The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (271 page)

But having met Sinatra, he was drafted into the Clan (and leaving his own underworld ties from Ohio):
Ocean’s 11
(60, Lewis Milestone),
Sergeants Three
(62, John Sturges),
Four for Texas
(63, Robert Aldrich), and
Robin and the Seven Hoods
(64, Gordon Douglas); to routine Westerns:
The Sons of Katie Elder
(65, Henry Hathaway),
Texas Across the River
(66, Michael Gordon),
Rough Night in Jericho
(67, Arnold Laven), and
Five Card Stud
(68, Henry Hathaway); to sex comedies:
Who Was That Lady?
(60, George Sidney),
Who’s Got the Action?
(62, Daniel Mann), and
Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?
(63, Mann); and to the adventures of Matt Helm:
The Silencers
(66, Phil Karlson),
Murderers’ Row
(66, Henry Levin),
The Ambushers
(67, Levin), and
The Wrecking Crew
(68, Karlson).

Whenever asked to act he turned silly—as in
Career
(59, Joseph Anthony);
Ada
(61, Mann);
Toys in the Attic
(63, George Roy Hill); and
Airport
(70, George Seaton). But that brief outburst of excellence, 1958–60, was renewed once—in Wilder’s
Kiss Me, Stupid
(64)—notable for the way it exploited his own picture of himself. On TV, the
Dean Martin Show
(65–74) was a classic.

Some kind of ennui or disbelief took him out of show business, but he could be seen briefly in two silly movies—
The Cannonball Run
(81, Hal Needham) and
The Cannonball Run II
(83, Needham). The rest is silence, inertia, or some higher state between coma and vanishing—the secret must be pursued in Nick Tosches’s magnificent book, a study of such shining nullity that it alone would justify the travail of being Dean Martin.

Steve Martin
, b. Waco, Texas, 1945
There are comics who have to work very hard to be stand up, to get out there, to dominate a live audience, to get laughs—in short, to do comedy, which
is
hard. Alas, the hardness may enter into them, preventing the tenderness (or the pretense of tenderness) that is essential to acting. To this writer’s mind, the team of comics who excelled on
Saturday Night Live
have been especially prey to this condition. I find it hard to get enthusiastic enough to want to write about Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase—all of whom have had substantial movie careers. I feel they are all as imprisoned in their comic armor as, say, Woody Allen. And while Steve Martin has the largest movie career of all the
SNL
people, he too—it seems to me—is fundamentally averse to acting. “Fake” bells go off in my head when he says lines. That is not to say he is unfunny—in
All of Me
and
Roxanne
, say—simply that this viewer feels a barrier, a tenseness in Martin, that cannot yield to pretending. Evidently, I am in a minority.

Thus, the list:
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
(78, Michael Schultz);
The Jerk
(79, Carl Reiner), which he wrote;
Pennies from Heaven
(81, Herbert Ross), a test case for my theory, to be run side-by-side with the British TV version;
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
(82, Reiner), a clever idea, and one that Martin helped write;
The Man with Two Brains
(83, Reiner), which again he wrote;
All of Me
(84, Reiner);
The Lonely Guy
(84, Arthur Hiller);
Little Shop of Horrors
(86, Frank Oz); executive producer and screenwriter on
Three Amigos!
(86, John Landis); with John Candy in
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
(87, John Hughes); screenwriter and executive producer again on
Roxanne
(87, Fred Schepisi)—it is a special sensibility that opts to give the Cyrano story a happy ending, maybe one indifferent to story; a straight sets loser to Michael Caine in
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
(88, Oz);
Parenthood
(89, Ron Howard), which showed a new, nonironic reaching for the mainstream;
My Blue Heaven
(90, Ross);
L.A. Story
(91, Mick Jackson), the most interesting of the projects he has written and produced, albeit burdened by a soft, whimsical undertone;
Housesitter
(91, Oz);
Grand Canyon
(91, Lawrence Kasdan), where he stood out like a sore thumb;
Father of the Bride
(91, Charles Shyer); and
Leap of Faith
(92, Richard Pearce), which would have had a chance of interest with an actor, as opposed to a stand-up presence.

Martin became a far more enterprising figure in the nineties. The onetime philosophy student and art collector has made telling ventures as a playwright and a novelist. It is as if he feels the limits of comic acting. There have been a few throwback movies, and a few that broke no ground. It will be a surprise if he does not soon turn to directing:
And the Band Played On
(93, Roger Spottiswoode);
Mixed Nuts
(94, Nora Ephron);
A Simple Twist of Fate
(94, Gillies MacKinnon);
Father of the Bride II
(95, Shyer);
Sgt. Bilko
(96, Jonathan Lynn);
The Spanish Prisoner
(97, David Mamet); the voice of Hotep in
The Prince of Egypt
(98, Brenda Chapman and Steve Hickner);
The Out-of-Towners
(99, Sam Weisman); the funny
Bowfinger
(99, Oz);
The Venice Project
(99, Robert Dornhelm);
Joe Gould’s Secret
(00, Stanley Tucci);
Novocaine
(01, David Atkins).

His career as novelist and an all-round Los Angeles thinker expands—yet at the movies in 2003 he had hits with two rowdy comedies—
Bringing Down the House
(Adam Shankman) and
Cheaper by the Dozen
(Shawn Levy)—that suggested not just very little thinking in L.A. but also the old incongruity of buying Cézanne paintings with the money from trash.

The dilemma deepens: the film of
Shopgirl
(05, Anand Tucker), written and produced by Martin, was really very good.
Cheaper by the Dozen 2
(05, Shankman) was not—ditto the new life for
The Pink Panther
(06, Levy). But Martin’s next book,
Born Standing Up
(07), a memoir, was very good. Since then, he wrote the story for
Traitor
(08, Jeffrey Nachmanoff),
The Pink Panther 2
(09, Harald Zwart) and
It’s Complicated
(09, Meyers), where he is swamped by Alec Baldwin. Can he be his real self in a great movie?

Lee Marvin
(1924–87), b. New York
“The profound unease we feel in identifying with an evil character in a movie is the recognition that we may be capable of such evil,” wrote John Boorman, thinking about Lee Marvin. “Lee knew from his war experiences the depth of our capacity for cruelty and evil. He had committed such deeds, had plumbed the depths and was prepared to recount what he had seen down there.” And so Marvin made the uncommon journey from flagrant, sadistic heavy in supporting parts to a central, necessary, inescapable man of violence—hero? avenger? professional? searcher? The answer was always enigmatic in his best films, and like a sleepwalker Marvin stared into the dream, trying to see an answer. He had such a way of looking—gazing, even—when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire: it’s a look that Boorman discovered in
Point Blank
. Marvin was so strong, he leaves alleged rocks like Wayne or Schwarzenegger looking artificial. But he made so much junk; it took a rare director to explore the significance of so apparently brutal a character.

He led a sheltered childhood as a member of one of the earliest English families in America. Unhappy at school he joined the marines and fought in the South Pacific, being invalided home in 1944. After various jobs, he became an amateur actor, playing small parts off-Broadway before going to Hollywood in 1950.

His debut was below decks in Hathaway’s
You’re in the Navy Now
(51). He became a supporting actor and one of America’s most authentic heavies: favored with close-ups in
Duel at Silver Creek
(52, Don Siegel);
Hangman’s Knot
(52, Roy Huggins);
Diplomatic Courier
(52, Henry Hathaway);
Eight Iron Men
(52, Edward Dmytryk);
Down Among the Sheltering Palms
(52, Edmund Goulding);
Seminole
(53, Budd Boetticher);
The Stranger Wore a Gun
(53, André de Toth);
The
Wild One
(53, Laslo Benedek);
Gun Fury
(53, Raoul Walsh); and
The Raid
(54, Hugo Fregonese). Above all, he is remembered as the hoodlum who throws scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in
The Big Heat
(53, Fritz Lang) and as one of Spencer Tracy’s opponents in
Bad Day at Black Rock
(54, John Sturges).

At this stage, he was thick-lipped, psychopathic, or degenerate. But he progressed to a quieter, more reflective and cynical hostility—in Fleischer’s
Violent Saturday
(55); in
I Died a Thousand Times
(55, Stuart Heisler); as the lecherous heavy in
Seven Men from Now
(56, Boetticher); and as the scheming officer in Aldrich’s
Attack!
(56). Already more impressive than many stars, Marvin turned to sour comedy—in
Raintree County
(57, Dmytryk) and Jerry Hopper’s
The Missouri Traveller
(58)—before going into TV as a means to stardom. He was enormously successful in over a hundred episodes of
M Squad
and returned to films as a credible challenge to John Wayne in
The Comancheros
(61, Michael Curtiz), John Ford’s
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(62) and
Donovan’s Reef
(63).

Marvin’s owlish punch-pulling in these films led directly to his Oscar in
Cat Ballou
(65, Elliot Silverstein). Far more important artistically was his methodical, gray-haired, businessman-assassin in Don Siegel’s
The Killers
(64). By the late 1960s he was at last a major star, walking on automatic through Brooks’s
The Professionals
(66);
The Dirty Dozen
(67, Aldrich); and creating one of the most influential violent heroes as the destroyer of the “organization” in John Boorman’s
Point Blank
(67). After a fascinating picture of a Robinson Crusoe marine in extremis confronting Toshiro Mifune in Boorman’s
Hell on the Pacific
(68), there were signs of Marvin’s mellowing. Thus in
Paint Your Wagon
(69, Joshua Logan) he hammed enjoyably and groaned “I Was Born Under a Wandering Star.”

Marvin’s career is central to the role of violence in the American cinema. It might be said that he moved from the irrational, unprincipled killer to the outsider figure in
Point Blank
who is as lethal as the criminal structure of society compels him to be. As a personality, Marvin dropped insensate cruelty for stoical self-defense. At his best, he was without sentimentality, mannerism, or exaggeration, frightening in his very clarity. But he did relax, like a fighter who had grafted his way to the title and then counts on some easier paydays:
Monte Walsh
(70, William Fraker);
Prime Cut
(72, Michael Ritchie);
Pocket Money
(72, Stuart Rosenberg);
The Emperor of the North Pole
(73, Aldrich);
The Spikes Gang
(74, Fleischer);
The Klansman
(74, Terence Young);
Shout at the Devil
(76, Peter Hunt);
The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday
(76, Don Taylor); and
Avalanche Express
(78, Mark Robson).

His acting career then took second place to the court hearings to decide whether Michelle Triola deserved half of his earnings from the years they had lived together.

In his last years, he was perfectly employed as the sergeant to a young infantry platoon in
The Big Red One
(80, Samuel Fuller);
Death Hunt
(81, Hunt);
Gorky Park
(83, Michael Apted);
Dog Day
(84, Yves Boisset);
The Dirty Dozen: The Next Mission
(85, Andrew V. McLaglen); and
The Delta Force
(86, Menahem Golan).

When he died, it became suddenly apparent that the movies would not have anyone to follow him in hardness or in that secret wealth of spirit and impassive irony that makes the hardness fascinating. No young actor now could be so fixed without edging into camp. Lee Marvin was the last of the great wintry heroes.

The Marx Brothers:
Chico
(Leonard) (1887–1961), b. New York;
Harpo
(Adolph Arthur) (1888–1964), b. New York;
Groucho
(Julius Henry) (1890–1977), b. New York;
Zeppo
(Herbert) (1900–79), b. New York
These deliberately ill-fitting brothers are the first demonstration in movies of private, protesting anarchy within the rational state. Long before our tentative reaching out for the madman hero, the Marx Brothers made it clear that madness was not heroic or noble, not even a martyrdom, but a helpless, self-destructive liberty. Their anarchy is useless, withering, and sad; they dominate events only by exaggerating their own privacy until it becomes manic, antisocial, and ridiculous.

There have been attempts to argue that the brothers stand up for the little man, for eccentricity, and against pomp, formality, and respectability. On the contrary, I think they relentlessly estrange themselves from audiences. Of course, they make us laugh, like the professional comedians they always were. But they are not interested in us. Chaplin hypnotizes us, Keaton calls to us through his utter deadpan, but the Marx Brothers are as fiercely preoccupied as the inmates of psychiatric wards spinning nonexistent webs.