Tony on the upside ...

MISTER CORY. I remember seeing this in 1957 as we young lads all saw Tony Curtis films then. This must have been the one (apart from TRAPEZE) which got him into more serious fare with the likes of Lancaster and Douglas, like SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. He is another ambitious young guy on the make here, with all that Universal-International gloss, as directed and co-scripted by Blake Edwards. Cory gets a busboy job at a swanky lakeside resort and sets his cap at Martha Hyer, perfecting her country club girl persona. Her younger sister is Kathryn Grant, who has an agenda of her own, and shows once again she was one of the nicer ingénues of the time (before giving it up to marry some crooner). Cory rises and opens his own gambling casino, but finds that while Martha romances him she has no intention of marrying beneath her. Whats great about this now is seeing two old timers having roles to sink their teeth into: Charles Bickford as the (as suggested elsewhere, possibly gay) gambling man taking the young kid under his wing, and Henry Daniell as the very snobbish manager of the resort whom Cory recruits to manage his own joint. Henry rises to the occasion splendidly.



Sidney Falco in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS and that killer lead in Wilder's perennial SOME LIKE IT HOT (only the best comedy ever written) are direct follow-ons from the ambitious young Mister Cory, cementing Tony's great decade. Another good Blake Edwards one, which I remember liking a lot then but never seen since, is 1958's comedy THE PERFECT FURLOUGH - with his wife Janet Leigh. He is another shyster army guy on the make here - it was called STRICTLY FOR PLEASURE here in the UK, Furlough being a word we do not use here.