Finest hours: Tony Curtis in The Boston Strangler

In one of his final interviews before his death in 2010, Tony Curtis admitted that he had in his day “wanted to be taken seriously as an actor”. This, frankly, wasn’t always evident from the films. Curtis made his start in swashbucklers and bodice rippers; followed his biggest hit as lead – Billy Wilder’s gender-swap farce Some Like It Hot (1959), in which Curtis with great comic dexterity makes a convincing argument of not taking himself seriously at all – with a string of sex comedies of diminishing effort and appeal; and saw out the (more modestly budgeted) second half of his career in titles like Lobster Man from Mars (1989) and The Mummy Lives (1994).

It was only relatively early in his career when Curtis made one of his last real stabs at ‘serious’ acting. The Boston Strangler (1968), a documentary-flavoured account of the hunt for and eventual interrogation of serial killer Albert DeSalvo, would star Curtis as the bogeyman at a time when he almost invariably played the romantic lead. 

Reunited with The Vikings’ (1958) Richard Fleischer, Curtis, who had a decade earlier battled barbarians and romanced fair maiden Janet Leigh for the director, was now recreating nauseating acts of sexual violence for his latest film, which would take Curtis as far from heroic as he would ever get on screen.

Curtis’s introduction as DeSalvo suggests some delight in the surprise casting: Fleischer’s camera tracks ominously through a drab apartment and turns slowly around a shadowy figure in a chair watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy on television. The camera comes to a stop to savour the image of Curtis-as-DeSalvo, the actor’s blue eyes masked by brown contacts, his nose filled out with putty, his formerly athletic frame padded out with 40 extra pounds.

To obscure those features was unusual for Curtis, an actor who had, as director Alexander Mackendrick put it, “a fantastic vanity”. No less unusual is Curtis’s style of performance in the film. Curtis had no difficulty playing repellent figures – repellent, in fact, was arguably what he played best, Curtis having so satisfyingly plunged to grubby depths before as a poisonous press agent in Mackendrick’s acrid noir Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and as a bigoted escaped con manacled to Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958). 

Curtis’s performance in The Boston Strangler, though, is free of any sort of Hollywood flash or actorly manner. Instead, there’s a nakedness to Curtis as DeSalvo, which in the final stages of Fleischer’s film turns into a display of quivering vulnerability from the actor.

In 1968, Curtis was in the doldrums professionally and personally. His popularity at the box office was waning, and he was in the midst of a divorce from second wife Christine Kaufmann. (It was also around this time that Curtis’s brother was institutionalised, diagnosed – as Curtis’s mother had been – with schizophrenia. Curtis said later that the diagnoses of both made him “question [his] own sanity”.)

In his 1993 autobiography, Curtis wrote that there was little more to his acting technique than “memorising lines and listening carefully”. It’s hard to imagine, though, that the nature of Curtis’s turbulent 1968 wouldn’t have fed into his performance as Albert DeSalvo, who Fleischer’s film depicts as a man whose life and mental state are, to his horror, spiralling beyond his control.

As history, this portrayal of DeSalvo is bunkum – a ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ plea made by the real DeSalvo was dismissed, while the film’s suggestion that DeSalvo had multiple personality disorder is pure fiction – but Curtis’s performance as the movie Strangler is genuine. 

Curtis does his finest dramatic work in The Boston Strangler’s climactic interrogation scenes, in which the Strangler killings’ chief investigator, John Bottomly (Henry Fonda), attempts to jog DeSalvo’s memory of the murders. In a series of long takes fixed on him, Curtis-as-DeSalvo is at first mumbly, halting, an unremarkable man, then increasingly in whimpering distress as terrible visions flash before him before, suddenly, his gaze turns blank, and DeSalvo – with calm and precision – pantomimes for Bottomly the killing of one of the Strangler victims.

The Boston Strangler represented a fork in the road moment for Tony Curtis. With his teen idol days behind him and financial troubles ahead, Curtis by his own admission would take much of his subsequent work for the money: TV spots, cheap films, even a magic show in Vegas. In The Boston Strangler, though, he is an actor to take seriously, who could find a wealth of feeling in a character as distant from himself as an everyday Joe moonlighting as a murderer. What else could this Tony Curtis do?