Roles of a lifetime
In a movie career spanning six decades and 80-plus films, Burt Lancaster played Wyatt Earp, Moses, Jim Thorpe, a pirate, a bookie, a billionaire, a gangster, a rogue general, a Nazi, a French Resistance fighter, and a convict who studies bird diseases. Playing a soldier, he was also one-half of the most famous kiss in cinema history, a wave-washed, adulterous embrace with Deborah Kerr on a Honolulu beach in “From Here to Eternity” (1953). Starting today, and running through Sept. 8, the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) will embrace Lancaster with a 20-film centennial retrospective. It’s not a kiss, but a remembrance: 100 years ago this November Burton Stephen Lancaster was born in Manhattan, one of five children in a working-class East Harlem family. His career in movies was delayed by a long Depression-era stint as an acrobat and by service in World War II. The iconic actor — with his clipped diction, pearly...