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MARTIN BALSAM BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR, 1965, for 'A THOUSAND CLOWNS'  Martin Balsam in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' |
You may forget the name,
but not the performances
of TheColumnists.com
Who Are Those Guys!
Their faces look as familiar as the people who live across the
street. But their names? Even though we’ve seen them dozens
of times, their names remain as elusive as the names of those
neighbors we never seem to find time to get to know anymore.
As Butch asked Sundance, “Who ARE those guys?”
It’s their fault, not ours, that we don’t ever get
to know them. For those guys possess this uncanny knack of being
able to turn themselves into other people just about the time
we think we’re becoming acquainted.
They are moviedom’s supporting and/or character actors--I’ve
never been able to clearly distinguish one breed from the other--who
change personalities more often than “W” changes his
rationale for starting a war in Iraq.
Occasionally one of them escapes anonymity and rises to the stars.
Witness the late Lee Marvin, who portrayed some really low-down
characters--check out "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955)
or "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" (1962)--until
winning an Oscar and Golden Globe as best actor playing an inept,
booze-marinated gunslinger in "Cat Ballou" (1965).
Then along came "The Professionals" (1966) and "The
Dirty Dozen" (1967). Voila! Villain Marvin turned into hero
Marvin.
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a well-worn Balsam in "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three."
Among my favorite supporting/character actors who never achieved that kind of stardom is Martin Balsam (1919-1996), despite the fact he earned an Oscar as best supporting actor playing Jason Robards Jr.’s frustrated brother-in-law in 1965’s "A Thousand Clowns."
Balsam stands atop my “A” list because he played in a lot of movies that I really like. Or perhaps it’s because he was in so many good movies over so many years, starting with 1954’s "On the Waterfront", that I couldn’t help but remember his name.
And, by the way, "On the Waterfront" was a picture that really was loaded with "those guys"--the excellent character actors whose names still ring familiar: Lee J. Cobb, Leif Erickson, Fred Gwynne, Pat Hingle, Karl Malden, Nehemiah Persoff and Rod Steiger. Oh, yeah, the star was one Marlon Brando. He didn’t fare too badly after that either.
Balsam always seemed to be working. As a character actor, he easily could switch back and forth between movies and television--in the era when television dramas had some meat to them--without his credibility as an actor being desecrated or his box-office drawing power depreciating.
Because character actors aren’t stars,
they never have to worry about their box-office appeal after
they’ve performed on TV. They, simply put, are just actors.
But isn’t working an actor’s life’s blood? Maybe
not today, when the big stars pull in multi-millions and make
one picture a year.
Here are a few Balsam flicks that I remember. It’s irrelevant
what the critics might have written about them because they’re
entertaining and, occasionally, enlightening: "Psycho,"
1960; "Cape Fear," 1962; "Seven Days in May."
1964, "The Bedford Incident," 1965; "Hombre,"
1967; "Little Big Man." 1970, "The Anderson Tapes."
1971; "Catch-22," 1970; "Murder on the Orient
Express," 1974; "All The President’s Men,"
1976; "Two-Minute Warning," 1977; and the 1991 remake
of "Cape Fear."
My favorite, though, is 1974’s "The Taking of Pelham
One Two Three," in which Balsam plays Mr. Green. It’s
one of the truly great suspense films, and he plays a key role.
Balsam’s part in it is nothing to sneeze at.
He may be one of "those guys" to some of you, but I'll never forget him.
©2006 by Len Klempnauer. The "Oscar"
logo and the phrase "Academy Awards" are the registered
trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. This column
first posted Feb. 27, 2006.
Len Klempnauer grew up in the same small
town--Santa Cruz, Calif.--as two of his colleagues at TheColumnists.com:
Chuck McFadden and RonMiller. He was the sports editor of the
Santa Cruz High School newspaper, The Trident, where McFadden
and Miller worked in the early 1950s. All three also began their
professional journalism careers in the same town--Len as a reporter
and editor on the Santa Cruz Sentinel, where Ron also worked
as a reporter, while Chuck was a reporter for radio station KSCO. "Today," says Len, "I read all AARP publications religiously." |
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