To hear Richard Benjamin tell it, MY FAVORITE YEAR was a charmed production. For his first film as a director, he had been looking for a comedy (“I’m just kind of bent that way,” he jokes) and the stars aligned to bring him a script that, he says, was everything he knew. He had Mel Brooks as the film’s guardian angel. He had a bona-fide movie star that his wife, Paula Prentiss, recommended after another actor regretfully declined the film’s plum role. And he heeded Carl Reiner, who gave him succinct advice about making a comedy: “Get funny people.”

Which he did. The film is character actor heaven, with Joseph Bologna, Anne de Salvo, Selma Diamond, Adolph Green, Basil Hoffman, Lainie Kazan and Bill Macy.

MY FAVORITE YEAR is set in the mid-1950s when television was live and comedy was king. Mark Linn-Baker stars as Benjy Stone, a young comedy writer on a variety show reminiscent of Your Show of Shows, where he ardently pursues the show’s not-amused production assistant (Jessica Harper). During one life-changing week, he is assigned to chaperone the show’s guest star, his idol, former swashbuckling screen hero, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole in an Oscar-nominated performance), who has a penchant for drink, womanizing and otherwise behaving badly. 

Benjamin spoke with TCM about casting O’Toole, trying to pin down Mel Brooks and why you should never end a comedy in a graveyard.

To quote Alan Swann’s great line, dying is easy, comedy is hard. With MY FAVORITE YEAR, you make it look so easy. How did the project come to you?

Paula and I were in New York. My agent, David Gersh, sent the script by Norman [Steinberg] and Dennis [Palumbo, credited as co-writer due to the Screen Writers Guild arbitration]. I remember reading it in the hotel room and as I finished, I said, ‘This is everything I know.’ I was in high school when Your Show of Shows was on. I would get on the phone with my friend Shelley Berger, who I am still close to, and we would do all these routines they had done on the show on Saturday night. I grew up loving Errol Flynn and those swashbuckling movies. I had also worked at 30 Rockefeller Plaza [the film’s setting] as an NBC page and guide, and I knew every inch of that place. [The script] was right up my alley, as they say.

Brooksfilms produced the film, and Mel Brooks was a writer on Your Show of Shows. Did he serve as the film’s guardian angel or offer any input?

Guardian angel’s good. He kept saying he would give Norman and I two full days to sit down and go over the script to see if we could make it even funnier. The truth of the matter is that the script didn’t need much of anything, but he promised that. Trying to get Mel to stop moving is a feat. We went to his house, and he invited us in and then said he was going out. He said he had to walk the dog. Then he comes back, and he said he had to go, that there was a crisis at Fox. I said, ‘No there’s not,’ and he said, ‘Well, there could be.’ So, what he ended up giving us was two hours, but it was a great two hours. And the next thing you know, he was gone.

But Norman and I came up with one of the best jokes in the movie while we were standing in his driveway watching him drive away. It’s the one where Swann falls off the roof and plummets past the two elitist guys. And one says, ‘I think Alan Swann’s beneath us,’ and the other guy says, ‘Of course he’s beneath us, he’s an actor.’

I cannot imagine anyone but Peter O’Toole as Alan Swann. Was he the first choice?

Albert Finney had been offered the role, but he had not committed. He was up in Sausalito making SHOOT THE MOON [’82]. They told me I had to go up there and convince him to do the film; otherwise they couldn’t make the movie. The list of people M-G-M would go with was very short, because who are you going to believe with a sword in their hands? So, I’m on this mission, because if he says yes, I’m going to get to make a movie. We arranged to have lunch together. He’s completely charming. I get ready to ask the question – which could change my life, by the way: ‘Will you do it?’ He said, ‘Well…,’ and I could tell it was going to be a no. He thought the script was really good, but he had done two or three movies in a row and he said he wanted to get back to the theater. Then he said to me, ‘Why don’t you get O’Toole?’ He said, ‘We do this all the time. I turn something down, he does it, he turns something down, I do it.’ When I got back home, Paula who had made WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? [’65] with Peter, said, ‘Get Peter. He is perfect for this.’ Finney said it, Paula said it. And I asked [co-producer] Michael Gruskoff if M-G-M would make the film with O’Toole, and Michael said yes.  

What was the meeting with Peter like?

(Laughs) That meeting! That meeting was quite something. First of all, we couldn’t find him. We could tell we had the right person because the behavior was just like the character. He had a farm in Ireland with no phone. You had to call this pub to get a message to him. I called the pub and they said Peter wasn’t there. His agent didn’t know where he was. I called his manager and said, ‘We’re trying to find your client.’ He said, ‘He’s at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He’s been here for a week.’ 

So, I’m actually talking to Peter O’Toole, and he said he had heard about the project and to send him a script and we would get together the next day. I go over and there he is in a beautiful suite wearing a smoking jacket; he is the character. He said, ‘Here’s the thing…’ and I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ He said he liked it very much, but he hadn’t read the last ten pages and to please indulge him and he would call tomorrow. The next day, on the dot, he called and he said to turn to the last page of the script.

Now, in the original script, there’s a scene which I shot that would have played after what’s in the movie. It took place in a Hollywood cemetery, and Benjy is walking past the gravestones. He says in voiceover that Alan Swann made him promise he would do something on his birthday every year. Alan has passed away, and Benjy comes to his grave, kneels down and pours a bottle of Courvoisier over the tombstone. That’s what’s on the last page. Peter asked me to read the date that was on the tombstone. It was Aug. 2. He said, ‘Aug. 2 is my birthday; did you know that?’ I asked Norman if he knew that, and Norman said no, he had made it up. And Peter says, ‘Therefore, I must do the film.’

What happened to that scene?

I was terribly reluctant to take that out because Peter did the movie because of it. But people at M-G-M said I couldn’t end a comedy in a cemetery. We had two audience screenings, one with that ending and one without it. In the screening with it, the audience enjoyed the picture, but the scene put a pall over things. Then we had the screening without it and the audience was very enthusiastic and very up as they came out.

How did you find Mark Linn-Baker?

Our casting director Ellen Chenoweth said the first person to get was Mark Linn-Baker. Mark came in and read and was terrific. I said, ‘This is my first movie, I can’t cast the first person who walks in here.’ I saw maybe 25 to 35 more—some really good people—but she was right, so after all of that, I said to get him.

Peter and Mark had great chemistry.

They seemed to hit it off right away, but later, back in L.A. after we shot the long scene on the roof, which played like a mini-farce, Peter came up to me and said, ‘I like the lad, you cast him well.’

Was Peter game for the physical stunts?

I couldn’t stop him from doing them! The bathroom scene required him to fall headfirst into the wall. I came to him before we shot and I said, ‘The camera is so close, I can’t pad this wall.’ He said, ‘I was brought up in music hall. I can do this all day. Don’t concern yourself.’

Director Howard Hawks once said that a good movie was three or four good scenes and no bad scenes. I lose count watching MY FAVORITE YEAR of how many great scenes there are in it. Between those driven by comic banter, the TV sketches, the physical comedy scenes, the quieter romantic scenes and even the dramatic confrontations, did you have a favorite type to direct?

I can’t say there was a favorite. It’s all of a piece. I will tell you that one of the scenes I like is in the Stork Club and getting to do something that reminded me of all these kinds of wonderful comic movies I loved growing up. I do remember that one of the first things we shot was the scene in Central Park where Alan Swann mounts the horse. It just seemed to lack energy. And I was thinking, ‘I have to go tell Peter O’Toole that he has to pick up the pace and it has to be lighter.’ I went up to him and said, ‘It’s good, but…’ and before I could finish, he said, ‘You want it faster and funnier.’ I said, ‘You’ve got it,’ and he said, ‘And you shall have it.’ And I thought, ‘This directing thing is not so hard.’ (laughs)

Were there directors you worked with as an actor who particularly inspired you when you became a director? For example, you worked with one of the best, Mike Nichols.

Mike, yes. He directed me in the national company of Barefoot in the Park and [the film] CATCH-22 [’70]. Mike’s thing was he’d come up to you very quietly and say, ‘Just like in real life.’ That was his main thing. It meant that there should be no ‘acting’ here; your character responds to situations as they would in life. It’s like what [critic] Walter Kerr once said about Neil Simon’s jokes: They have the truth in them. This is what funny people know: You can’t try to get a laugh, because you won’t get it.  

At one point, Alan Swann says that doing the TV show was the most fun and the hardest work since the world was young. Was that what making MY FAVORITE YEAR was like for you?

It was the most fun, there’s no question of that. It was a magical experience because of the screenplay and everyone involved. Everyone’s game came up because of Peter. You don’t need many takes with him, that’s for sure. But how all of this came about and got to the point where I would be offered this, and what has to happen in your life to come to that moment – you can’t make it up. And when that moment comes, you’re hopefully ready. I was really fortunate.

Oscar Levant once quipped: “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”

The actor-composer-pianist-writer starred with Day in her first film, ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS (‘48), in which she played a bubbly singer. And it is true that she played 30-something-year-old virgins beginning with PILLOW TALK (‘59), the first film she made with Rock Hudson. But Levant’s comment diminishes the former band singer’s accomplishments as an actress and ignores the fact that her characters were quite modern and progressive. In fact, you could call her an early feminist.

During her “Golden Age,” which I define as between LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (‘55) and SEND ME NO FLOWERS (‘64), she played successful career women at a time when there weren’t that many being portrayed on screen. In the George Abbott-Stanley Donen cotton candy-colored musical THE PAJAMA GAME (‘57), she’s a worker in a pajama factory, a member of the union leadership who doesn’t take any guff from her bosses. In the delightful romantic comedy TEACHER’S PET (‘58), she’s a successful journalist and college professor; in PILLOW TALK, a flourishing interior decorator; and two years later in LOVER COME BACK (‘61), she goes toe to toe with Hudson as a rival Madison Avenue ad executive. And, in the often-neglected comedy IT HAPPENED TO JANE (‘59), she’s a widowed mother of two who takes on the meaner-than-mean head of a railroad (Ernie Kovacs) when the company causes the death of 300 lobsters she was shipping.

Day’s characters were also incredibly feisty. In PILLOW TALK, the only film for which she received a Best Actress Oscar nomination, she learns that the man she’s fallen for, the shy handsome Texas Rex Stetson, is actually the womanizing composer she shares her party phone line with, so she redesigns his apartment into a gaudy mess reflecting his lothario ways. Speaking of lothario, Day’s leading men often played long-term bachelors-serial daters, like Clark Gable in TEACHER’S PET and Cary Grant in THAT TOUCH OF MINK (‘62). Her characters fall in love with them but won’t become their latest conquests. It’s actually the men who succumb to her charms and give up their womanizing ways when they fall in love with her.

Still, the virgin quote harmed her legacy. “People don’t take her seriously,” said former L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan in 2012. “It was a lifetime battle for Marilyn Monroe to be taken seriously; that was a battle she won. Audrey Hepburn was taken seriously. People are reluctant to take Doris Day seriously. It’s too bad.” Cari Beauchamp, a film historian and writer who specializes in the history of women in film, told me in 2012 that when she talks to people about Day “they tend to say she played the girl next door. And you look at her movies, particularly at the time of those films and she wasn’t the girl next door. She always had a backbone.”

Day was a popular singer with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, scoring her first No. 1 in 1945 with “Sentimental Journey.” Hollywood soon came knocking on her door, and she answered in the Warner Bros.’ Technicolor musical ROMANCE ON THE HIGH SEAS, directed by Michael Curtiz, in which she introduced the Best Song Oscar nominee “It’s Magic.” Not only was she adorable and a breath of fresh air, Day seemed totally at ease in her big screen bow.

“I wanted to be in films,” she told me in 2012. “I wasn’t nervous. I just felt ‘I’m here. I am supposed to be doing this.’ I was so lucky to have such terrific actors and directors. Everything was different and everything to me was great.”

Her films at Warner Brothers were a mixed bag. She got to demonstrate her dramatic chops reuniting with Curtiz for YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN (‘50), starring Lauren Bacall and Kirk Douglas. And I also loved the Booth Tarkington-inspired musical comedies ON MOONLIGHT BAY (‘51) and BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON (‘53). Turan loves her musical-comedy CALAMITY JANE (‘53), in which she has a field day as the famed Wild West heroine, because “her energy is kind of irrepressible.” Day also introduced the Oscar-winning song, “Secret Love” in the freewheeling classic.

But she really came into her own when she went to MGM to do the musical drama LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME, in which she gave a tour de force performance as torch singer Ruth Etting, who has a particularly volatile marriage to a gangster (James Cagney). But she was totally ignored by the Academy and the Golden Globes. The film was nominated for six Oscars, winning for Best Motion Picture Story, with only Cagney, brilliant as Marty “the Gimp” Snyder, getting nominated for his performance.

Turan described LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME as a “provocative film. It almost defines a kind of thing that you would say: Doris Day would never do something like that. But when we say that we are thinking of the cliché Doris Day, not thinking of the actual actress who made interesting choices and interesting films.” Day also counted the hit, directed by Charles Vidor, as a career highlight. “I really loved working with Jim,” she said of Cagney, who had previously appeared with her in the disappointing THE WEST POINT STORY (‘50). “The wonderful thing is that when you have someone like him to play opposite, it’s very exciting. You just feel so much from a man like that.”

She didn’t do research into Etting’s life but went by the script and “just how I felt and what I listened to. You react. It was so well-written. It just comes out of you. I don’t know how to explain it.” But it probably wasn’t hard. Like Etting, who endured abuse at the hands of her husband, the four-time married Day was mercilessly beaten by her one husband, musician Al Jordan, the father of her only child, Terry Melcher.

Mastering drama and musicals, Day was also a fabulous comedian. Just look at her expression when Gable, as a seasoned newspaper editor, kisses her for the first time in TEACHER’S PET. She crosses her eyes and is literally weak in the knees. Or when she realizes in THAT TOUCH OF MINK that Grant wants her to share his bed when they go to a resort. It’s brilliant. And of course, she and Hudson had a chemistry few actors get to share on screen. Ironically, Day admitted she didn’t know who Hudson was when they were cast together in PILLOW TALK, even though he had been a major star for most of that decade and earned an Oscar nomination for GIANT (‘56). “Isn’t that amazing?,” she said laughing. “I thought he was just starting out. I didn’t know about the films he had made. I just loved working with him. We laughed and laughed.”

The quality of her films declined after SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Her third husband and manager, Marty Melcher, put her in poorly received comedies such as DO NOT DISTURB (‘65) and CAPRICE (‘67). He squandered her money and signed her up to do the CBS sitcom The Doris Day Show without her knowledge before his death in 1968. The series ran from 1968 to 1973.

After the series, Day went to Carmel, co-owned a pet friendly hotel there and concentrated on animal welfare. In 1985-86, she did the pet-forward TV talk show Doris Day and Friends, best remembered for guest Rock Hudson, who was suffering from AIDS. She admitted Hollywood never lured her out of retirement. “No one really said that – ‘Oh, come back.’ I was just here.’”

“The most serious films are comedies,” Carl Reiner told interviewer Andrew Buss in 2019. “They look easy, but they’re hard to come by.”

Lily Tomlin agrees. “It’s very hard to strike the right comedic tone,” she says, and she considers ALL OF ME (’84), her lone collaboration with Reiner, to be something of a miracle. It’s a deftly handled, sweet screwball and spiritual romance. “That’s the kind of comedy I like to see,” she said in a phone interview. “The script is sweet and lyrical, but it’s a vehicle for broad physical comedy for Steve.”

It is Reiner’s masterpiece.

ALL OF ME is included in TCM’s five-film tribute on July 28 to Reiner, screenwriter, author, actor, director and multi-Emmy-winning creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show. He died June 29 at 98. In ALL OF ME, Tomlin stars as Edwina Cutwater, a frail but fabulously wealthy woman who summons lawyer Roger Cobb (Martin) to her deathbed to inform him of her plan to come back from the dead. And then it gets bananas, as her soul is accidentally transmigrated into Cobb’s body.

Tomlin spoke with me the day after Olivia de Havilland died at 104. “I thought she was going to live forever, dammit” she said. “I respected and admired her. She was extremely good in everything she did.” Tomlin then shared her memories of Reiner’s “fun and harmonious” set and why it took her six weeks to commit to doing the film she calls one of her favorites.

How familiar were you with Carl Reiner? Did you watch Your Show of Shows growing up?

Lily Tomlin: Sure I did. I was taken with Imogene Coca. I was more attracted to the women who were doing comedy, because whether I knew it or not, I was headed in that direction. I saw Carl and loved him. And I got to know him. I remember sitting and talking to him in the makeup room [of a show I was on] and we talked about Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. He was just a fabulous, sweet guy. I wrote this to [his son] Rob when his dad died: I used to go see his wife, Estelle, sing in the clubs. I went early one night and there was Carl on his hands and knees running cable to her microphone. That was just so memorable. When we made ALL OF ME, he was such an easygoing, wonderful guy; talented and funny and unflappable.

You two seem very well suited in that like him, you find comedy through characters and situations, not jokes.

LT: I’m honored. I never thought of that.

I watched an interview with Carl, who said you were ‘a hard yes’ to do ALL OF ME. He said it took about six weeks of ‘wonderful lunches and meetings’ before you committed.

LT: I had no idea he said that.

He gave you credit for reshaping the script.

LT: That was sweet of him. A lot of directors wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t say anything about reshaping the script out of respect for him. It’s hard as hell to make a movie.

He said early versions of the script were written very much with a male gaze.

LT: I hesitate to say misogyny. It was an accepted thing in comedy, especially at that time. I was mostly trying to influence the writer, Phil Alden Robinson (who also wrote FIELD OF DREAMS). There was a scene where Steve’s character was going to spank Victoria Tennant’s character in bed. I said he could playfully paddle her like, ‘You’re a bad girl.’ Even that’s iffy, but I knew they could play it comedically. It was important to me to be able to express that, and I’m so glad I did because it’s one of my favorite movies. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and Steve has never been better.

And it’s so sweet. The image in the mirror of you and Steve dancing at the end gets me every time.

LT: (Laughs) Carl and I exchanged messages. I said, ‘No one wants to see him dance with Victoria, who is this treacherous character. They want to see him dance with me.’ I don’t remember if they shot it both ways. Finally one day, he left a message and said, ‘Okay, you’re right.”

What are your most vivid memories of making the film?

LT: This is wacky. I wanted Edwina to have real jewels, not stage jewels. I was thinking of (philanthropist) Barbara Hutton. Jewelers used to bring her trays of jewels and she would look at them in bed with a jeweler’s glass. I wanted that to be part of my character. [The studio] wouldn’t rent good jewels for me, so I rented them myself. I had to have a guard on set whenever the jewels were there.

When you learned that Carl has passed, what were your thoughts of him?

LT: I just loved him. He was so menschy, sweet and good and still had so much humor. When I went to see him to talk about ALL OF ME, he had such a charming and wonderful house. I told him, ‘I’ve been looking all over for this house. Now I see why I don’t have it: you’re living in it.”

Tony Curtis was one of Hollywood’s top stars of the 1950s and ‘60s. After starring in such mindless fodder as NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM (‘52), he proved he was far more than just an uber-handsome face by delivering dramatic performances of complexity and nuance in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (‘57) and THE DEFIANT ONES (‘58), earning an Oscar nomination for best actor for the latter. And he was also a first-rate farceur in such comedy classics as Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT (‘59).

Curtis and his frequent co-star Janet Leigh, his first wife from 1951 to 1962, were La La Land’s golden couple. And it was big news when Leigh gave birth to her daughters Kelly and Jamie Lee, who went on to become a major film star. But the ‘70s weren’t as fruitful. By 1979, he had separated from his third wife, Leslie, and had a raging drug problem. He was very frank during a 1999 TCM Private Screenings interview with Robert Osborne. “Drugs were very important to me,” he confessed. “I used to freebase, smoke cocaine, a lot of alcohol. I did some heroin. I couldn’t work. I didn’t lose jobs. I just didn’t get them.“

He did get a big job during this time, however. Curtis was hired to star at the Mark Taper Forum in late 1979 in Neil Simon’s new play I Ought to Be in Pictures, which would open on Broadway the following spring. The actor left the production before the run ended in Los Angeles. Curtis was equally frank with me in a 2009 Los Angeles Times interview about the experience.

“I hated it,” he said. “I had no place to live. I wasn’t living at home. The marriage was over. I was living in the back of my Trans Am. I was really strung out, and you would think [director] Herb Ross and Neil Simon would have compassion enough to take this coward’s hand if they wanted to. That was really a very difficult time for me.”

Still, it would be four years after the stage experience before he sought help at the Betty Ford Center. But once he got clean, “one thing I found was I was still the same kid I was in New York City who used to run around and mimic people. All of a sudden, I got back to my roots.” The reason why Curtis was so good at playing hard-scrabble characters is that he, too, had a hard knock early life.

Curtis was born Bernard Schwartz in 1925 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. His father operated a tailor shop. His mother suffered from schizophrenia and beat Bernie and his two brothers. Finances were so bad at one point, his parents put him and his beloved brother Julius in a state institution. When they returned home, Julius was hit by a car and died in 1938. Young Bernie also had to deal with gangs and anti-Semitism. He got out of the neighborhood during World War II, serving in the Navy on the submarine U.S.S. Proteus.

After the war, he enrolled in acting classes at the New School for Social Research. Curtis captured the attention of casting agent Joyce Selznick, and in 1948, he was signed to a contract at Universal, making his debut in the film noir CRISS CROSS (‘48) as a rumba dancer who makes Burt Lancaster jealous when he cuts a rug with Burt’s girlfriend, played by Yvonne De Carlo. “What a time that was,” he told me in our 2009 interview, a year before his death at 75. “I had never been to California except for when I was in the Navy, and here I was coming out with a movie contract.”

He had noted that coming to Hollywood was an overwhelming experience. “I was a handsome boy. It helped. I didn’t have to kiss anything. I didn’t have to kiss anybody. I was 22 years old. I started doing good, and suddenly I was King Kong at Universal for seven or eight years.” But he had to endure not only such films as NO ROOM FOR THE GROOM but also such lame costume dramas as THE PRINCE WHO WAS A THIEF (‘51), which marked his first starring role.

The studio kept casting him in these lightweight vehicles because, “they cost absolutely nothing. Those pictures cost about $200,000, and we shot them in 18 days. They went out and grossed $2.5 million, and that was on a .30 cent movie ticket. There was nobody in town who was grossing that kind of money. I never thought that I didn’t deserve it. I just loved being in movies, you know. I loved the acting lessons and going on set.”

Paramount’s bio-pic HOUDINI (‘53), his first film with Leigh, gave him his first role of heft. Curtis was more than up to the task. He began to get frustrated with the roles at Universal. “I didn’t have guys looking after me,” he said. His agent Lew Wasserman, Curtis noted, “was not on my horizon yet. But as soon I got connected with Wasserman, then the quality of my pictures changed with TRAPEZE, SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, THE DEFIANT ONES (‘58) and SOME LIKE IT HOT. I never ended up with an important player until Burt Lancaster in TRAPEZE (‘56).

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS is an extraordinary piece of work, way ahead of its time. The drama, directed by Alexander McKendrick, was not a hit when released but has grown in reputation over the decades. It’s not a comfortable watch, but some of the most brilliant films aren’t. Curtis is remarkable as Sidney Falco, an ambitious, fast-talking Broadway press agent trying to get in good with vile Broadway columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Lancaster).

After that, both Curtis and Sidney Poitier earned Oscar nominations for Stanley Kramer’s THE DEFIANT ONES, a landmark racial drama in which they played escapees from a chain gang. Curtis honed his comedic chops in such Blake Edwards comedies as THE PERFECT FURLOUGH (‘58) with Leigh and OPERATION PETTICOAT (‘59) with Cary Grant before making his mark in the iconic SOME LIKE IT HOT.

Though Lemmon earned an Oscar nomination for his iconic performance, Curtis is equally funny – and downright gorgeous – in this gender-bending farce about two musicians who witness the St. Valentine’s Day massacre and disguises themselves as women in order to hide out in an all-girl dance band. Curtis does a spot-on impression of Grant in SOME LIKE IT HOT when he pretends to be rich oil heir in order to seduce the band singer played by Marilyn Monroe. Over 30 years later, he toured in a theatrical version of the classic comedy, taking the role as the much-married wealthy mama’s boy played by Joe E. Brown in the movie. He ended up leaving the production after a near-fatal bought of pneumonia.

In the 1960s, he appeared in epics like SPARTACUS (‘60) and TARAS BULBA (‘62) and in such dramas as the underrated THE RAT RACE (‘60) with Debbie Reynolds and THE OUTSIDER (‘61), in which he earned strong notices as Native American Ira Hayes, one of the Marines who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. Edwards and Curtis reunited in 1965 for the extravagant comedy THE GREAT RACE, probably his best comedy of that decade. And the hit marked a reunion with his SOME LIKE IT HOT co-star Jack Lemmon.

Curtis lost fans when he had an affair with his 17-year-old TARAS BULBA costar Christine Kaufmann. Curtis divorced Leigh in 1962 and married Kaufmann the following year. Their only other film together was the dreadful WILD AND WONDERFUL (‘64), which was neither. In fact, most of his comedies during the decade wasted his talents, including BOEING BOEING (‘65), a boring sex romp with Jerry Lewis, and ON THE WAY TO THE CRUSADES, I MET A GIRL WHO…(‘67).

I do remember he hit the talk show circuit really hard in 1968 to promote THE BOSTON STRANGLER, his return to dramatic fare. He gives a scary, brave performance as infamous serial killer Albert DeSalvo. Though an Oscar nomination was not in the cards, he did earn a Golden Globe nomination. But the film let him down, and its stereotypical depictions of the LGBQT community are difficult to watch in 2020.

When I interviewed him in at his Brentwood house in 1999, Curtis seemed happy. He had married his sixth wife, horse trainer Jill Vandenberg, and was surrounded by his paintings (he was a well-respected artist) and many cats. The couple would eventually move to Las Vegas, where they operated a horse refuge.

Curtis noted he didn’t have any film projects in the offing. “I don’t like the quality,” he said. “I don’t want to play old men because I ain’t no old man. I’m 73 ½ and that’s what I am. There is nothing in me that equates to what they call age. The most perfect romantic movie I would love to make would be me with a 23-year-old girl. It’s her first time and it’s his last time. Two people who just met at the right time in their lives. Time is not a dilemma. They both need each other. That is what I call a great movie.”

In 1939, RKO scored a big hit with THE GIRL FROM MEXICO, a 70-minute comedy starring Mexican actress Lupe Velez and character actor and comedian Leon Errol. The film paired Velez’s naturally volatile personality with Errol’s knack for physical comedy and was more slapstick than screwball. Velez played Carmelita Fuentes (soon to be Carmelita Lindsay), the feisty Mexican entertainer who wins over Dennis (Donald Woods), a mild mannered and easily flummoxed American businessman. Errol plays a dual, nay, triple role of Dennis’ uncle Matt, the uppity and hard drinking Lord Basil Epping and Uncle Matt pretending to be Epping. The situational comedy was a blend of romantic blunder and the foil of disguise and mistaken identity. 

RKO quickly made plans to make the concept a series. Velez had developed her own reputation as the “Mexican Spitfire” and RKO launched the series with the moniker in 1940. The films were formulaic, made on a tight budget with a quick turnaround and were almost guaranteed to be profitable at the box office. The studio churned out two films a year (MEXICAN SPITFIRE [1940], MEXICAN SPITFIRE OUT WEST [1940], THE MEXICAN SPITFIRE’S BABY [1941], MEXICAN SPITFIRE AT SEA [1942], MEXICAN SPITFIRE SEES A GHOST [1942], MEXICAN SPITFIRE’S ELEPHANT [1942]) and the series ended with a 7th film (or 8th if you count the original film), MEXICAN SPITFIRE’S BLESSED EVENT in 1943. During its heyday the madcap adventures of Velez and Errol were so popular that Universal borrowed them both for their own film SIX LESSONS FROM MADAME LA ZONGA (1941).

In MEXICAN SPITFIRE AT SEA, Carmelita (Velez) and Dennis, now played by Charles Buddy Rogers, head to Hawaii on a second honeymoon. Little does Carmelita know that Dennis is actually on a business trip and on board the vessel is Dennis’s potential new boss, his business rival and both Uncle Matt and Lord Epping. Hilarity inevitably ensues in the tight quarters. A ship was the perfect new location for the Mexican Spitfire formula with Leon Errol switching back and forth between his dual personas as often as he entered each cabin room. The series was directed by Leslie Goodwins and by 1942, the writing team, which varied film to film, had learned to limit the number of Velez’s onscreen outbursts and focus on Errol’s physical comedy and the eccentricities of the other characters. In MEXICAN SPITFIRE AT SEA, they brought back Marion Martin as Fifi and ZaSu Pitts as Miss Emily Pepper, both introduced in the previous film THE MEXICAN SPITFIRE’S BABY. Pitts adds a dash of charm with her gift for playing lovably befuddled characters. The star of the show, at least in this entry in the series, is Errol who keeps the humor going for over an hour despite the flimsy plot.

In 2009, when TCM hosted the Latino Images in Film series, Robert Osborne sat down with John Noriega, Professor of Chicano Studies at UCLA, to discuss the Mexican Spitfire films. Osborne loved these movies as a kid and Noriega pointed out that the comic potential from a mixed marriage like the one portrayed in the film anticipated I Love Lucy, which would come a decade later. The series’ appeal might be lost on many contemporary viewers, especially the stereotypical portrayal of the lead character, but in a way Velez’s Carmelita was ahead of her time.

Noriega went on to say that each film broaches the question: will she be able to assimilate? The answer is always no. Not only will she not change who she is, she’ll always be the Mexican Spitfire, she won’t be pushed out of the marriage or the country. She’s here to stay. In David Zinman’s book, Saturday Afternoon at the Bijou, he says of Velez, “Lupe was a free spirit off stage, a liberated woman before her time.” Velez infused her own vivacity into the role of Carmelita. What we see is pure Velez. Eventually, the series became very repetitive and started losing steam. But it might have continued for at least one or two more entries had it not been for Velez’s untimely death by suicide in 1944.

When prompted (and sometimes not), I love telling folks about one of my favorite movies, I SEE A DARK STRANGER (‘46), released as The Adventuress in America. The little-remembered British flick stars Scottish actress Deborah Kerr as a headstrong Irish lass who grew up hating the British so much that she accidentally ends up a German spy during WWII.

Yes, it’s a comedy. And a thriller. And a romance.

You’d think a British film about a girl filled with such hatred towards the Brits that she works with the Germans against them would be a tad hard to swallow after the war, right? The comic liberty taken with the subject is one reason I’ve always admired I SEE A DARK STRANGER. Upon watching it again recently, I was also rather startled to find how contemporary it is—particularly the fact that the main character, Bridie (Kerr), blindly hates an entire group of people for no legitimate reason.

Filmmaking team Frank Launder (writer/director/producer) and Sidney Gilliat (writer/producer), authors of Alfred Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES (‘38), wrote I SEE A DARK STRANGER near the end of WWII. Filming in Ireland and England took place for several months throughout the latter half of 1945, with the picture debuting in the UK in 1946 and the US in 1947. As Bruce Babington observes in his book Launder and Gilliat, that post-war release allowed the writers to make light of tense subjects despite being less than two years removed from the action. In fact, most reviews domestically and abroad lauded I SEE A DARK STRANGER, and curiously, few English critics voiced an issue with Bridie; most focused instead on the film’s comedic angles.

One reason for the picture’s positive notices is the precarious balance Launder and Gilliat pulled off, particularly in the film’s tone and Bridie’s character. Jerry Vermilye commented in The Great British Films that the movie “could hardly have emerged the winningly offbeat lark it remains—so cleverly skating the thin ice of Anglo-Irish satire and the seriousness of wartime espionage—without the teamwork of Launder and Gilliat.” The writers maintained an equilibrium between those tense spy segments and the story’s sardonic humor, smartly restraining the seriousness of Bridie’s actions… until she realizes their potential consequences, which keeps her sympathetic.

Indeed, Bridie’s intentions remain squarely anti-British as opposed to pro-Nazi, and the comical bits generally arise from her surroundings and misplaced patriotism. For instance, a particularly entertaining early scene finds Bridie sharing a train compartment with a nice-looking gentleman. Her inner musings of him flow from intrigue to attraction to doubt to hatred when she detects his English surname. Game over, for now, because he just so happens to be her Nazi recruiter. Kerr, top billed for the first time, displays impressive range and command of her role, balancing Bridie’s headstrong naïveté and her youthful impulsiveness with the severity of the events occurring around her. (Kerr won the New York Film Critics Circle Award jointly for this picture and 1947’s BLACK NARCISSUS.) Babington emphasized that Bridie’s “composite of wilful (sic) child and resourceful heroine, winsome sweetness and transgressive boundary crosser” is “essential to the film’s strategies.” It’s hard to believe Launder and Gilliat aimed to generate sympathy for a German spy, easily an objectionable notion for Brits, but Kerr’s candor, unsophisticated charisma and dry humor cause you to root for a happy ending—for her and the British!

One scene that finds Kerr amusingly oscillating, in this case between brusque anger and inexperienced flirtation, involves British officer David Baynes (Trevor Howard), whom she’s tasked to detain while other spies break a prisoner out of jail. When given her orders, she balks; as a Brit, Baynes is automatically the enemy. It’s a riotous scene watching Bridie try to suppress her aversion as she feebly attempts to keep Baynes occupied with her feminine wiles. How he sticks by her is beyond me!

That raging, blind hatred Bridie shows feels very relevant today. Her gullibility and baseless revulsion for another ethnicity fuels her actions and ensnarls her in something that she eventually (thankfully) realizes can hurt her own people; in fact, that animosity is the basis for this entire film. And to think: All of it started with misinformation passed down by her father. Without proper education or access to the facts, Bridie almost got herself, and many others, killed. If it weren’t for the clearly satirical slant of her character, Bridie could truly be a terrifying soul.

But as it goes, Launder and Gilliat took a potentially provocative subject and characters and turned them on their head during a time when many were in desperate need of laughter. If you’re in the mood for a quirky gem filled with witty dialogue and colorful characters, I highly suggest seeking out I SEE A DARK STRANGER.