In 1946, a 33-year-old trapeze artist tried his hand at the motion pictures. Burton Stephen Lancaster – “Burt Lancaster” to the world – became a star with his first picture, The Killers based on a Hemingway short story. Directed by Robert Siodmak, the film became an instant classic and remains a staple film noir till date.
But it was Lancaster, the circus acrobat and neophyte “actor”, who, exhibiting a dazzling fusion of awe-inspiring physicality and vulnerability laced with undertones of feral menace, was soon to follow an uncharted course in a Hollywood with a penchant for stereotype.
With November 2 marking Lancaster’s birth centenary, critics and film-buffs alike are only now coming to terms with an astonishing legacy of classic films left behind by this legendary actor through the course of a four decade-long career.
The son of Irish immigrants, whose father was a postal worker, Lancaster spent his formative years in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen amid life’s hard knocks. The young Lancaster, with his blue eyes, Adonis-like physique and a hunger for reading, sublimated his energies in the circus and later in vaudeville. Spotted in a Broadway play and offered the part of the doomed ex-boxer “Swede” Andersen in The Killers , the film cemented Lancaster’s reputation as a “tough guy”.
Consequently, his physicality loomed heavy in subsequent noir classics like the gritty prison drama Brute Force (1947) Criss Cross and Sorry , Wrong Number (both 1948).
But the outspoken, brawny intellectual actor was soon to prove the greatest subverter of Hollywood’s star system, resisting typecasting, meddling in scripts and asserting creative control of productions.
In 1947, Lancaster rejected the part of brutish Stanley Kowalski in the stage version of Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire . This incident would directly foster a fierce creative competition over two-and-a-half decades with an erratic, temperamental phenomenon known as Marlon Brando. An eye to commerce, coupled with an unduly wary estimation of his acting abilities, led Lancaster to become one of the earliest actors to venture into production.
Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, formed in 1948, gave 1950s cinema such memorable films as the award-winning Marty (1955) Come Back, Little Sheba (1956) and most notably, the caustic Sweet Smell of Success (1957). 1953 was yet another turning point in Lancaster’s life after he participated in Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity .
As a sergeant embroiled in an illicit romance with his superior’s wife (played against type by Deborah Kerr) on the eve of Pearl Harbour, the film showcased Lancaster’s adroitness in complex roles, earning him his first Oscar nomination. His lovemaking scene with Deborah Kerr with roll-on-the surf has passed into cinema legend.
Lancaster’s famous “grin” was to be put to menacing effect in the chilling Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Directed by Alexander Mackendrick, the film bitingly lays bare the promiscuous relationship between celebrityhood and the tabloid press. In 1958, he faced-off yet another yesteryears legend, Clark Gable, in Run Silent, Run Deep – a World War Two submarine battle-of-wits that has since become a prototype for naval thrillers.
He capped the decade winning a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in 1960’s Elmer Gantry. Based on Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Lancaster’s fiery performance as the corrupt, eponymous evangelist is a testament to his vigour, virility and intellect. The procrustean nature of Hollywood’s studio system, by definition, eschews complexities while appraising its stars and instead narrows the focus down to distinct ‘traits’. Epithets such as “hard-bitten” Kirk Douglas; “cynical” William Holden, “intense” Rod Steiger; “brooding” Marlon Brando; “noble” Gregory Peck; “suave” James Mason are routinely and superficially used to size up actors while reviewing their work.
But Lancaster’s finest performances give one the sense of simultaneously resisting any particular classification, and incorporating all the above mentioned qualifiers at the same time. Following his Oscar-win, he put his clipped manner of speech and impeccable, un-American diction to marvellous effect in Stanley Kramer’s tense, all-star courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).
Lancaster, chosen as a second preference to Laurence Olivier, played Dr. Ernst Janning, a German judge racked by guilt over his complicity in Nazi war crimes. Spencer Tracy, who headed the cast, reportedly found Lancaster “dour”. But Lancaster’s searing eight-minute testimony unravelling the phenomenon of Hitler at a critical point in the film is a masterpiece.
With the gradual withering away of the studio system, the 1960s saw Lancaster’s film choices become increasingly dictated by his liberal politics, with artistic significance taking precedence over the commercial value of projects.
In his first foray into World Cinema, Lancaster’s performance as the aging Don Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina, presiding over the fall of aristocracy with a reptilian majesty, is nothing short of sublime.He rounded off the decade with a stunning, fascinating performance in the then-underrated film adaption of John Cheever’s The Swimmer (1968). With a new creative order fast emerging in American cinema, Lancaster more than held his own in the 1970s beginning with Robert Aldrich’s violent Western, Ulzana’s Raid (1972).
He consoled himself with Conversation Piece (1974) – his second collaboration with Luchino Visconti. Lancaster plays a cultivated Professor living out his twilight years in an elegant Roman palazzo, surrounded by his antique books and paintings, when his life is violently intruded by a noisy noblewoman and her bizarre entourage. The film, Visconti’s last, is a masterful meditation on loneliness, politics, crass popular culture and sexuality and acts as a companion piece to his Death in Venice .
His health, which started declining in the mid-1980s, deteriorated with a stroke in the 1990s. He finally died of a heart attack at age 80 in 1994. Till this day, critics who consider Brando to have been the better actor, find it hard to pin down the self-taught, self-made Lancaster who exploded on the screen without any formal instruction.
