Burt Lancaster: Body and Soul

He set up a company to produce films with Harold Hecht, both for himself and for others, in 1955, a partnership that flourished from the start, and it was notable just how varied the roles were that Lancaster chose. Among his great projects was the acidic Sweet Smell of Success (1957), where he played the all-powerful and megalomaniacal columnist J. J. Hunsecker, who prides himself on being “hep” and knowing all the scores. Lancaster sadistically savors lines like, “You’re dead, son, get yourself buried” and “My big toe would make a better president,” but Hunsecker has an Achilles’ heel: his overpowering love for his sister Susan (Susan Harrison). And so Lancaster is able to reveal the wormlike softness under this man’s hard outer shell.

It was in the 1960s that Lancaster did his very best work on-screen, starting with the satyr-like con man Elmer Gantry (1960). Lancaster seems to be electrified with some kind of elemental power here; his hair is at its wildest, combed forward and sticking up and all over the place like antennae because Gantry is the lustiest man on earth and wants to be super-alert and get a rise out of everyone around him. He got an Oscar for this movie, but he was even more impressive in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) as a hardened prisoner and obsessive so willful and stubborn that he intimidates his jailers. This is an ideal role for Lancaster because it relies on a combination of outward brute strength and private, resentful gentleness.

He did what he himself thought of as his best work in Luchino Visconti’s novelistic and painterly The Leopard (1963) as a Prince who knows that his way of life is on the way out. In the climactic ball sequence, Lancaster fleshes out the Prince’s tiredness, his “ah well” awareness that he might have wasted his life, and finally his open grief, which is revealed when a diamond-like tear slides down his face and he closes his eyes as if lowering a curtain. He worked a second time for Visconti in Conversation Piece (1974), another requiem on a much smaller scale, where Lancaster transitions seamlessly and touchingly from attempts at intimidation to outright elderly helplessness. This is a difficult role, and Lancaster plays it with insight and control. Few male stars of his era pushed themselves further than Lancaster into areas of weariness and vulnerability.

In The Swimmer (1968), an adaptation of a John Cheever story, a fifty-five-year-old Lancaster plays the entire film wearing nothing but a tight blue swimsuit. His body is still impressive enough to flaunt, but this is a movie where Lancaster lets his smiling flim-flam get exposed and his rather hollow bluster get ridiculed. In the 1970s, Lancaster started to play more character parts, but he took one more memorable lead role in Atlantic City (1980) as Lou Pascal, an old underworld hanger-on and “those were the days” type who knows a big chance when he sees it. This is a movie where Lancaster’s smiling self-satisfaction is used for comic purposes.