Local Hero finds a Houston oil company yuppie, MacIntyre (Peter Riegert), sent to Scotland by his employer, Knox Oil & Gas, to purchase an entire town and its bay for a new refinery. The research and planning has been done, all that’s left is for the deal to be made with the locals. MacIntyre gets the job due in part to last name. However, he confides to his friend that his parents were Hungarian and they adopted the name MacIntyre because they thought it sounded “American.” That detail gives you some sense of the world view of Forsyth’s film.

This is a true gem of a movie: gentle, but pointed, moody, but hopeful and eccentric and funny without trying too hard. Local Hero gives the viewer the illusion of comfort of familiar terrain while actually being quite unlike any other film.

Forsyth, who had already had one sleeper hit the previous year with Gregory’s Girl, has said that without Lancaster’s star power, the film would likely not have been made. Lancaster plays the CEO of Knox Oil, Felix Happer and though he’s on screen far less than Riegert, he creates a truly memorable character. Lancaster was no longer the acrobat or chiseled tough guy of his youth, but he’d grown into an even better actor.

Happer has some of the qualities we’d expect of the CEO of a massive oil company: he’s a narcissist and a bully. However, he’s got a couple of somewhat endearing quirks, most prominently his fascination with astronomy. When MacIntyre visits Happer for last minute instructions on the deal before flying to Scotland, Happer seems only interested in making sure MacIntyre will call him personally at any time if he witnesses anything unusual in the heavens – especially in Virgo. This sets up the beautiful sequence of a drunken MacIntyre’s rapturous phone call to Happer as he witnesses the aurora borealis for the first time.

Lancaster and Riegert both deliver layered, nuanced performances that keep the delicate balance of whimsy and cold reality in play. (Happer may be a boorish oil billionaire, but you’d like to think that if he ran BP, the current disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would never have played out like this.) Lancaster’s comic touch in his dealings with his quite possibly deranged psychoanalyst is especially deft and charming.

While in Ferness, the sleepy fishing village in Scotland, Knox intends to buy, the formerly cynical MacIntyre and his Scottish Knox liason Oldsen (Peter Capaldi, brilliant in last year’s In the Loop) become completely charmed by the little seaside village and its inhabitants. They almost can’t bear to do what they’ve been sent to do. While the oilmen have an attack of conscience, the locals can’t wait to sell out – as is noted in the film, “You can’t eat scenery.”

What makes Forsyth’s film so endearing is that it’s never cloying. The village locals are colorful, but never in a phony, central-casting sort of way. Denis Lawson, known in the U.S. largely for appearing in the Star Wars movies as Wedge and being Ewan McGregor’s real life uncle, also stands out as lawyer/saloon keeper Gordon Urquart, whose wife Stella bewilders MacIntyre. The inhabitants of Ferness act like real people and so do MacIntyre and Oldsen. Critic Roger Ebert noted in his original review of the film: “…what could have been a standard plot about conglomerates and ecology, etc., turns instead into a wicked study of human nature.”

While Local Hero wasn’t any sort of big box-office hit, over 25 years later, it’s become a beloved classic. As for the film’s enduring charms, Forsyth has claimed he simply didn’t know how to make a more manipulative film. In an interview with the Guardian in 2008, he said:

“I hesitate to use the word ‘innocence’ about it, because the characters have attitude, have stories, have views, I don’t think it was too innocent a film. But if there was a layer of purpose or intent missing, a layer of manipulation – here’s where we want the audience to feel this, or that, I’ve always truly hated that – then, perhaps, that’s been its secret, if you like.”

True to its spirit, Local Hero manages to have a happy ending, although it’s a close call. We’re as sad as MacIntyre is to leave Ferness. When he makes that final call to the public phone box by the beach, he’s doing it for everyone in the audience as well.

In one of Burt Lancaster’s finest roles he had the misfortune, and then the great fortune, to go head-to-head for the audience’s affection with Susan Sarandon’s lemons.

Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (1980) traces the decay and rebirth of a city and a man as Lou (Burt Lancaster), an aged one-bit-hood who’s sniffed but never tasted a life of crime, bumbles his way into his beautiful neighbor’s screwed-up life. That neighbor is Sally (Susan Sarandon), and her daily work in a casino oyster bar leads to the ritual cleansing of her bare breasts and arms with lemon juice each night. Watching the painstakingly thorough application of said juice through Sally’s kitchen window, we share a voyeur’s perch with Lou from his darkened room next door. Thus begins our identification with Lou–through our common depravity.

The first fifteen minutes spread out silently, setting the plot and place like a gentle ocean wave lapping the shoreline. Such sustained quiet in a film is striking in its own right, but all the more unlikely when you realize it was written by a playwright. This is John Guare’s only attempt at conceiving a project explicitly for the silver screen, and you wonder if he just got bored with the medium because it came so naturally to him.

Louis Malle has juxtaposed much of the opening action with scenes of demolished and decayed buildings. Old Atlantic City was razed and rebuilt with the legalization of gambling in 1976, a metamorphosis etched in the lines of Lou’s rumpled suits. Gone is the city’s axis of organized crime, replaced by the glitz of the legal jackpot and the free-for-all drug trade. Lou is just another decrepit structure, waiting for the wrecking ball. Watching Lou running numbers through the poverty stricken parts of town, or trying to hock a shamefully stolen cigarette case, he seems outside of time–like a guy selling Christmas trees in May.

As Lou shuffles around town enduring a series of humiliations, Burt Lancaster is not “mugging” in any scene. There’s no winking to the audience, reminding us not to confuse Lou with Burt. This is an actor finding the most pathetic corners of his soul and exposing them for us to judge.

Because Lancaster gives such an honest performance, he takes the audience to wildly unexpected places. Lou descends into his gangster fantasy, enabled by the accidentally successful execution of a drug deal that lines his pockets for a few days, and he takes us along for the ride. As the character Lou becomes more and more deluded, the actor infuses him with a noticeable heft and vigor. He straightens his back. He moves more gracefully and charm starts to ooze in his every utterance. He’s bluffing everybody, including the audience, and we should know better because we know what he’s holding.

His bluff works best on Sally – who’s been blindsided by the unexpected return and violent death of her estranged husband Dave. Actually, estranged doesn’t cover it – he ran off with her kid sister, knocked her up and returned to peddle some stolen dope from her home. What’s the word for that? When Lou extends a knowing, comforting, wealthy-looking hand to her, she’s in no position to question the help. The irony, of course, is that Lou’s holding Dave’s drugs and money, sucking Sally right back into the drama surrounding her dead husband.

Lou has been watching gansters all his life, and now that the time has come to play the part, he grabs it with both hands. He wraps the mist of illusion around them so tightly, we can almost believe their love scene. Maybe for a minute. Which is all Malle and Guare give to them.

Physical violence ends the charade. When thugs push Lou aside to attack Sally, he crumples in the corner. The curve returns to his spine as if crushed by the weight of reality. And we realize what we’ve endorsed thus far is nothing more than a cheap veil covering a rotten dream.

Lou realizes it too, just in the nick of time to salvage what passes for a happy ending. He’s got to extricate Sally from the mess he’s created. And though he’d rather high-tail it on the first bus out of town than face the actual danger he’s stirred up, she drags him into the fight where he’s got to pull the trigger to save them both. All the typical positive outcomes are flipped on their heads. Success would be murder. Happiness would be an appearance on a wanted poster. That’s how it ends in Atlantic City.

***

It’s hard to believe that the Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” was not conceived for, or at least in reference to, this film. It shows how accessible these themes were at this time around this place. Still, they mingle in my mind as one extended meditation. A terrific companion to the movie, whether or not they have any other than the title in common.

I probably shouldn’t admit this given that I consider myself relatively well versed in classic cinema, but I’ve seen alarmingly few Burt Lancaster films. In fact, out of the 86 titles listed on his IMDb page, I’ve seen exactly two, and one of them is Field of Dreams. Not that Lancaster’s performance in that flick was unworthy, his Moonlight Graham was the most fully realized character in that film, but by that point Lancaster was 76 and in his final theatrical release.

The other Lancaster film I’ve seen came after my wife and I visited a friend in San Francisco and hit the usual tourist traps including the dormant island prison of Alcatraz. When we got back home, we watched Clint Eastwood’s Escape from Alcatraz (which is exactly what it sounds like, was filmed on location, and matched the description of the real-life events we were given while touring the prison) and Lancaster’s Birdman of Alcatraz, which was shot on stage sets and could more accurately be said to have been “inspired by” rather than “based on” the life of the titular character.

The actual Birdman of Alcatraz was Robert Stroud, a teenage runaway who became a pimp in Alaska and, ten days shy of his 18th birthday in 1909, shot another pimp during a scuffle and was convicted of manslaughter. Various incidents during Stroud’s incarceration, including the murder of a guard, increased his sentence, ultimately to death, but in 1920, his mother appealed to President Woodrow Wilson for a stay of execution and was given one. Stroud instead spent the next 23 years in solitary confinement at Leavenworth Federal Penitentary before being moved to Alcatraz. While at Leavenworth, Stroud took an interest in some injured birds in the courtyard and, over the years, turned himself into one of the leading ornithological minds in the world and the author of the classic text, Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds, among other titles.

The film, released in 1962, a year before Stroud’s death, is a fictionalization of Stroud’s story with Lancaster playing a stoic, heroic version of the brilliant psychopath who wasn’t actually allowed to keep birds after being transferred to Alcatraz in 1943. As biography, it’s bunk. As a tale of rehabilitation and self-motivation, it’s inspirational, thanks largely to the quiet dignity of Lancaster’s performance.

In fact, if you can put aside the degree to which it whitewashes the actual Stroud and botches the facts, it’s a wonderful film. Two of my favorite supporting players of the era, Thelma Ritter and Karl Malden, play Stroud’s mother and warden, respectively; Telly Savalas appears in an entertaining character role; and the director, who took over after production began, is a 32-year-old John Frankenheimer, whose next film was The Manchurian Candidate.

It’s worth remembering, however, who the real Stroud was. Rather than a mixed-up kid who failed to find his calling until too late in life and whose brilliance instead boiled over into rebellion and violence until a dedication to his work allowed him to live the life of the mind while his body was imprisoned, Stroud was a diagnosed psychopath whose ornithological genius was yet another product of a violently overactive brain that never found peace. Said one former fellow inmate who described Stroud as “a vicious killer,” “I think Burt Lancaster owes us all an apology.”

It is a sign of the times that our movie heroes no longer go traipsing off to Mexico to scratch their itch for unlikely nobility, filthy lucre, or good old-fashioned trouble. The show-me-your-papers crowd in Arizona would have us believe there are so many illegals heading north that even celluloid mercenaries looking south of the border better stay home lest they be trampled. Myself, I’d suggest that the abundance of lead being slung in Mexico’s drug wars makes telling stories about brave yanquis, especially the contemporary variety, about as plausible as having Madonna sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Once, however, the land of Villa welcomed Humphrey Bogart so he could die a greed head’s death in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and Robert Mitchum, fresh out of a very real jail, as he tracked down a missing Army payroll in “The Big Steal.” You should know about “The Magnificent Seven,” of course, just as you should “The Wild Bunch”: two classic Westerns that sprang from the idea of American bad men finding something good inside them under Mexican skies, the former ending with a triumphant ride out of town, the latter with a fireball of dark glory. And then there is a hugely entertaining Western that is too often forgotten, “The Professionals,” which is about early 20th Century mercenaries who are crazy brave but not stupid. Four of them, to be exact: Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, each possessing more testosterone by himself than there is in all of Hollywood today.

Lancaster was a former circus acrobat who did his own stunts and, legend has it, could handle himself in a street fight. Marvin fought his way through World War II as a marine in the Pacific, and, with a mug like his, he must have put up his dukes a few times as a civilian, too. Ryan boxed in college (and was nothing less than splendid in the fight racket noir “The Set-Up”). Strode played football at UCLA, broke the NFL’s color line (alongside college teammate Kenny Washington), wrestled professionally, died a righteous death in “Spartacus,” and, though he was 52 when “The Professionals” was released in 1966, looked like he was made of steel cable.

You could hunt for a long time and not find a cooler cast, and I say this without having mentioned Jack Palance and Claudia Cardinale, who are in it, too. They were gathered together by Richard Brooks, one of those filmmakers whose biggest movies you may remember – “In Cold Blood,” “Elmer Gantry,” “Blackboard Jungle” -– but whose name has pretty much been washed away by time. Brooks wasn’t a powerhouse like John Huston, for whom he wrote “Key Largo,” nor was he the directing equal of a Huston or a Howard Hawks. He was a former newspaper reporter whose ideas and passions bounced all over the place, the way they must have when he worked general assignment. He found the inspiration for “The Professionals” in a Frank O’Hara novel called “A Mule for the Marquesa,” and it became one of only three Westerns on his resume. Maybe Brooks should have made more; “The Professionals” earned him Oscar nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay. But even so, every time I watch it, I come away thinking it was the cast that had all the fun.

The story they find themselves in is strictly meat and potatoes. With the fires of the Mexican Revolution reduced to dying embers, railroad baron Ralph Bellamy summons Lancaster, Marvin, Ryan and Strode to present them with a problem he expects them to solve: The bandit chieftain Jesus Raza, played by Palance, has kidnapped Bellamy’s wife, the fetching Ms. Cardinale, and he wants our heroes to rescue her. They know Palance from the old days. They’ve fought beside him but they’ll fight against him because that’s what hired guns do. And so, once the money is right — $10,000 a man upon La Cardinale’s return — they set out to do it again.

There’s no great overarching truth here that I can see, no haunting message of the kind that Sam Peckinpah used to send about time passing men by. What Brooks does is simply spin a yarn that gets off the launching pad because the railroad baron is a liar. Everything else about the movie is pure entertainment of the pre-CGI variety, starting with a dandy opening sequence in which Brooks establishes all of his heroes in less that a minute: Marvin is the weapons expert, Ryan the horseman, Strode the tracker, and Lancaster the guy who goes out the window in his long johns when he gets caught loving up another man’s wife. He’s by far the most corruptible of the bunch, but he’s also a damn good explosives man. And then there’s that killer Lancaster smile, as broad as the windshield on a Peterbilt. No way he gets left behind.

Funny thing is, even though Lancaster packs the most charisma in “The Professionals,” the best lines in Brooks’s taut, engaging script come from Marvin’s mouth. Early on, Bellamy points at a photo of him as a young man and says, “Your hair was darker then.” “My heart was lighter,” the silver-thatched Marvin replies. When our heroes realize they’ve been gamed by Bellamy, it’s Marvin who tells Lancaster, “Amigo, we’ve been had.” Later, they’ll realize that Palance and Cardinale have been playing them for suckers, too. But their reward for getting past all the treachery is the moment when Bellamy, beaten and cuckolded -– has any actor ever had more female co-stars stolen from him? -– calls them “bastards.” “Yes, sir,” Marvin says. “In my case an accident of birth. But you, sir, you’re a self-made man.”

The only one of the movie’s stars who gets short-changed is Ryan, who has little to do and hardly anything worthwhile to say. He deserved better, and got it three years later in Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch.” Marvin and Lancaster banter back and forth while hatching clever plans, and there’s a particularly evocative moment when, as they’re about to square off with a gang bandits, Marvin tells his old running mate, “Same set-up as Durango.” With a single line of dialogue, Brooks has told us volumes about them. As for Strode, he’s such a mesmerizing physical presence that he renders dialogue almost unnecessary, whether he’s scaling cliffs or shooting flaming arrows. Palance looks right, though not particularly Mexican, playing a rebel. Cardinale, an Italian import who doesn’t appear until halfway through the movie, wears a peasant blouse in the last act that is enough to make any red-blood male bug-eyed. There seems to be no way it can possibly withstand the pressure it’s under. The fact that it does may, in some quarters, be regarded as a tragedy of epic proportions. But “The Professionals” hews to the Western movie tradition of keeping females in their clothes. I love it just the same.

I love it for the swagger and certainty of its heroes, for its gunfights, train robberies, and canyon passages. I love it, too, for Maurice Jarre’s jangling score and cinematographer Conrad Hall’s shot of sweating dynamite before the explosion that Lancaster and Marvin think will set Cardinale free. There’s a well-worn feel to much of it, I’m not denying that, but to me, watching “The Professionals” is like putting on a favorite pair of Levi’s, faded, frayed and so soft and comfortable that I never want to take them off.

And yet, when people ask about my favorite Westerns, I rarely remember to include it on my long and rambling list. The obvious choices -– “The Searchers,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Unforgiven,” you know the rest — are there, and I throw in “Will Penny,” “7 Men from Now,” even “Rancho Deluxe” to make things interesting. But too often “The Professionals” doesn’t get a call unless it’s as an afterthought, and I don’t understand why. After all, it’s not just one of my favorite Westerns, it’s one of my favorite movies, period. The blank I draw seems like a variation on always hurting the one you love. For years–no, decades, because time is no longer on my side–I’ve backed and filled and called people a day later to tell them I should have mentioned “The Professionals.” But I’ve never felt I’ve properly atoned for my forgetfulness.

Until now.

“I love this dirty town.” That’s the only line from Sweet Smell of Success that I quote on a regular basis, but only because I don’t quite have the presence to pull off “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.” For that, you need Burt Lancaster.

Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most brutal movies I’ve ever seen that includes almost no physical violence at all; it’s just funny enough to keep you from slitting your wrists afterwards, but with humor so cold and sharp you could use it for a razor blade. Anyone who thinks of the 1950s as a Norman Rockwell era of innocence should be sat down in front of this paean to cutthroat cynicism and soul-destroying ambition, then given a nice mug of warm milk and a hug.

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster, two good-looking actors with charisma to burn, have never been less attractive. It was a brave choice by both of them (and the studio was opposed to Curtis taking the role of smoothly sniveling Sidney Falco, a press agent who’s had all the empathy, dignity, and morality burnt out of him by a lifetime of humiliations), but I think especially by Lancaster. Sidney Falco is at least occasionally pitiable, but Lancaster’s Walter Winchell-esque monster J.J. Hunsecker is one of the least redeemable characters ever committed to film. (See his inclusion on the AFI’s list of all-time movie villains, although that is, now I look at it, one terrible list — if you think Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were the “villains” of Bonnie and Clyde, you missed the whole damn point. And “Man” in Bambi as an all-time villain? Please. But that’s a whole separate post).

I first remember seeing Lancaster in Atlantic City, a favorite VHS rental of my dad’s (mostly for the line “You should’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean back then… it was really something.”). Later I saw him in From Here to Eternity and the cheesy fun western Vera Cruz, with his magnetic appeal on full display, and in the film noir classics Criss Cross and The Killers, where he was a dark, flawed, but handsome and charismatic figure. He is still my definitive Wyatt Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral – which came out in 1957, the same year as Sweet Smell of Success, but takes place in a staggeringly different America. Lancaster was a gorgeous young man, and still quite an eyeful in his forties, but J.J. Hunsucker is too despicable to have even a shred of sex appeal.

Words are the weapons in Sweet Smell of Success (written by Ernest Lehman and blacklisted lefty Clifford Odets, and directed by Alexander Mackendrick), and J.J. Hunsecker is its serial killer; Freddy Kreuger and Mike Myers earn more viewer sympathy. This is all by design, of course, and the merciless screenplay doesn’t pull a single verbal punch:

It’s a dirty job, but I pay clean money for it.

The cat’s in a bag and the bag’s in a river.

Like yourself, he’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster.

Son, I don’t relish shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun, so why don’t you just shuffle along?

My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in thirty years.

Match me, Sidney.

Those last three are Lancaster’s, and only a handful of the movie’s best. (For full effect, of course, the last one needs to be quoted while holding an unlit cigarette). According to rumor the script was brilliantly rewritten by Odets months past deadline, while he was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and then rushed scene by scene directly from his typewriter to the set.

The movie was shot on location in New York, and I’m not sure you could say it has any affection for the city — really, I’m not sure you could say this movie has any affection for much of anything — but it certainly gets a jolt of jittery energy from its setting. The story could be transplanted to Los Angeles easily enough, I expect, but it wouldn’t be same without the rushing crowds its characters struggle past, or the packed bars and restaurants where glamor and power and desperation and slimy cunning are jostled together.

If Sweet Smell of Success has a flaw, it’s that the female lead, J.J.’s sister Susan, around whom the whole plot turns, is never really developed as a character, at least not compared to the devastatingly etched male leads. But on reflection I believe this is not really a gender issue – not because she’s a woman, but rather because she’s moral and kind. These are not the human facets that Sweet Smell of Success is interested in, and god bless it for that. Nice people are almost never any fun to quote.