His Own Man: Burt Lancaster (1913-1994)

He is remembered by the laugh. His muscular head would snap back, and out would come three bold, staccato barks: “Ha. Ha. Ha.” That laugh helped define Burt Lancaster’s personality and gave amiable employment to a generation of mimics. But the cool thing about the Lancaster laugh was that it could mean anything; it might express amusement or a jolly contempt. His smile, a CinemaScope revelation of perfect teeth, had the same enigmatic edge to it. Was it benediction or absolution? Was it seductive or — perhaps — a predatory baring of fangs?

This mystique made Lancaster, who died last week of a heart attack at 80, the first modernist movie hunk. He sprang to prominence in the emotional chaos after World War II and was a star in his first role, as the doomed Swede in The Killers (1946). Immediately viewers could spot a gritty urban charm, brooding good looks, a handsome physique. He made the most of this charisma in The Crimson Pirate, an ebullient homage to Douglas Fairbanks that drew on Lancaster’s own acrobatic skills, and later as the consummate con man in both Elmer Gantry (for which he won an Oscar in 1961) and The Rainmaker. Before hitting it big at 33, Lancaster had been a salesman too, and these performances suggested that here was a man who could peddle any dream to anybody.

He was the dishy, tough-talking sergeant in From Here to Eternity, where he took a roll on the beach with Deborah Kerr and made himself a pinup idol. But unlike most earlier male stars, who were straitjacketed in heroic roles, Lancaster could be his own man, choose parts and not worry whether audiences would like him. He always had that measure of confidence in himself: as a young man he left New York University, where he had a basketball scholarship, to join the circus. What showed through was the will not to be somebody, but to do something.

Without making a big deal about it, Lancaster had artistic ambitions. Early on he smartly inhabited characters created by prestige dramatists: the returning soldier in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, the drunken husband in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, the buffoonish Italian suitor (a terrific turn) in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tatoo.

He was also an imposing presence offscreen. One of the first actors to create an independent production company, Lancaster had a rangy entrepreneurial curiosity. In some of the films he produced, such as Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty (an Oscar winner in 1955) and The Catered Affair, the star did not appear. But he got the pictures made, and they set the mood for other sympathetic dramas about little people — Hollywood’s neatly scrubbed version of Italian neorealism.

Quite a different sort of film made by Lancaster’s company was the brilliantly brutal Sweet Smell of Success. Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker, a Walter Winchell-type Broadway columnist with horn-rimmed glasses and an accountant’s haircut, gets relatively little screen time; yet he dominates the cynical scenario as surely as Dracula does any vampire movie. Lancaster knew he needn’t raise his voice to exude pestilence. There is capital punishment in his whisper, “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Lancaster was an ingenious manager of his career. In a group of films made between 1962 and 1964 that included Birdman of Alcatraz, Seven Days in May and The Train, he shepherded young John Frankenheimer toward the top rank of Hollywood directors. Lancaster’s itch for artistic adventure led him to Luchino Visconti, for whom he played the put-upon prince in The Leopard and, later, a haunted professor in Conversation Piece. For Bernardo Bertolucci he played another Italian squire, grandfather to Robert De Niro in 1900. In Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, Lancaster was the Texas oil tycoon — and the Hollywood imprimatur for a small, beguiling film.

Between these jaunts, Lancaster was pleased to prove that the old Hollywood formulas still had vitality. Westerns (The Professionals) and all-star thrillers (Airport) alternated with quirkier projects like Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City. In the latter, for once a Lancaster character seems resigned to not getting the little bit of heaven he so desperately desires: an invitation to rub lemon slices on Susan Sarandon’s chest. But even when playing a failure, he is majestic in his conviction — as he was in one of his last roles, giving heft and poignancy to an elderly ballplayer in Field of Dreams.

In an important way, Lancaster put a brash face on poststudio Hollywood, on the industry-cum-art that wanted to retain its old magic while venturing to faraway places and into man’s dark heart. But he was never a Hollywood tabloid star; he stayed away from scandal. He will be remembered not for his sins but for his achievements. And that’s a grand legacy for a mysterious, hardworking man.