Burt So Good

An erstwhile acrobatic circus performer and Broadway actor, Burt Lancaster's payoff would come with his very first film, The Killers (1946) a Robert Siodmak directed noir that would communicate Lancaster's flawed and tragic masculine beauty as the doomed somnambulist Swede who sleepwalks to his death after a chance encounter with a femme fatale (Ava Gardner). The actor could not be more prescient, to know that straight-shooting one-dimensional heroic figures were simply not his forte. The prison melodrama Brute Force (1947) illustrated Lancaster's sweaty power, in marked contrast to his more meticulously groomed peers. The following year would find Lancaster in a triplet of noirs, the finest hour being Siodmak's Criss Cross (1948), filmed on location in downtown Los Angeles' now defunct Bunker Hill district, he would portray yet another incarnation of a doomed soul, this time in the shape of a reluctant crook, who finds himself absolutely bewildered, bothered and bewitched by the pulchritude of one Yvonne De Carlo.

The actor's first attempt at more overt menace is seen in Sorry Wrong Number, in the same year for Anatole Litvak seemed a mite strained as did his more 'actor-driven' performances in films such as Daniel Mann's mesmerizer Come Back Little Sheba (1953) where Lancaster plays a disillusioned drinker stuck in a passionless marriage. But his performance as the omnipotent Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker,  in Alexander Mackendrick's  1957 Sweet Smell of Success was his most noteworthy to date. Coolly disrupting the lives of all those around him while suggesting an incestuous desire for his younger sister, Lancaster definitively demonstrates that there is much more to him than the acrobatic athleticism of such entries as Trapeze or the earlier Crimson Pirate (1952) a film which Lancaster himself co-produced.

Star-Crossed-Criss-Crossed Lovers, Decarlo & Lancaster

By any such accounts, Lancaster had a prickly disposition and was exceptionally difficult to work with , but with that, he also had the uncanny knack for fusing this aspect of his personality with the charismatic good looks and muscular physique that had been his calling cards. An encounter with the iconoclastic Robert Aldrich engendered some of his most inspired work as the rebel Indian and last Apache warrior , Massai in Apache (1954) and in several releases to follow for director Aldrich. As his looks diminished with the ravages of time, he appeared even more considerable an actor, wreaking of gravitas and utmost authority, unforgettably as the Sicilian aristocrat in Visconti's The Leopard (1963). There were a fair share of misses in his latter years but redemption ensued with his exquisitely observed performance in Louis Malle's Atlantic City, which was one of several distinguished codas to a phenomenal career.

All bets are on - a seasoned Lancaster and a September Sarandon Atlantic City (1980)

Lancaster passed away in 1994, just two week's shy of his eighty-first birthday.