Peter CostelloRegular readers who enjoy Aubrey Malone’s film reviews will enjoy this biography of one of the last great stars of the old Hollywood system. Gore Vidal used to make fun of Curtis’s Brooklyn accent as deployed in The Black Shield of Falworth when he was a young man, but for many other people any amount of unfortunate movies can be forgiven for the sake of Some Like It Hot and the handful of truly classic films that Curtis made in the course of his career in both television and film.
He died at the age of 85 back in 2010. For his fans his era will always be the Sixties and Seventies when he made his most memorable pictures. But this is a serious minded book and deals with the darker side of his personal and professional life. Malone has had access to still unpublished family archives, and this new material, as well as an astonishing trawl through what was written about Curtis, provides for once a truly balanced biography, in which both the movie fan and the film enthusiast will find much they did not know. P.C