"You best go find out who you are. Come on. Now what's wrong with you, you old buzzard? Come on. Don't be afraid. Out there you can kick up the dust. You can dance to fiddle music. Watch the alfalfa bloom. If you like, you can see gold teeth. Taste sweet whisky and red–eyed gravy. The air breathes easy, nights move faster, and you tell time by the clock. Now you don't wanna be a jailbird all your life, do ya? You're a highballin' sparrow. So you fly high, old cock. Go out there and bite the stars — for me. Find yourself a fat mama and make a family. You hear? Beat it."
Robert Stroud (Burt Lancaster)
If you've been reading this blog for awhile, you know of my love of history — and how I feel about the standards for movies that attempt to re–create historic events or tell the life stories of noteworthy people.
But the 55th anniversary of the premiere of director John Frankenheimer's "Birdman of Alcatraz" is an appropriate time to revisit that.
Simply put, I believe that a movie that proposes to tell the story of an actual event or life should be faithful to the facts. Well, most of the facts. I can overlook minor details.
"Birdman of Alcatraz" took some liberties with the truth. For openers, the title implies that Robert Stroud, the convict about whom the movie was made, kept birds at Alcatraz. In fact, he kept his birds at Leavenworth. When he was transferred to Alcatraz, he wasn't allowed to keep pets.
But I suppose you could get around that by saying that Stroud had already established himself as the Birdman before he went to Alcatraz so the title was a reference to his past, not his present, activity.
OK, I guess I can let that one slide.
The thing I find it harder to overlook, though, is the apparently considerable liberty the filmmakers took with Stroud himself. The movie did portray him as a bitter individual given to violent outbursts, but the clear implication was that he mellowed as he aged.
Former inmates have said the portrayal was inaccurate, that Stroud was not the amiable fellow of the movie but a "vicious killer" and troublemaker — and, indeed, the movie was candid about the events that led to his incarceration — but Burt Lancaster's Stroud could be a sympathetic character whereas the real one apparently was not.
Having said that, though, "Birdman of Alcatraz" had its inspiring moments — and a remarkable cast — in spite of its inaccuracies. Besides, the makers of "Birdman of Alcatraz" freely acknowledged, as did the makers of "A Beautiful Mind," that it was not a literal presentation of a life story, merely based on it.
If the movie did take liberties with the truth, though, it didn't gloss over the fact that Stroud was a hothead in his youth.
But Stroud also became an authority on sparrow diseases — all because he found some injured sparrows in the prison yard one day and began raising them.
So, to borrow a Huckleberry Finn observation from Mark Twain's classic novel, the makers of the movie "told the truth — mainly."
The movie received four Oscar nominations and lost all four.
Lancaster was nominated for Best Actor. He was nominated four times in his career — and even won once — but lost this time to Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Thelma Ritter was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Stroud's overbearing mother. She lost as well — to Anne Bancroft's magnificent performance in "The Miracle Worker," but I thought the role of Elizabeth Stroud was every bit as demanding as the role of Anne Sullivan.
Telly Savalas was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. He lost to Ed Begley in "Sweet Bird of Youth." I'm not sure if Savalas' character was real. Perhaps it was a combination of several inmates who interacted with Stroud in some way — although Stroud spent almost his entire incarceration period in solitary confinement so he couldn't have interacted with other inmates much. Besides he would have been as likely to get into a fight with a fellow inmate as to make friends with him.
The fourth nomination was for cinematography, and "Birdman" lost that one to "The Longest Day."
Karl Malden received no nomination — although I have long believed he deserved one as Stroud's first warden. Maybe it is because his character was entirely fictional whereas most, if not all, of the other primary characters were real, but aspects of their lives were fictionalized.
Was "Birdman of Alcatraz" Lancaster's best? That is really hard to say. He was always good. Some people will cite "From Here to Eternity." Others will say "Elmer Gantry" or "Atlantic City." I would say "Judgment at Nuremberg" or "Seven Days in May." But that's me.
