Tony and Janet

The Grim Reaper was unusually busy in the entertainment world this past week, claiming Arthur Penn, director of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Little Big Man (1970), on Tuesday and Stephen J. Cannell, creator of The Rockford Files and The A-Team, on Thursday.  But Tony Curtis’s passing in between was a little unnerving, because he had already been much in my mind as I planned to mark today’s sixth anniversary of Janet Leigh’s death.  During their marriage from 1951 to 1962, Tony and Janet co-starred in several films, including George Pal’s Houdini (1953) and Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958), as well as producing the genetic miracle that is Jamie Lee Curtis.

It would be polite but disingenuous of me to call Curtis one of my favorite actors, yet this has a lot to do with the fact that many of his films were comedies, a genre on which I am very tough, although as always, I’ll gladly make an exception for Billy Wilder.  Seeing Tony woo the plotz-inducing Marilyn Monroe with a Cary Grant accent in Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), joining Jack Lemmon as fugitive jazz musicians in drag, is a rare treat.  For trivia fans, its setting of the Hotel del Coronado figured prominently in Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, but could not be used for the movie, Somewhere in Time (1980), as it looked too modern for the period scenes.

I don’t know if this constitutes a guilty pleasure, or how I’d feel about it if I saw it now, but I did love Curtis’s admittedly silly comedy Those Daring Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies (1969).  At least, that’s the title under which I stumbled across it on the beloved Late Show in my youth, immediately pegging it as the late Ken Annakin’s follow-up to his own Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), but back in Britain it was the more manageable Monte Carlo or Bust!  Interestingly, Blake Edwards’s similar The Great Race (1965) left me cold; Edwards also directed Curtis in Operation Petticoat (1959), teaming him up with none other than Grant.

Those who have checked out my “Bradley’s Hundred” list and/or reviews know that Curtis did appear in one of my all-time favorite dramas, chained to Sidney Poitier as convicts on the run in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958).  There’s not a trace of the grinning pretty-boy here, and Curtis earned a richly deserved Oscar nomination for the role.  Due to less familiarity, I have less distinct memories of his dramatic work opposite BOF fave Burt Lancaster in Carol Reed’s Trapeze (1956) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957); in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960); or as Ira Hayes, the ill-fated Native American WW II flag-raiser of Iwo Jima, in The Outsider (1961).

As for Leigh, I wouldn’t have placed her in the pantheon either until I had one of those forehead-smacking moments when I suddenly say, “My God, So-and-So starred in [fill in number] of my favorite films!”  In her case, the four are Touch of Evil (1958), Psycho (1960), The Manchurian Candidate (1960), and The Fog (1980), all but one of which (Candidate, cancelled out by other John Frankenheimer films) is also in the B100.  And let’s not forget The Naked Spur (1953), one of the Westerns in which Anthony Mann—who was replaced by Kubrick on Spartacus—directed James Stewart, with a terrific supporting cast including Leigh, Robert Ryan, and Ralph Meeker.

In preparation for this post, I finally read Janet’s book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller (written with celebrity biographer Christopher Nickens), which nicely details the making and after-effects of the film, including interviews with Hitchcock’s assistant, Hilton Green, and screenwriter Joseph Stefano.  She offers a unique perspective on how her character of Marion Crane pulls off that Third Man/Exorcist trick of dominating the film despite limited screen time.  We were lucky enough to meet Leigh and have her sign a copy at a convention some years ago, as well as having her autograph a photo for my mother-in-law, whose name is also Marion.

Robert Bloch, whose contribution to the film’s gigantic success as the original author of Psycho sometimes goes underappreciated, paid Leigh perhaps the ultimate compliment when he said, “I wish I had written the character as well as she played her.”  Simply put, she is not only gorgeous (Hitch wasn’t dumb enough not to promote the film with photos of Leigh in her undies), but also immensely appealing; viewers care about her and are devastated by her abrupt death.  Marion is an indelible creation, of the type that any actor would be lucky to create once in a lifetime, so let us hope that Tony and Janet, though long since divorced, are now sharing some happy memories.