Tony Curtis is dead and a little bit of me has died too. He was one of the iconic male film stars of the 1950s. I suppose he was not as big as Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, and he was certainly not an actor of the caliber of Henry Fonda or Spencer Tracey. But he had real star appeal and there was something truly endearing about the Bronx accent, especially when he was dressed up as a Roman slave in a short tunic. Above all, he was one of the stars—along with Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe—of the funniest American movie ever. I first saw Some Like it Hot in the summer of 1959, the year it appeared, and I last saw it earlier this year on DVD. I show it regularly in my film course, Philosophy and Film, alternating it with the funniest British movie ever, Kind Hearts and Coronets.
For those of you so culturally deprived as not to know the plot, like the best farce, it is beautifully simple in outline and gorgeously mixed up in detail. A couple of jazz musicians (Curtis and Lemmon), in Chicago in the 1920s, accidentally get to see the St. Valentine’s massacre. Running from the gangsters who know that they were there, they dress up in drag and join an all-girl band, which goes down to Florida. The Curtis figure (Josephine) falls in love with the ditzy singer in the band, Sugar Kane (Monroe), and much of the comedy follows as he then dresses up as a rich playboy, wooing Sugar with a demeanor and accent that parodies Cary Grant. Even funnier is the Lemmon figure (first called Geraldine and then changed to Daphne) who is wooed by a millionaire Osgood Fielding III, who wants to make her his next wife—a proposal accepted by Daphne who hopes thereby to get a good settlement when the marriage proves not to be all that it might. I won’t spoil it by telling you the ending, but it truly has the funniest and best line in the whole of cinema.
Boring individual that I am, with my class I use the movie to raise the question of the nature of humor. Why is it that we find a story about the St. Valentine’s Day massacre side-splittingly funny? Why analogously do we find Kind Hearts and Coronets, about a man who murders eight of his relatives (all played by Alec Guinness) so that he might inherit the family dukedom, really amusing? In both cases it has something to do with the absurd and suspension of belief. In both cases, obviously, although there is violence it is sanitized in a way. The men killed in the massacre were crooks themselves. The relatives of the future duke were the biggest crowd of parasites and boors ever seen on the silver screen. In both cases clearly there is some connection with ourselves being parodied. We too are cowardly and avaricious and obsessed with sex and more.
At this point I am all set to plunge into Aristotle on comedy. Alas, as I have said before, the stern Blogmeisters at the CHE keep me on a short leash. I am told that you readers would not entirely appreciate a pithy four or five thousand word dissertation on what makes us laugh and why it is or is not good for us—followed, of course, by the same on why we love to go to horror movies and be scared out of our skins. So let me simply return to Tony Curtis and say what pleasure he has given me in my life. His then-wife too. Who can forget Janet Leigh in that wonderful bedroom scene at the beginning of Psycho? And let us mention their daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, especially her terrific comedienne role in A Fish Called Wanda. As I said, today a little bit of me died too.
5 Responses to Shedding a Tear for Tony Curtis
mercy_otis_warren - September 30, 2010 at 6:54 pm
While it’s definitely not comedy, my favorite Tony Curtis role is the smarmy tuft-hunter/press agent Sidney Falco in the marvelously dark *Sweet Smell of Success*.
bioemeritus - October 1, 2010 at 9:22 am
Who can forget Tony Curtis’s NY accent in a raft of ’50s epics like Taras Bulba, Spartacus, and the Vikings? And we can’t ignore Jamie Lee’s entrance in Trading Places!
dank48 - October 1, 2010 at 9:30 am
Yesterday my 23-year-old told me Jamie Lee Curtis’s father died. I feel like I’m getting along there myself.I’ll never forget “Yonder lies de castle of my fadder.”
llevitt1 - October 1, 2010 at 11:40 am
The NY Times obit reports that Curtis never said that. But he said lots of other things worth repeating, mostly in his courtship of Marilyn in “Some Like It Hot.” Alas, I can’t quote any.
11182967 - October 1, 2010 at 4:02 pm
I saw “Falworth” when it came out and have been quoting that line for years–so much for the accuracy of chidhood memories!Michael Ruse: I’d certainly like to see your take on “what makes us laugh . . .” I suspect that humor is an aspect of the self-consciousness which permits us to not only go about being ourselves but to observe ourselves being ourselves at the same time–a correlate, probably, of sanity (a concept presupposing self-consciousness, I’d think). Humor could well have evolved out of tension between violence, both done to us and done by us, and our awareness of both the apparent arbitrariness of violence done to us (an alternative to religion?) and the guilt associated with our responsibility for our own violence (humor often being cruel as well). The physiology of laughter, we’re told, is therapeutic, and might also have evolved as an alternative to fight or flight when you can’t do either one. What do you think?It’s also good to know that there are still those of us left who treasure the sort of humor found in the Ealing Studios comedies of the 50s. I found the boxed set of DVDs of the Guiness movies, but too late to share them with my mother, who shared them with me when they first came out. My parents would sneak off to see foreign films at the only Detroit area theater which showed them–and with whose name my minister father did not want to be associated since most days of the week it showed skin flicks. The day after seeing The Lavendar Hill Mob (mom’s favorite) or Captain’s Paradise or The Ladykillers my mother would regale me with a detailed and spirited retelling of the plot. My father couldn’t help passing along to me a couple of generations of Calvinist sense of responsibility and guilt, but fortunately he and my mother also passed along the gift of humor to counter the Calvinism. Surely there are seed of a theory in there somewhere.