Tony Praises Errol

Loew’s Seventy-second Street Theater, Manhattan

From “Tony Curtis: The Autobiography”

When you’re a kid, you don’t know you’re going to grow up. You just look at big people and you don’t believe it’s going to happen to you. It has no reality. You’re not quite sure who you are or what you are, and a lot of time you’re not happy about that, or anything else.

Then all of a sudden you go into a building. It’s dark. It’s got thirty-five-foot-high black-and-white images of people doing the most incredible things you’ve ever seen. What an extraordinary environment. For an hour or two in that warm, different planet, whatever problems I had faded away. It was as calm and reassuring as a church. It was almost always open for business. You could go in and sit down quietly in the dark, and all that anguish going on around you outside disappeared. I could sob if I wanted, or I could just be quiet and look up at the screen. Those experiences were very intoxicating and important for me. Now and then I thought that I would like to bounce around up on that screen too.

The Charge of the Light Brigade was the most important movie to me when I was a kid. What a picture! I watched it over and over at Loew’s Seventy-second Street, glued to my seat up in the loge and forgetting everything around me. I had no sense of my body at all; just of perceiving those images on the screen and the thunder of all those sounds. The way Errol Flynn sacrificed his life for his brother, who was in love with that girl. I can still see it today in my head, the one brother knocking out the other and taking his place. It brought tears to my eyes, that sacrifice. Maybe because it was around the same time I lost my own brother.

The Adventures of Robin Hood, too, was a fabulous picture I loved so much. It was the first color movie I ever saw. Flynn’s insouciance, his daring; it was so appealing I could picture him walking into any pool room in Manhattan and just taking over. I loved Errol. He was lean and mean and strong.

— Tim