In some ways, life typically does imitate art. For most of the roles outlined in this book, the subjects looked, at least partially, within themselves, their own lives, personalities, and experiences, to become someone new
And sometimes, art does its impression of life. That’s what millions saw from Burt Lancaster in the closing of 1989’s baseball flick Field of Dreams, the story of Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner), who crops his corn to build a baseball field and lures back the ghosts of baseball’s past, led by Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta).
For the entire film, we’ve learned of “Moonlight” Graham, the young man who, as every American boy has, dreamed of stepping onto the baseball field. For a half-inning, he once did, playing outfield in the last game of the season. He never got to bat. He never got to make a play in the field. After the game, he headed back to the minors, and eventually out of baseball.
Kinsella travels across the country to visit Graham’s hometown, and finds himself back in the 1970s, where he meets someone who’s long since passed and gone away. But not much is what it seems or matters in this film, and Graham (That’s now Dr. Graham) eager to tell his tale of decades before.
“I would have liked to have had that chance,” he says. “Just once, to stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases – stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag.”
Still, it’s from too long ago, and death’s a bit too nearby, so Graham decides to leave his dream unrealized. A dejected Kinsella leaves, but on the way home, picks up a hitchhiker who just happens to be named after the Doc. Once home, the youngster finally gets to play with the greatest.
In one of the final scenes, Graham morphs back into his older self to save Kinsella’s daughter. It’s time for him to head back where he came from; the dreams have come true, and the wishes have been granted.
“Hey, rookie,” Jackson shouts. “You were good.”
Graham looks back at Jackson, and it’s that same look that he discussed early on. He knows something Jackson doesn’t, and perhaps that he (Lancaster) was better than just good. Maybe Lancaster knew that these were his final steps on a movie screen, and when he looked back, he saw quite a bit more than an Iowa baseball field. For as Burt Lancaster walked into that corn and disappeared, he was taking a final bow from the film world he’d thrived in for so long.
After making movies for over 40 years, never again would he hit the big screen. Less than six years later, Lancaster took his final leave.
Remember that blurb earlier about the impression contest between art and life? It came in full force in one of the most famous roles in Lancaster’s career, the one that many feel into which he put more effort than any other performance. In acting, as in anything else in life, we put forth our best efforts if we find personal reasons to care about our task; a student shouldn’t just write an essay to get an A, and a doctor shouldn’t just heal for the paycheck. Even if it’s all in the subconscious, we tend to try just a little harder if we put our minds, hearts, and hands together on the same project.
For the role that garnered Lancaster the third of his four Oscar nominations (more on this in a moment), he put a dramatic spin on a real life, pitch-dark story that, in all fairness, portrayed its subject in a far brighter light than he probably deserved.
A pimp from Alaska, Robert Stroud killed a bartender in 1909, saying that one of his “girls” had accused the bartender of, shall we say, welshing. At Leavenworth, one of America’s most well-known prisons, Stroud stabbed to death a guard in front of over a thousand prisoners.
Sentenced to solitary confinement for the rest of his life, Stroud, whose education had stopped before elementary school graduation, developed an interest in birds. He studied them for hours, kept hundreds in his cell with them (Alfred Hitchcock would have probably had quite a penpal relationship with this fellow), and published books on them.
In 1955, Stroud’s biography, Birdman of Alcatraz was published (Stroud’s main work had been at the San Francisco island penitentiary). Over the next few years, film deals were kicked around, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) always refused to get involved, fearing that one of its most notorious and hated (deservedly so) residents would come off a hero.
Still, Lancaster and others kept asking around, and got a film deal in place as the 1960s arrived. Himself harboring a longtime interest in the flying residents, Lancaster claimed that Stroud “took an… unnatural existence and yet made it a meaningful thing.” It was enough to propel him to the forefront of preparation for his career.
Lancaster read everything he could get his hands on about Stroud’s case. He studied the laws, and met with Stroud’s lawyer. He located some letters from Stroud, although the prisoner himself refused to meet with the actor, as did any members of Stroud’s family. Lancaster’s head was half-shaved, with gray and white hair applied every day.
“I felt like I knew him intimately,” Lancaster said, “and I felt I had some idea what it was like to spend forty years in solitary confinement.” Telling the story, he said, was not an attempt to glorify Stroud or any other prisoner, but to bring attention, and hopefully enhancement, to the treatment of the confined.
The FBP refused permission to film in an actual prison, so Leavenworth and Alcatraz were rebuilt, although some exterior shots were done near the boundary of Alcatraz and San Francisco Bay. Roughly 2000 canaries were brought in from Japan, and many sparrows as well (Stroud’s interest in birds had began when nursing an ill sparrow to vigor a few years into his prison life). With birdseed attached to his hands, Lancaster spent weeks working with the animals. The fliers, whose wings had been clipped to keep them from escaping, soon started to jump into his hands. For the scenes where the birds get sick and fall to the ground, they were fed lighter fluid.
But tragedy also struck Lancaster during filming; in January 1961, just a week after President Kennedy took office, the actor’s brother Jim, an assistant director on Birdman, died of a sudden heart attack at the studio as the crew was preparing to film a riot scene at the island prison. Lancaster saved his grieving for private, going right back to work after the body was taken away.
When the film was finished, it was over four hours long. Before much cutting or rewriting could be done (director John Frankenheimer handled much of this), Lancaster had to play a small role as a defendant in Judgment at Nuremberg, the story of the Nazi trials. The film would end up with two Oscars, including a Best Actor for Maximilian Schell, who played a defense attorney.
After Nuremberg, Lancaster got right back into character as Stroud and finished filming Birdman. But his rough luck continued; in November of 1961, his half-million-dollar Bel-Air home was one of over 450 houses destroyed by a brushfire. The next April, Lancaster stormed out of a TV interview – one of few he gave throughout his career — with Mike Wallace when the interviewer kept focusing on Lancaster’s legendary temper and not on Birdman (Lancaster had fired original director Charles Crichton, and he and Frankenhiemer had battled to the point that the director said he’d never work with Lancaster again, which lasted only until 1964’s Seven Days in May).
Though Lancaster had hoped at the time that the film might just move others – like, say, the FBI – enough to have them take another look at the Stroud case, and maybe even reward him for his “work,” things went down the anticlimactic path both during and after the film’s release. Audiences didn’t really care about the subject at hand, as the film didn’t do well at the box office; just after the book on his life was published, Ida Turner, the widow of the guard that Stroud murdered, wrote a newspaper letter claiming that “(Stroud’s) only reason for having birds was (to) destroy them and thereby in a small way satisfy his desire to kill.”
Lancaster was (in hardly a surprise) beaten handily for Best Actor by Gregory Peck for To Kill A Mockingbird. Stroud, who’d end up spending over 50 years in prison, died there a few years later after Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy refused to release him for his final days. Lancaster himself would later label Stroud, “a real evil son of a bitch.”
Like many longtime performers, Lancaster was underwhelmed by the prestige of the Oscars.
“While the nominees are undoubtedly worthy of the award, the voting system is based largely on sentimentalism and politics,” he said. “If you’ve been nominated before and not won, then the second or third time you get nominated is the time you’re likely to win. That doesn’t mean that winning is not rewarding. It is, but you have to recognize that you’re not necessarily being given the award for the right reasons.”
Seven years after picking up his first Oscar nomination after getting busy on the beach with Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, 1953’s Best Picture, Lancaster took on a much watered-down malevolence than he would later for Birdman. Ironically, the role would require much less preparation than many of his career, particularly because he’d been getting ready for his entire life.
The title character in Elmer Gantry was a smooth-chatting, rough-drinking downlow fellow who never ran out of quick lines or blasts of charisma. Sound a bit like a certain someone? Richard Brooks thought so; after working with Lancaster in 1947’s Brute Force, he approached the actor about producing a film based on Sinclair Lewis’ novel about the salesman who somehow allows the double whammy of religion and love to break through his wall of selfishness.
By 1956, Brooks had gotten approval from even Lewis (never a stranger to controversy himself), and he and Lancaster spent seven months working out the screenplay, which actually encompasses a much shorter time period than the novel. Not that they were pressed for time; it would be four more years before the film got anywhere near the light of a camera. But the two kept plugging, and in early 1960, things finally came together.
Lancaster played the role of the fellow who becomes a fixture in the world of evangelism. The traveling salesman meets Sister Sharon Falconer (Brooks’ wife Jean Simmons), who falls in love with him. With the two playing a holy vs. evil routine — Gantry warning of Satan, Falconer promising saviorship — they become a fixture in the local religious group (real local Baptists, not actors, were used in many of the preaching scenes). Controversial public religious screamers Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson had been used as models during the screenplay work, and Billy Graham, who’d bring evangelism to a whole new level in the 1950s, also inadvertently provided some material (Brooks and Lancaster never admitted this).
But Gantry’s past comes roaring back, as many figured it eventually would, in the form of prostitute Lulu Baines (Shirley Jones), an ex-girlfriend who fell into misery after being cursed by her dad for her affair with Gantry. The two eventually straighten out their differences, and Gantry vows to give up his wild ways for Falconer, but it’s too late; she’s killed in a fire at their church.
Not surprisingly, as anything touching religion in film has always been a surefire recipe for an uproar somewhere, protests arose like sunflowers on fast forward. Letters poured in both praising the film for showing the healing power of faith and criticizing its intimidation of Catholicism. Either Brooks, Lancaster, or both (depending on who is telling the story) had to spend a few talking chatting in New York with Jesuits about Gantry’s eventually cut final line to a rival: “See you in hell, brother.” After all, a guy who believes in Christ can’t knowingly send himself to hell, right? Only the Fellow upstairs has that power!
Not that this was really the point of the film (missing the point has always been pretty easy for the religious “right”); Gantry was an imperfect soul who only others saw as elevated, not necessarily someone who saw himself that way. Religion wasn’t his modus operandi, salesmanship was. He could make people believe they wanted someone just a little bit more than most others, and people admired him for that. Not so much because he was leading them to faith, more that he was leading them anywhere. America has always been a land that makes heroes out of those who aren’t – many people can name more actors, musicians, and professional athletes than can rattle off the doctors and nurses that heal, the teachers who instruct, and our other real role models – and Gantry exemplified this, not the Healing Power.
Gantry, remarked Lancaster, was “interested in women. He drank and gambled, and he could holler hell-fire and brimstone. He has weaknesses common within us all, and he had vanities, and he had a great gift of communication. He liked the sound of his own voice, and he liked the effect it had on people when they got all stirred up. He wanted people to like him, and he was searching for something missing in his life; someone to be with him. It was the easiest role I ever played because I was playing myself.” It was also a payoff; he and Jones took home statuettes, while Brooks grabbed one for his screenplay.
Over three decades later, only a few years before Doc strolled off that field, Lancaster admitted that he, again like many of Hollywood’s legends, was far down the list of fans of his work.
“There are not many,” he said, “just a handful (of films) that I liked myself in and would hope to be remembered for. From Here to Eternity, Sweet Smell of Success, Elmer Gantry, The Leopard, and Atlantic City. They are the highlights of my life in movies.”
Norman Writes 