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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 26 |
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FIVE SCREEN HEAVIES WHO LIGHTENED UP |
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Born to be booed, yet
three earned Oscars
of TheColumnists.com
Over my many years as a movie fan and frequent film critic, I've discovered several natural laws of the Hollywood star-making process. One of them goes like this: If you're really, really nasty on screen, you'll eventually wind up as a hero.
Take the case of five classic screen "heavies" that I watched all through my youth and into my adult years, then finally wound up meeting in person in the course of my professional career as a movie critic and television columnist: Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance and Lee Van Cleef.
Borgnine was the quintessential evil fat guy in the first phase of his movie career. As my colleague Leonard Maltin once described him, Borgnine was "burly, gat-toothed, frog-voiced--with a face to match." He was the antithesis of a screen hero. He reminded me of every bully I'd ever met on the school grounds in grade school, usually waiting behind something, just waiting to pounce.
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into skinny Montgomery Clift. Before the movie was over, he sent Frank Sinatra to sing with the angels. |
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His most memorable screen villain was "Fatso" Judson in the 1953 Best Picture Oscar winner "From Here To Eternity." He was the G.I. who pushed everybody around and eventually murdered Maggio (Frank Sinatra). But I remember him doing something even more unforgiveable on the screen: Picking on a one-armed man (Spencer Tracy) in "Bad Day at Black Rock" (1955). He usually got his comeuppance in grand style, though, especially when that one-armed guy turned out to know karate and beat the living crap out of him.
Then, also in 1955, Burt Lancaster's production company picked Borgnine to play the leading role in "Marty," the big screen adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's TV drama. In the original version, another screen villain, Rod Steiger, had played Marty, a lonely butcher who fell in love with a plain-looking woman and won her heart, even though his deadbeat bachelor pals needled him about what a "dog" she was.
Lancaster had worked with Borgnine earlier in the 1954 western "Vera Cruz," in which Borgnine was up to his usual nasty tricks. He obviously saw the real Ernie Borgnine, who is a sweet and gentle man, and figured he'd be ideal for the role of Marty Pasetta. He not only was ideal, but he was magnificent. If you've forgotten how great his performance was in "Marty," revisit the scene where he calls up a girl he'd met in a movie theater and asks her for a date. He has to explain that he's the "heavy" guy who'd been sitting behind her. The pathos and sensitivity Borgnine shows in that scene is masterful screen acting.
Borgnine's performance won him the Best Actor Oscar for 1955. By 1962, when he began his run as the affable PT boat commander in TV's "McHale's Navy" sitcom, Borgnine's real personality was showing--and it won him a new generation of fans, who forgot all about his mean and vicious characters of the past.
Ironically, I met Borgnine in 1973 when he had taken a juicy villainous role in the movie "Emperor of the North," playing a sadistic train conductor whose primary goal in life is to bust-up legendary hobo Lee Marvin. His "comeback" as a heavy won him lots of plaudits, but people had decided to love him by then. I remember him as most definitely the loveable type, a gregarious big bear of a man with an engaging smile and a real twinkle in his eye.
As long as the name Lee Marvin has come up, I may as well cite him as another fine example of a classic screen bad guy who morphed into a leading man after years spent doing some extremely nasty things in the movies.
I think I first became aware of Marvin in 1952 when he played a thoroughly disgusting villain in "Hangman's Knot," a Randolph Scott western, then served as the malicious handyman for sadistic German film director Fritz Lang in "The Big Heat," a shocking 1953 film noir in which Marvin, playing an underworld thug, disfigures girl friend Gloria Grahame by throwing scalding hot coffee in her face. (She gets her revenge at the film's climax, burning his face up pretty badly, too!)
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Lee Marvin with "bad girl" Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang's "The Big Heat" (1953). |
Marvin just looked mean all the time. Lanky and slack-jawed, he could make you believe he was only a few points above moron level. Big and lean, he seemed just too ornery to sit around doing something benign. He was the kingpin for the rival biker gang that challenged Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" and was among the rotters who picked on poor one-armed Spencer Tracy in "Bad Day at Black Rock." (The scene in which he stretches out on Tracy's hotel room bed, itching to pick a fight with him, is classic Marvin villainy.)
In real life, Marvin was often a roaring, belligerent drunk and so it was not a stretch to imagine him playing thugs the rest of his life. Even when he starred in NBC's crime series "M Squad" (1957-60), playing a lawman, he was a hard and brutal lawman. Perhaps his ultimate bad guy role in his many western movies was hellraising killer Liberty Valance in John Ford's 1962 "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." As the pop song about the movie reminded us, when Liberty Valance came to town, everybody looked for a hiding place.
(Marvin also had the dubious honor of killing future Pres. Ronald Reagan in Reagan's final screen role as a mob boss in 1964's "The Killers.")
But then came 1965's "Cat Ballou," the spoof western in which Marvin played a dual role--an outlaw with a tin nose and a used-up gunslinger often too drunk to stay on his worn-out horse (a nag that liked to lean against the nearest wall). This comic turn changed Marvin's career permanently, winning him the Best Actor Oscar for 1965 and sending him off to new horizons as a leading man.
To be sure, Marvin wasn't the conventional leading man. He still looked like someone had hit him across the face with a wooden plank and he was seldom sober. But his action roles, like the leader of "The Dirty Dozen" (1967) and the stolid infanty sergeant in "The Big Red One," lifted him to true name-above-the-title star status. He was perfect as a modern hero, usually a flawed, but courageous man.
I was still intimidated by his horrible reputation as a drunk who didn't suffer movie critics gladly when I finally met him in 1985. He was then doing a TV movie sequel to "The Dirty Dozen," so I made an appointment to interview him at his home outside of Tucson, Ariz., since I was going to be there anyway for filming of the "Stagecoach" remake with Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson.
Marvin was still being plagued by reporters wanting quotes about the "palimony" lawsuit filed against him by his ex-girlfriend and so I didn't expect him to be in a great mood to see me. To make things even worse, I was an hour late for the interview because my rental car broke down. I ended up driving to his place in the rental outfit's parts van, the only vehicle they had available.
Marvin greeted me warmly and broke up when I explained the ludicrous scenario that sent me to his house in a parts van. He had recently married his original high school sweetheart and had completely sobered up. Mrs. Marvin had prepared a lunch for us and we just sat around all afternoon shooting the bull about movies and Marvin's hobby as a sport fisherman. If there was a mean bone in his body, it never showed on that memorable day.
Another heavy seemingly unsuited for hero roles was Lee Van Cleef, who first made an impression (negative) on me in "High Noon" (1952) as one of the three gunmen who's waiting for ex-con Frank Miller to show up on the train, so they can all amble into town and gun down lawman Gary Cooper, who put Miller in jail. Van Cleef had slits for eyes, a predatory hawk-like nose and a real bad attitude. You did not want him waiting for you at the train station.
When Clint Eastwood and several other low-rent Hollywood cowboy heroes saw the western market dry up in America and headed for Italy to work in the "spaghetti westerns" being made there in the 1960s, lots of the "bad guys" from Hollywood westerns had to follow along if they wanted to keep working. Van Cleef went over and played the chief bad guy in the second and third of Eastwood's legendary trio of Sergio Leone westerns--"For A Few Dollars More" and "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."
He was especially memorable in the latter film, playing a vengeful gunslinger so menacing and riveting that he pretty much resurrected the character in "Sabata" and "Return of Sabata." With those popular films, Van Cleef suddenly found himself a hero. Just like Eastwood's "Man With No Name," Van Cleef's gunslinger character was good or bad depending on who was paying his salary. With his high cheekbones and narrow eyes, Van Cleef looked positively reptilian at times.
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though, and he ended up being thought of as a hero. |
But as strange a "hero" as he was in the Italian westerns, he was even stranger when the "spaghetti & sagebrush" era ended and Van Cleef, then about 60, returned to Hollywood to star in the short-lived NBC television series "The Master," playing a ninja master. Without guns blazing, the aging and increasingly stoic Van Cleef didn't cut a very heroic figure. Nor did it help that the series was adle-brained in concept and execution.
Naturally, that's when I met up with Van Cleef, finding him somewhat remote and out of place.. I don't know whether he was a jolly guy in person or not All I know is that we had re-defined the action hero since he began as a villain in westerns in the 1950s and he suddenly found himself one, even though he wasn't doing anything much differently than he had as a villain.
Though I never really warmed up to Van Cleef in person, I didn't dislike him. He might not have been in the best of health when I talked to him in 1984--he died five years later in 1989. The only one of these five "heavies" I didn't like was Jack Palance, who gave me nothing but terse, thoughtlessly boring answers in a telephone interview I never got around to writing because he gave me virtually nothing. Then Palance chilled me out even further when I met him in person at a party in honor of the ABC show he was hosting in the 1980s--"Ripley's Believe It or Not."
Palance began his movie career as one of the darkest of bad guys. Look up his bone-chilling performance opposite Joan Crawford in "Sudden Fear" (1952) to see him at his most sinister. His unhandsome features always made him look like a guy whose cosmetic makeover was ruined by a drunken plastic surgeon. He'd been a prizefighter at one time and must have been one of those guys who led with his face. His first major acclaim as a villain probably came when he was nominated as Best Supporting Actor of 1953 for his performance in George Steven's "Shane."
As Wilson, the hired gun who's brought in by the cattlemen to scare the hell out of the sod-busters, Palance was distilled evil in its purest form. When daring, but inept farmer Elisha Cook Jr. comes to stand up to Wilson, the gunfighter drills him easily and grins as Cook's blasted body flops in the thick mud of the western street in front of the saloon where Wilson hangs out.
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the records to find out if Jack Palance was born wearing black. In his younger years as a classic movie western villain, he looked and acted like a big snake someone had slipped into a black cowboy outfit. |
My friend and former neighbor Ralph Nelson, who directed Palance in the Playhouse 90 live TV drama "Requiem For A Heavyweight" in 1956, always praised Palance as a decent guy and a devoted actor. I'm willing to believe I just got Palance on two bad days when nothing was going right in his career. I certainly think his performance as used-up boxer "Mountain" Rivera in that Rod Serling TV drama was his best ever and certainly deserved the Best Actor Emmy he received.
Like Lee Marvin, Palance finally earned his greatest honor--an Academy Award--playing a role that spoofed his earlier work as a western villain. His comic performance in "City Slickers" (1991) was wonderful. By that time, Palance had pretty much left villainy behind him for good and was a recognized character actor in films and TV.
Finally, I'll tell; you about another screen heavy I couldn't imagine ever going straight on screen: Jack Elam.
Elam was an accountant for Hopalong Cassidy Productions in the early 1940s who was pressed into service as a bit player in a Hopalong western when they needed somebody who looked frightening. Elam certainly filled the bill and soon was earning lots more money as an actor than he ever made doing the accounts for low-budget film producers.
I first remember Elam on screen in "Rawhide," a 1951 western in which he was one of the outlaws holding Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward captive at a frontier outpost while his gang waited to hold up the stagecoach. Though he was impossibly thin--he seemed to have no buttocks whatsoever--he looked as tough as a stick of beef jerky. He was grizzled and stringy-haired and one of his eyes always seemed to be trying to roll around so it could look behind his head. He was the sort of shifty character who might shoot the family dog or dunk a bawling baby in hot water just for kicks.
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life in movies untl he grew much older and put on weight. Than he began playing variations on Walter Brennan, usually as loveable old-timers. |
In sharp contrast to his scores of dastardly villain roles, Elam was a happy-go-lucky guy in person, a cheerful drinker who seemed to get funny when loaded. After about 20 years on screen, he began to put on weight and soon was a parody of his former self. Look at him as the sidekick to James Garner in "Support Your Local Sheriff" (1969) and "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971). The closest to the real Elam you might have seen on the screen was the character he played in "High Noon"--the affable town drunk that Gary Cooper lets out of jail just before he goes to face Frank Miller and his gunmen.
When I caught up to Elam, he had pretty much morphed into the new Walter Brennan. He was playing fat old coots that little children loved. I ran into him once on the set of "Eight is Enough," playing a scene with a little kid. I felt like telling him he must have wandered into the wrong soundstage while drunk and should be strangling the kid, not playing a scene with him.
I think I first talked with Elam in a 1979 press conference at CBS for "Struck By Lightning," a stupid sitcom in which he actually was playing Frankenstein's Monster. The show lasted less than a month. In 1986, I chatted with him when he was doing "Easy Street," another useless sitcom, this time on NBC, in which he played a derelict living in a mansion with Loni Anderson. By then he was resigned to being laughed at instead of scaring people.
While he filmed "Easy Street" on a soundstage at what used to be the old Republic Pictures studio, Jack stayed a few blocks away at the venerable old Sportsmen's Lodge in Studio City. That was one of my favorite hangouts and I often saw him at breakfast time. Once he came in with a bewildered look on his face. He'd forgotten where he'd parked his car the night before because he'd had a snootful. I remember him telling the waitresses he was pretty sure it was parked, "Somewhere in the valley."
Jack was lots of fun in those days--and
old friends of his told me he always was a funny guy, even when
he was boiling babies and shooting their dads on the big screen.
Like most movie bad guys, he was something else entirely when
off duty. With that sage observation, I guess I rest my case.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted Aug. 14, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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