126 thoughts on “Burt Lancaster Movies”

1. Yes have a reply Mr Lancaster was in my opinion one of the best screen actors of our times. How many actors can command a screen presence. most or his movies are so believable you actually feel like you are the character.and or feel what the character feels. And that my fine feathered friend is acting.!

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   1. Hey Alfonzo….I agree Burt was a acting legend for sure. Great comment….glad a Lancaster fan found this page.

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2. 1 I’ve been looking our for this update for some time now and the wait has been worthwhile. Bruce’s tabulation of Burt’s hit after hit after hit from 1946-1970 illustrates once again that one is right to question the objectivity of the Quigley Top 10 which virtually excluded Burt throughout his exceptional long career.

   2 Separate Tables was produced by Burt’s own company and a big talking-point at the time was that Rita Hayworth and Deb Kerr got into a billing dispute so that two posters and two different cast lists had to be issued which alternated top billing between the two women. Even today the alternative cast lists are available for inspection one in IMDB and the other in Wikipedia.

   3 To avoid complicating matters further Burt billed himself last among the 5 stars of the film and he argued in an interview that in an ensemble picture special last billing was just as prestigious as first billing. It might have been difficult to convince Spencer Tracy of that. Burt did though make changes to the script to ensure greater on-screen prominence for his own character. Anyway the poster showing Burt’s special last billing has been reproduced on Wikipedia.

   4 David Niven won the Oscar for the movie but Burt originally sought Larry Olivier for the Niven part and Vivien Leigh for the Hayworth role. Burt did though secure Larry’s services the following year for The Devil’s Disciple alongside Burt and Kirk.

   5 Burt seems to have been one of the drove of stars who sought a part in Godpop (as Variety nicknamed it at the time) and it would appear that he was after the title role. “I would have been subtler as Don Coerlone.” he said in a later interview.

   6 Apparently acting was not the only field in which Burt sought to better Marlon. In her autobiography Shelley Winters confesses to having had a “long love affair” with Burt in the early days; and one of Burt’s own biographers tells of how Burt called at Shelley’s apartment with flowers one evening bur was not admitted because Bud was already in the apartment !”. Wikipedia suggests that the Winters affair happened at a time when Burt was married so he must have been quite the ladies man in his day !

   7 In his autobiography Burt humbly confessed that the only star by whom he ever felt “frightened” of being out-acted was Monty Clift in From Here to Eternity and separate reports on the making of that film suggest that associates had to calm down Burt at times if he thought that Clift’s acting risked dominating the film.

   8 I loved the taglines on the posters for the 1958 submarine film Run Silent Run Deep starring King Gable and Burt. TOGETHER! TERRIFIC! IN ALL THE SEVEN SEAS NEVER TWO LIKE THESE! Clark was officially the first billed star but so popular was Burt in my Belfast in 1958 that I clearly recall that the cinema owners placed Burt’s name first on their marquees.

   9 I have said before that I find Bruce’s Possibly Interesting Facts very useful and informative; and for me an additional benefit of that section of the page is that it has the knock-on effect of stirring in my memory long-forgotten nostalgic talking points such as those now mentioned above. So I hope that other readers don’t mind me indulging myself ! !

   BOB

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3. Again, since I have already written on this page, I will wait for long comment making when Bruce is home.

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4. 1 I too have always been a great Burt fan. Indeed AFI’s screen legends list once again mystifies me in that I think it places Kirk Douglas a couple of places above Burt. I agree that both deserve to be on it; but when it comes to the fine tuning Burt should in my opinion have been accorded any ranking edge in that by any familiar measure of stardom he always bested Kirk:

   (1) His films out-grossed Kirk’s and his box office average was better. 67.4/100.6 for Burt & 5.19/69.9 for Kirk according to Bruce’s updated 100 greatest stars list.

   (2) Burt was top-billed in all of the films that he and Kirk made together.

   (3) Whilst the (in my view) highly over-rated and at times inaccurate Quigley polls of Top 10 movie stars accorded Burt an unrealistic two entries only in his entire career, Quigley NEVER had Kirk as a top-tenner.

   2 Indeed one of Kirk’s biographers opined that a big hangup of Kirk’s was that all his life he was not content with being Kirk Douglas but wanted to be Burt Lancaster !

   3. A great apparent quality of Burt’s was that he was a good friend. For example it will be noticed that he found in several of his films parts for his old circus chum Nick Cravat.

   4 However according to a Lancaster chronicler whilst Burt and Kirk had a great and mutually-respectful professional relationship they did not have the close friendship always mooted in the media. The biographer concerned claimed that Burt told him that the friendship was a myth generated by Kirk to give them both publicity. Indeed Burt apparently used to publicly poke fun at Kirk’s alleged thirst for publicity.

   5 Burt’s final years were sad ones, housebound in a wheelchair because of a series of strokes. Ironically he is said to (with the first of those) have collapsed in front of his friend Dana Andrews while visiting Dana in hospital. I personally heard Kirk complain in a television interview some years ago that he had repeatedly tried to see Burt after the latter was housebound, but had been able to gain access. Kirk seemed to blame Burt’s wife; but in the light of what I have said in 4 above I have often wondered whether the blame did lie with THE WIFE.

   6 I am not too much into modern stars (Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and MICHAEL Douglas being exceptions). and my hangup is with the Old Guys such as Bogie, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Taylor, Brando and Burt. I am also a great Kirk fan and I admire his constitutional strength as he is almost 100.. He has done well in that respect and has bodily outlived his old co-star by about a quarter of a century. Thankfully though DVDs and our TV sets the other giant also still lives on.

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   1. Robert:

      Since Burt was a producer, he wore several hats.

      I will say this.

      Of the films the two did together, my favorurite is Gunfight at the OK Corral and that is my favourite version of that classic battle.

      Have you checked out the Henry Fonda page yet?

      It is also over 5 years old, but Bruce lost the comments in cyberspace.

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      1. FLORA
         I don’t think that i realised that Bruce had updated this page but anyhow the updates are not in my database so when I’ve considered them I’ll probably have a comment. Thanks for drawing the page to my attention

         BOBBY

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5. I remember seeing some of Lancaster’s movies when I was a kid on TV, like The Crimson Pirate and The Rainmaker (he gives his best performance in this movie, I think) and was fortunate enough to have seen Atlantic City when it came out. He was a really cool guy who pushed for interesting movies to be made. Sweet Smell Of Success is certainly a masterpiece which hasn’t aged one bit and some of the other movies he made with his production company were great movies too – Separate Tables, Kiss The Blood Off My Hands, Marty, even with the fun movies like The Crimson Pirate or Trapeze he made sure that great directors and talented DP’s were behind the camera.

   Other not above mentioned movies worth checking out IMHO are All My Sons, The Unforgiven, A Child Is Waiting, Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Ulzana’s Raid, Apache, The Swimmer, The Leopard.

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