A Star is Worn
Boy that’s a big picture, huh? It’s made even bigger by the big star it features sprawled on a Hawaii beach, Burt Lancaster. This still from From Here To Eternity would become the most iconic of Lancaster’s storied career, and the 1953 release would go on to cement his role as a leading man on the silver screen. Burt Lancaster was a New Yorker. An acrobat. A soldier. But this blog isn’t about any of that. This blog is about adaptation, and how films and actors adapt to each other. Today we’ll break down 3 films that say something about Burt Lancaster, movie star.
Burt Lancaster was by all measures one of the most prominent movie stars of the 20th century’s second half. His rise to stardom was atypical, appearing in his first film, The Killers at the age of 33. While it’s common among the little people who watch films to switch careers, the most high-profile actors often start young, many of them born into the business. 33 years old is also far past the prescribed age range for a leading man, described by academic Barry King as “between 19 and 25 years, at least 5 feet 10 inches tall but not over 6 feet 2 inches, well-proportioned physically, [and] handsome”. Now Lancaster absolutely fits most of that, barely scraping by this arbitrary height requirement at exactly 6' 2". But getting into the acting game relatively late in life might have signified something about the rest of his career, Lancaster was not your average leading man.
In some ways, he enjoyed some fortunate early success, though his talent was apparent. Lancaster’s debut in The Killers (1946, Robert Siodmak), an adaption of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, was critically lauded, and the film would, decades later, go on to be preserved in the United States National Film Registry. Hemingway would call it “the only good picture ever made of a story of mine”. In The Killers, Lancaster plays a former boxer forced into retirement due to an injury. The role fit Lancaster perfectly, mirroring his own career as a former acrobat who also had an injury cut his athletic career short. Though surely the casting director played a large part in getting Lancaster the role, this synchronicity between Lancaster’s on screen portrayals and his real life off camera would be a recurring theme in his Hollywood career.
This athleticism would be on full display 5 years later, when Lancaster portrayed titular Native American sports legend in Jim Thorpe: All-American. The film was an early example of the sports biopic, documenting the entirety of Thorpe’s career up to that point, albeit with some Hollywood dramatization worked in, like most biopics. Lancaster, 37 at the time of production, undertook the unenviable task of portraying Thorpe from his freshman year in college to his eventual decline in late middle age. This is done to mixed results, as one can see in the still above, where Lancaster looks as if he’s ran out of his office job and accidentally stumbled into a college track team. This one frame does make Lancaster’s attempt to portray a young Thorpe look rather ridiculous, but in other parts of the film Lancaster manages to display a youthful unease with rather understated grace. Was the older actor making up for lost time here, taking on the roles he could have taken if his career started sooner? One could argue that perspective, but this isn’t just a movie about Thorpe’s college years. All-American covers almost the entirety of Jim Thorpe’s life, as in real life the athlete would pass just two year after the film’s release. And so Lancaster “ages” throughout the film, eventually showing wear and tear beyond the actor’s years.
This frame in particular, wherein Thorpe sits alone in an empty Olympic arena, highlights Lancaster’s range in All-American. No longer the optimistic young prodigy who smiled wide as he learned to love the world of sports; Lancaster, with the help of the makeup department, now shows a world-weariness, his eyes alone telling a forlorn story. The eyes of a man who lost all he had, reflecting on his best years that have long since passed. The contrast between these two frames couldn’t be starker, and the story they tell together is one as old as time. It’s a story Lancaster would tell in later works, of a man whose time has passed, and the difficulty of coming face to face with that reality. Lancaster seemed drawn to these roles from the start of his career, and one can’t help but think his life behind the scenes played a part in this. As a man who had to give up his career as an acrobat, he found a sort of second life in acting, and the performance he gives as Jim Thorpe shows a man who never got that second chance.
The story of Lancaster’s transition to acting is somewhat muddled, with different elements emphasized depending on who’s telling it. A 1994 New York Times obituary claimed “he gave up acrobatics because he felt he was just being ‘a dumb actor’ who never spoke while performing, which left him feeling unfulfilled”. Yet by all biographical accounts, Lancaster was forced out of the circus due to a finger infection that would require amputation if he continued performing. Other stories describe him as unenthusiastic about acting until meeting a producer in an elevator who found Burt perfect for a part in a play. The overall picture painted in these stories is of a man who, much like Jim Thorpe, was unable to further pursue his true passion, but, like Jim Thorpe and his coaching ambitions, found a way to continue that passion in a different way. Burt Lancaster was finding a way to keep performing.
So perform he did, and in some instances his acting performances weren’t too far off from his acrobatics. The most obvious instance of this is in the box office smash Trapeze, released in 1956 and directed by the legendary Carol Reed. Trapeze was the perfect vehicle for Lancaster to relive his past, but as in All-American, Lancaster took on a more nuanced, reflective role. He was 43 at this point, well beyond the point where he could fill the shoes of a young leading man. Yet just three years ago his musclebound physique made waves at the box office in From Here to Eternity. His roles in this period showed a duality in Lancaster, playing the handsome romantic male lead in one film and the older cooler head in the next. None would define this dualism more than Trapeze, where Lancaster took on the role of the jaded older professional dragged back in by his young apprentice, hoping to reach the heights he had always dreamed off.
Lancaster gives a moving performance here, which should come as no surprise, it’s another role that plays perfectly to the actor’s strengths. What’s more impressive is that Lancaster, as in all his movies, performed all of his own stunts in Trapeze. 17 years removed from his acrobatics in the circus, Burt Lancaster steps back into his first role, synthesizing past and present with a knowing sense of irony. It uniquely heightens the role, and the film, in a way that could only be done by casting Lancaster. This is the power of the movie star. Their off-camera stories as real people add layers to the stories they tell on screen. The roles they typically take on inform the viewer’s expectations for every character they portray. Here, Lancaster the movie star could not be closer to his subject: a man past his physical prime performing death defying stunts yearning for his earlier years.
Three years prior, a reviewer for Variety said Lancaster gave “a performance to which he gives depth of character as well as the muscles which had gained marquee importance for his name” in regards to his role in From Here to Eternity. Clearly, some in the industry saw only a sculpted physique when they saw Lancaster on screen, and “depth of character” came as a welcome surprise. In Trapeze, Lancaster again had the opportunity to flex both his muscles and his acting prowess, and though he certainly does the latter, I’d like to examine the former for a moment. Lancaster was year by year running out of time to rely on his famous muscles, and Trapeze was one of the last opportunities he would have to incorporate them in a role. But how do Lancaster’s muscles inform a role, and how does the use of those muscles on screen say something about Lancaster’s body?
In Trapeze, both Lancaster and his co-star Tony Curtis are the objects of most of the movie’s attention. Curtis was more of a prototypical movie star than Lancaster, starting his acting career at the age of 23. Like Lancaster, a handsome face would get him far, but here in Trapeze his physique became an object of gaze more so than his distinctive facial features. He and Lancaster transform from characters to objects, of both attraction and spectacle. This transformation is unique to this kind of movie, and can really only otherwise be seen in a few places; the actual circus, daredevil stunt performances, and perhaps professional wrestling, which we’ll touch on later.
When actors portray characters, they are, in general, attempting to make their characters relatable, to insert a bit of the audience into the fictional people on screen. One of the primary obstacles in doing so can be seen in someone like Lancaster, whose physical presence can immediately disqualify many audience members from identifying with his characters. In a movie like Trapeze, our identification with the actors changes depending on the scene. When Tony Curtis is getting his heart broken, any audience member can empathize with the emotions being conveyed. But when he and Lancaster are performing death-defying stunts, they become not points of identification, but objects of spectacle. Take the screenshot above, where Lancaster swings through the air, camera aimed at the apex of the big top. The audience can not be asked to identify with this, they can’t know how this feels. Here, Lancaster and Curtis here are detached, they’ve reached the point of stardom where the audience is entirely unable to relate to them. The thrill of these scenes is distinctly impersonal, yet distinctly human — the thrill comes from the threat of human life ending, the fear of plummeting. When we see Curtis or Lancaster flying through the sky we are forced to consider the possibility that their character’s time could be up any second.
Which brings us to The Swimmer, a film that deals with this concept of limited time in a direct way, and has much to say about not only Lancaster’s body, but the ramifications of it’s degradation over time. If Trapeze asked the audience to separate their body from Lancaster’s and view it purely as spectacle, The Swimmer asks us to wear Lancaster’s body like our own. 24 years after Lancaster’s film debut, the audience is forced to contemplate what those iconic muscles mean for Burt’s career as it approaches it’s twilight years.
In fact, The Swimmer is in many ways inseparable from the career of it’s lead actor. It is informed by the roles Lancaster has taken on before, and the types of roles that had defined his career. It’s a film that relies on the interplay between the history of the screen and the life of the actor, an exercise in star power that rarely gets explored in such a cerebral way. So before we dive into The Swimmer, (you’ll take the pun and you’ll like it) I’d like to talk about another rare example of this kind of exploration into a star’s career on film. So let’s talk about The Wrestler.
The Wrestler follows another star who got famous off of his handsome face and imposing physique, Mickey Rourke. Like Lancaster, he was an athlete before he became an actor, though Rourke was a boxer instead of an acrobat. Like Lancaster, his looks elevated him in his early career, with comparisons coming in spades to the great classic Hollywood actors. It all went wrong for Rourke though after a return to boxing left the face that built his career mangled, and plastic surgery resulted in something unrecognizable compared to his younger years. This history culminated in the 2009 release The Wrestler, directed by Darren Aronofsky.
The Wrestler casts Rourke in a tailor-made role, playing a washed up former professional wrestler whose face and body have been worn and torn by the forces of time. The parallels to Rourke’s life behind the screen are apparent, and his character’s return to the ring mirrors the actor’s return to film, heightening the movie’s meaning in a way that wouldn’t be possible with another actor in the role. The degradation of Rourke’s appearance is also crucial here, the actor’s face has transformed, it’s not the mug that used to put butts in theater seats. It mirrors the body of his character, which Rourke has to get in shape throughout the film for his final showing in the ring. As much as the movie is fiction, it’s also very real commentary on Rourke’s career, and the fall from grace that time imposes on a handsome star.
So The Wrestler is a perfect example of a movie that looks to incorporate the actor within it’s narrative and it’s themes. Another perfect example of this, The Swimmer debuted in 1968, directed by Frank Perry. The film comes at about the halfway point of Burt Lancaster’s storied career, a time where he’s too young to quit, but too old to take on the kinds of roles he used to. The actor is in a period of transition, clinging to the assets that defined his earlier years, forced to come face to face with the inevitable end of that period of his career. His character Ned is in a period of transition as well, though it’s full nature isn’t revealed to the end of the film. Ned is a middle-aged man, with a muscular physique that he loves to show off, reveling in the physicality of swimming and running. He’s decided to “swim home” by traversing through his neighbors’ pools, each stop revealing more of the truth to the audience and Ned alike.
Writer Carlos Valladeres wrote beautifully on Lancaster’s performance in The Swimmer: “Lancaster is shockingly hip to playing a slimy, creepy shell of a man, an odious martini-sipping hotshot who jumps into old flames’ pools and expects neighbors to shower him with confetti to celebrate the six-pack he’s maintained”. This perfectly summarizes the trek Ned takes to get home, and the attitude he takes as he traverses the decadent homes of luxurious Connecticut suburbia. Ned fancies himself a “suburban stud” as one of his jilted ex-lovers describes him, and he parades around in a musculature that fits the description, but not the man it belongs to. Ned refuses to wear his age, resulting in a discordant sense of self that Ned can’t seem to bring in line with reality.
Not only is Ned in denial of his relentless physical decline, as the movie continues we learn he’s also been refusing to acknowledge his failed marriage, his financial turmoil, and his strained relationship with his children. Throughout the film he offers thousand dollar checks to his acquaintances, and claims his wife and children are happily playing tennis, doing so with a sincerity that, after learning the truth, leads us to wonder if Ned even knows he’s lying. The conviction Ned has as he carries on his facade is almost haunting; Lancaster’s performance sells it perfectly, flashing his toothy smile after a fib like it’s involuntary. His Ned is a man that is unconvincing to everyone but himself, who he’s fooled into a ruinous state.
Much like The Wrestler, our leading man shares much with the character they’re portraying. In 1966, two years before the release of The Swimmer, Lancaster separated from his wife Norma Anderson, they had five children and were officially divorced in 1969. Throughout the film, characters make comments about Ned’s wife, who they frequently reference, somewhat derisively, as being involved with the League of Woman Voters. Not coincidentally, according to a 2008 biography of Lancaster, Norma Lancaster had entire room of the house she and Burt shared “devoted to Norma’s major interest, The League of Woman Voters”. There were also many a Hollywood rumor about Lancaster’s affairs, which may have been tacitly confirmed by Ned’s affairs in The Swimmer. There can only be so many coincidences, and the way Lancaster plays Ned, you get the sense the film is telling us more about his life than he’d make available publicly.
These parallels tell us what the movie itself can not. A viewer who didn’t know the full background information on Lancaster might think the film is simply about a man in denial of the state of his life. But knowing what we do about Lancaster’s life, we understand the movie is about Lancaster’s own denial, which he by necessity must have overcome in order to make The Swimmer. By taking the role, Lancaster was acknowledging certain aspects of himself that he could never come out and say plainly. In Ned’s rejection at the hands of his nubile former babysitter, the actor acknowledges the farcicality of a 55 year old Burt Lancaster trying to play the handsome romantic lead — it’s a way for him to say goodby to the types of roles he used to play. And if we accept that parallel, then we accept that Ned’s anguish at the movie’s conclusion is shared by the actor as well. Burt Lancaster went through the same denial Ned did, and in becoming Ned, he came face to face with the reality of his broken marriage, one pool at a time.
The movie star is a modern concept, an idol in the public’s eye. They aren’t the screenwriters who adapt stories into scripts, and they aren’t the directors that oversee that adaptation. But the lives of actors are stories too, and when they appear in a film, they write another chapter of that story. Sometimes, those films say something about an actor’s life, and in the case of a movie like The Swimmer, a film can be an adaptation of an actor’s life itself. Being a movie star is something you have to carry, a physical burden the actor must bear. Though they still need talent, it’s their face, their body, these are the things that determine their careers. And when the cold hand of Father Time drags those assets away, the star tends to fade away.They can Mickey Rourke it and try to fight the inevitable, or they can learn from Lancaster, and let their roles age with them.
