Ambition Is Almost Enough

40 Pounds of Trouble. "Muddah, when I grow wup I'm gung to be like Gary Grant." It isn't easy to be like Gary Grant, especially for a kid from The Bronx, but Bernie Schwartz meant business. At 22 he changed his name to Tony Curtis and copped a one-line bit in a B movie. "Woo, woo!" was all he said, but the second they saw him a million bobby-soxers said the same. Tony was short (5 ft. 8 in.), dark and pretty. His hair was a mass of kiss curls, his lips were red and luscious, his front teeth twinkled like a Broadway marquee. Soon he was known in the trade as "the male Yvonne de Carlo"--she was the queen of the B's and he was cast as her honey, but that wasn't what he wanted to be at all. He studied Gary's walk and he studied Gary's talk, but he might as well have tried to take the BMT to England. "Yonduh," he solemnly stated in one tale of old Baghdad, "lies duh castle uh duh Caliph, my fahduh."

After 15 years and 39 pictures, Tony still has a nagging case of Bronxitis, but his beach-boyish looks and his up-from-the-gutter go have established him securely among the Big Ten at the box office. At 37, he has learned the secret of eternal youth: use plenty of makeup to hide the wrinkles. He has also learned the secret of good cinemacting; don't act--be yourself. As himself, Tony is by no means Cary, but he has studied the old master so carefully that he has become a highly skilled comedian in his own right.

In this comedy Tony has a role in which he can Cary on to his heart's content : he plays a man who thinks he can do without a woman. Do what? Do business, for one thing, and as the manager of a Nevada casino, he has plenty of business to do. One day, temptation (Suzanne Pleshette) comes slithering into his Eveless Eden. He resists. But after temptation comes responsibility (Claire Wilcox). He can't resist. How could any redblooded, blue-eyed, squarejawed, caramel-centered American male resist a darling little five-year-old girl abandoned by her heartless father in the lobby of a gambling casino; abandoned without a Mr. Goodbar to her name, without so much as a nickel for a Nab in her pretty little purple plastic pocketbook; abandoned in a lobby without a Coke machine, without a drinking fountain, without even a television set--and only seven minutes left till Huckleberry Hound I

Tony takes her in, and the rest of the film tells more or less hilariously how he learns what every father knows: that a child needs a mother, and that a mother, regrettable as it may sometimes seem, simply has to be a woman.

Tony has had better material, but he has never made more out of less. He skitters through his best scenes like a cat in pattens. He flicks a bad line away as a zillionaire might irritably flick a pearl out of an oyster. And when he does a slow burn you could fry an egg on his deadpan. Cary should approve.

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