Saturday, June 3 | 2 Movies
“All my life I had one dream, and that was to be in the movies.”
So begins Tony Curtis’ 2008 memoir, American Prince. By any measure, he succeeded well beyond the fantasies of the Bronx-born son of Hungarian immigrants named Bernard Schwartz. He appeared in over 120 films. He shared the screen with such childhood celluloid heroes as James Stewart and Cary Grant. He was directed by some of the finest, among them Blake Edwards, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kubrick, Vincente Minnelli and Billy Wilder.
And yet, despite indelible performances in such films as The Boston Strangler (1968), Spartacus (1960), Sweet Smell of Success (1957) and his Oscar-nominated turn in The Defiant Ones (1958), Curtis was not fully appreciated as an actor.
In the 1952 costume drama, Son of Ali Baba, Curtis delivered a line that would become the bane of his existence, “Yonder in the valley of the sun lies the castle of my father.” Like “Play it again, Sam,” never spoken by Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca (1942), that line lives on in pop culture misquoted—and delivered in a stereotypical Bronx accent—as “Yonder lies the castle of my Fadda.” Impressionists and comedians dined out on that one for decades as the ultimate dunk on Curtis as a screen lightweight.
Debbie Reynolds was first, Curtis claimed in American Prince. During a television appearance, she said, “Did you see the new guy in the movies? They call him Tony Curtis. In his new movie, he’s got a hilarious line where he says, ‘Yonder lies the castle of my Fadda.’”
Years later, Curtis wrote, Hugh Hefner approached him at a party and repeated the line to him. “Hef, I never said it,” Curtis coolly told him. “Then don’t tell anybody,” Hefner replied. “It makes a great movie story.”
Curtis had a million great movie stories, many about his prodigious sexual conquests. “One of those few leading ladies I didn't have an affair with was [Some Like It Hot, 1959, costar] Jack Lemmon," he wrote in his first memoir published in 1993. But his absolute best story afforded Curtis the last laugh, and vindication against those who condescended to him. We’ll get to it shortly.
TCM invites you to a Tony Curtis birthday bash featuring two lesser-known vehicles from his six-decades career that are testament to his tremendous appeal, Rudolph Mate’s The Black Shield of Falworth (1954) and Robert Mulligan’s The Great Imposter (1960).
The first is a rousing costume drama that finds Curtis in peak matinee idol form as Myles Falworth, a peasant whose father, an Earl, was unjustly banished years before. After running afoul of the plotting royal usurper Earl of Alban, he and his sister (Barbara Rush) are secreted to the castle (no, not that one) of family friend Earl of Mackworth (Herbert Marshall), where he is to be trained in the ways of a knight.
Curtis’ athleticism is excitingly on display here in the kind of heroic role he would self-deprecatingly parody in Edwards’ The Great Race (1965). But what’s really outstanding is Curtis’ hair. That’s not a dig. Curtis himself called his wavy locks “the weapon in my arsenal” that none of his fellow Universal contract players could claim. “My hair took on a life of its own,” he wrote in American Prince. “For a while, my haircut was more famous than I was.” He claimed Elvis Presley, whom he would later befriend, copied his look.
Curtis yearned to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor and The Great Imposter gave Curtis a more substantial role as Ferdinand W. Demara Jr., a real-life charlatan who fooled a lot of people a lot of the time by passing himself off as a teacher, a Trappist monk and a surgeon in the Canadian Navy, to name only a few of his cons. Curtis’ considerable charm offensive serves him well in this role. President John F. Kennedy was a fan of the film, telling Curtis, “My dad ran an advance screening…and the scene of you pulling Edmond O’Brien’s tooth was the funniest thing we ever saw.”
Curtis may have identified with Demara, a man of talent and brains who refused to settle for less. Curtis, too, was single-minded in his pursuit of an acting career, an ambition born out of a hellish Depression-era childhood. Following a stint in the Navy during World War II, he took acting classes on the GI bill at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.
Marlon Brando, Bea Arthur, Rod Steiger and Harry Belafonte got their starts there. Walter Matthau was a classmate. Curtis would say that he was considered the least likely to make it, but he was discovered and signed by Universal. He left New York for Hollywood on his 22nd birthday.
Which brings us to the Yvonne De Carlo story. Curtis costarred with her in his first film, Criss Cross (1949). He was uncredited, but not only did he make an impression on her, he impressed the studio, which was flooded with fan mail asking who the guy was who danced with Yvonne De Carlo. Four months later, Curtis returned to New York to promote his next film, City Across the River (1949). He was given a suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and a large black limousine. He went for a drive in the limo and found himself by his former acting school. As he told Esquire magazine:
“It was a terrible, rainy afternoon, and who do I see out in front? Walter Matthau. He's got a long, heavy coat on with a Racing Form sticking out of the pocket, and he's looking down at the gutter. Here I am in this nice, warm limo. And there he is, this grumpy guy surrounded by a cold, miserable world. The look on his face says, ‘What's ever going to happen for me?’ So, I tell the driver to pull alongside him and stop. Now Walter's watching the limo. I roll the window down, look at him, and say, ‘I fucked Yvonne De Carlo!’ Then I roll the window back up in a hurry and tell the driver to get the hell out of there.”
When asked if Matthau was upset, Curtis insisted, “No, no no. For years, Walter loved to tell that story at parties. He’d make it last 20 minutes.”
Happy birthday, Tony. You had a style all your own. One might be hard-pressed to find an actor who so enjoyed being a movie star as much as you.
