Atlantic City, My Old Friend."

Separate Tables (Delbert Mann, 1958)

Cast: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, Wendy Hiller, Burt Lancaster, Gladys Cooper, Cathleen Nesbitt, Felix Aylmer, Rod Taylor, Audrey Dalton, May Hallatt, Priscilla Morgan. Screenplay: Terence Rattigan, John Gay, based on plays by Terence Rattigan. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Harry Horner. Film editing: Charles Ennis, Marjorie Fowler. Music: David Raksin.

This somewhat stodgy drama set in a residential hotel in England received seven Academy Award nominations, including best picture, and David Niven and Wendy Hiller actually won for best actor and supporting actress. Unfortunately, today it seems tired and rather clichéd, with Gladys Cooper reprising her smothering mother role from Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), this time keeping her thumb on Deborah Kerr (who racked up the fifth of her six unsuccessful Oscar nominations for the film). Burt Lancaster and Rita Hayworth were called in for star power, but only seem miscast as the squabbling divorced couple. Niven's performance as the faux major whose imposture is exposed when he's arrested for sexual harassment in a theater is indeed the standout in the film, but the Oscar is also a reward for a quarter-century of playing second leads and sidekicks.

Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Peter Riegert in Local Hero

Cast: Peter Riegert, Peter Capaldi, Denis Lawson, Burt Lancaster, Fulton Mackay, Norman Chancer, Rikki Fulton, Alex Norton, Jenny Seagrove, Jennifer Black, Christopher Rozycki, Gyearbuor Asante. Screenplay: Bill Forsyth. Cinematography: Chris Menges. Production design: Roger Murray-Leach. Film editing: Michael Bradsell. Music: Mark Knopfler.

Local Hero is one of those small charmers that pop up occasionally, get rave reviews, and then sort of fade into the background. It's worth rediscovering, principally for Bill Forsyth's affectionately whimsical take on human beings. Another writer-director would have played the subject -- an American oil company's plans to exploit a small Scottish fishing village -- for more blatant satire and social commentary. But Forsyth is more interested in the people than the issues, so he keeps sending the film off into little eddies of contingency and irrelevance. On the way to the village, for example, the representatives of the oil company, Mac (Peter Riegert) and Oldsen (a startlingly young Peter Capaldi, years away from Doctor Who), accidentally hit a rabbit with their car and decide to bring it with them and nurse it back to health. The rabbit is doomed for the dinner table, but its presence in the story speaks more about the characters than it does to any larger theme the film might be concerned with. Forsyth keeps us cheerfully off guard throughout the film, with features the larger-than-life Burt Lancaster in one of his most humanizing roles.

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, at the start of their Hollywood careers, shine out against the noir background of The Killers like the stars they became. Which is perhaps the only major flaw in Robert Siodmak's version of -- or rather extrapolation from -- Ernest Hemingway's classic short story. They're both terrific: Lancaster underplays for once in his film career, which began with this movie, and no one was ever so beautiful or gave off such strong "bad girl" vibes as Gardner. But their presence tends to upend the film, which really stars Edmond O'Brien and a fine cast of character actors. Hemingway's story accounts for only the first 20 minutes or so of the film, the remaining hour of which was concocted by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Richard Brooks. In the Hemingway part of the movie, two hitmen (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) enter a small-town diner looking for their target, a washed-up boxer they call "the Swede." They bully the diner owner and tie up the cook and Nick Adams (Phil Brown), but when they decide that the Swede isn't going to show up for his usual evening meal, they leave. Nick runs to warn the Swede, Ole Anderson (Lancaster), in his rooming house, but the man exhibits only a passive acceptance of his fate. The short story ends with the Swede turning his face to the wall and Nick returning to the diner, but in the film we see the hitmen arrive at the rooming house and kill the Swede. What follows is a backstory that Hemingway never bothered with -- although he later told Huston that he liked the movie -- about an insurance investigator's probe into the killing. The Swede had left a small insurance policy, and when the investigator, Reardon (O'Brien), contacts the beneficiary he begins to find threads that lead him back to an earlier payroll heist. With the help of a friend on the police force, Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who knew the Swede from his boxing days, Reardon sorts out the tangled story of what happened to the loot and how the Swede became the target of a hit. Siodmak's steady hand as a director earned him an Oscar nomination, as did Arthur Hilton's editing and Miklós Rózsa's score, which features a four-note motif that was lifted by composer Walter Schumann for the familiar "dum-da-dum-dum" title music of the 1950s TV series Dragnet, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Veiller was also nominated for the screenplay, but the contributions of Huston and Brooks went uncredited, largely because they were under contract to other studios.

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947)

Surprisingly violent for a film made under the Production Code, Brute Force gives us a prison-break story in which we root for the prisoners, but it still comes down heavily on the crime-does-not-pay moral: "Nobody escapes," says one of the movie's few survivors to the camera at the end. "Nobody ever really escapes." Under Jules Dassin's direction, Richard Brooks's screenplay tries to have it both ways: The cons are heroic and the guards are villainous, but law and order must prevail. The easy way out of this is to kill off both the heroes and the villains. The chief hero is Joe Collins, played by Burt Lancaster with his usual handsomely bullish intensity. The chief villain is the head guard, Capt. Munsey, played against type by Hume Cronyn. The imbalance between the two is exhibited early in the film when Munsey tries to dress down Collins but is confronted with a massive Lancastrian cold shoulder. But Munsey has guile on his side, along with ambition to supplant the weakling Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen), who is under political pressure to toughen up enforcement in the prison, from which reports of unrest among the inmates have been emerging. Dassin tells us all we need to know about Munsey when we see him in his office, which has little homoerotic touches in its decor like a picture of a male torso, along with a large Hitlerian photograph of Munsey himself. While beating a prisoner with a rubber hose to elicit information about a planned prison break, Munsey turns up the volume on the Wagner he is playing on the phonograph. Not that the cons are any less gentle: To punish a prisoner who collaborated with the guards, they force him into the machine that stamps out license plates, and during the climactic prison break, a stoolie is strapped to the front of a mine car and shoved out into the gunfire from the guards. The film never really lightens things up, though there are some flashback scenes involving tender moments between some of the prisoners and what the credits bill as "the women on the 'outside,'" including Ann Blyth as Collins's cancer-stricken wife. There are some good performances from Charles Bickford as the con who edits the prison newspaper and joins the escape plan after he learns that his expected parole has been put on indefinite hold, and Art Smith as the prison's cynical, alcoholic doctor, along with solid support from Sam Levene, Jeff Corey, Howard Duff, and a horde of well-chosen ugly-mug extras.

Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

What do Sweet Smell of Success, His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941), and The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) have in common? They are all among the critically acclaimed films that, among other honors, have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. And none of them received a single nomination in any category for the Academy Awards. Sweet Smell is, of course, a wickedly cynical film about two of the most egregious anti-heroes, New York newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis), ever to appear in a film. They make the gangsters of Francis Ford Coppola's and Martin Scorsese's films look like Boy Scouts. So given the inclination of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stay on the good side of columnists and publicists, we might expect it to shy away from honoring the film with Oscars. But consider the categories in which it might have been nominated. The best picture Oscar for 1957 went to The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean), a respectable choice, and Sidney Lumet's tensely entertaining 12 Angry Men certainly deserved the nomination it received. But in what ways are the other nominees -- Peyton Place (Mark Robson), Sayonara (Joshua Logan), and Witness for the Prosecution (Billy Wilder) -- superior to Sweet Smell?  The best actor Oscar winner was Alec Guinness for The Bridge on the River Kwai, another plausible choice. But Tony Curtis gave the performance of his career as Sidney Falco, overcoming his "pretty boy" image -- in fact, the film makes fun of it: One character refers to him as "Eyelashes" -- by digging deep into his roots growing up in The Bronx. Burt Lancaster would win an Oscar three years later for Elmer Gantry (Richard Brooks), a more showy but less controlled performance than the one he gives here. Either or both of them would have been better nominees than Marlon Brando was for his lazy turn in Sayonara, Anthony Franciosa in A Hatful of Rain (Fred Zinnemann), Charles Laughton in Witness for the Prosecution, and Anthony Quinn in Wild Is the Wind (George Cukor). The dialogue provided by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman for the film crackles and stings -- there is probably no more quotable, or stolen from, screenplay, yet it went unnominated. So did James Wong Howe's eloquent black-and-white cinematography, showing off the neon-lighted Broadway in a sinister fashion, and Elmer Bernstein's atmospheric score mixed well with the jazz sequences featuring the Chico Hamilton Quintet. Even the performers in the film who probably didn't merit nominations make solid contributions: Martin Milner is miscast as the jazz musician who falls for Hunsecker's sister (Susan Harrison), but he hasn't yet fallen into the blandness of his famous TV roles on Route 66 and Adam-12, and Barbara Nichols, who had a long career playing floozies in movies and on TV, is surprisingly touching as Rita, one of the pawns Sidney uses to get ahead. As a director, Alexander Mackendrick is best known for the comedies he did at Britain's Ealing Studios with Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955). His work on Sweet Smell was complicated by clashes with Lancaster, who was one of the film's executive producers, and after making a few more films he accepted a position as dean of the film school at the California Institute of the Arts in 1967, where he spent the rest of his career as an instructor after resigning his administrative position. Sweet Smell currently has a 98% favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes's Tomatometer and an 8.2 rating on the IMDb.