Re-Evaluating Burt Lancaster / Biographer will talk about the cinematic giant at S.F. Film Festival presentation

For the longest time, Burt Lancaster was underappreciated. He had box-office clout. He had power to pick and choose his projects. But critical respect was slow in coming.

Only in the past few years have critics begun to acknowledge that the big guy was a cinematic giant. Indispensable in that process has been Kate Buford, whose book "Burt Lancaster: An American Life" was published last month to glowing reviews and enthusiastic sales. The book is already in its second printing and is a Los Angeles Times best-seller.

Tomorrow night Buford will be at the Kabuki Theatre giving a free one-hour seminar and slide presentation about Lancaster as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. She was also the author of the first critical study of his work, published in Film Comment in 1993, a year before his death.

ATTENTION-GRABBER

Buford, a commentator for the Public Radio International show "Marketplace," remembers watching Lancaster films as a child in her native Walnut Creek.

"He grabbed my eye and held it," she says, speaking by phone from Chicago. "He was so free in his movements, I felt I could be free, too. On that level, he got to me as a child."

She forgot about Lancaster until 1981, when she happened to see "Atlantic City." "He was amazing. He was playing this down-and-out character, but there were a couple of physical movements of such grace and strength. I thought about 'The Crimson Pirate' and 'Trapeze' and wondered, how did he get from those roles to this?"

Buford maintained her interest in Lancaster throughout the '80s. "The VCR was invented, so I got to go back and look at his films, and then I really got into it. To me it seemed as if his films, starting in 1946 through 'Field of Dreams,' told a rather coherent story."

Buford was surprised to find out that, until her Film Comment article in 1993, nobody had done a critical study of Lancaster. "I wondered, where is everybody? Is it just me?"

For Buford, helping to turn the critical tide has been the most rewarding part of this process. "To take a subject that everybody thinks they've figured out -- or they've forgotten -- or that they've relegated to a niche in the great organizing box in the sky -- and make people see it anew, that's satisfying."

When we see Lancaster in "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), perhaps his best film, playing a ruthless, slightly twisted newspaper columnist, it's hard to imagine how any critic could fault his performance. But in his own day, Lancaster was severely criticized for this and other roles that today are regarded as classic.

"Vincent Canby admitted that critics were too close to 'The Crimson Pirate,' " says Buford. "They couldn't believe that anyone so beautiful could be an actor. Plus, Lancaster was competing with Brando, who was more talented, whose genius was greater. But in the end, the one who played out the hand was Lancaster."

Indeed, Lancaster never stopped growing. He pushed himself, playing against type ("Come Back, Little Sheba"), and was always initiating independent projects. He was not just an actor but a producer. He was also such a forceful personality that he ended up as the de facto co-director of many of his films. "He was utterly without vanity," says Buford. "He had a healthy ego and was impervious to criticism."

INTIMIDATING AND CONTRADICTORY

In person, he could be terrifying. "As a young man, he would've scared the hell out of me," says Buford. "He was an intimidating, contradictory person. But as an older man, he calmed down, and I think I would have liked to have met and talked with him at this stage."

In writing the book, a project that began in 1994, Buford tried to nail down rumors that Lancaster was bisexual. "It was like a hall of mirrors. I'd hear a story, and then the person would deny it. In the end, I couldn't confirm anything, though it seems that those categories -- bi, straight, gay -- meant nothing to him. When people reach that level of stardom and power and temptation, they cross into another dimension all of us can only guess at."

Buford sees Lancaster's as a life that transcended barriers.

"There is an assumption that so- called pop culture is not real culture. But I wrote this biography from the same perspective that you'd write about an inventor or a politician," says Buford.

"In doing this project I came to feel that the barriers between pop and real culture are artificial. They're bogus."

FILM SEMINAR

BURT LANCASTER: AN AMERICAN LIFE: A seminar by Kate Buford. 6 p.m. tomorrow. AMC Kabuki 8 Theatre, 1881 Post St. Admission free. (415) 931-3456.