The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (337 page)

Dennis is the younger brother of Randy Quaid, whom he followed into pictures. Married once to P. J. Soles, he was married to Meg Ryan for ten years—a further proof of his high amiability. He had a small part in
Crazy Mama
(75, Jonathan Demme);
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
(77, Anthony Page); and then came
September 30, 1955
(78, James Bridges);
The Seniors
(78, Rod Amateau);
Our Winning Season
(78, Joseph Ruben), with Soles;
Breaking Away
(79, Peter Yates);
G.O.R.P
. (80, Ruben); Ed Miller in
The Long Riders
(80, Walter Hill);
All Night Long
(81, Jean-Claude Tramont);
Caveman
(81, Carl Gottlieb); with Kristy McNichol as brother-sister country singers in
The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia
(81, Ronald F. Maxwell);
Johnny Belinda
(82, Page); a singer/boxer in
Tough Enough
(83, Richard Fleischer);
Jaws 3-D
(83, Joe Alves).

That was a pretty tough education, but Quaid got a great boost of energy with his swaggering “Gordo” Cooper in
The Right Stuff
(83, Philip Kaufman);
Dreamscape
(84, Ruben);
Enemy Mine
(85, Wolfgang Petersen); and then a real hit as the New Orleans detective with Ellen Barkin in
The Big Easy
(87, Jim McBride), another picture that caught his jazzy rhythms and his sexy recklessness;
Innerspace
(87, Joe Dante), the film on which he met Meg Ryan (they were married in 1991).

Since then, too few films have inspired or required his daring: the juror in
Suspect
(87, Yates); wasted in
D.O.A
. (88, Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel);
Everybody’s All-American
(88, Taylor Hackford); a little over the top as Jerry Lee Lewis in
Great Balls of Fire!
(89, McBride);
Postcards from the Edge
(90, Mike Nichols);
Come See the Paradise
(90, Alan Parker);
Undercover Blues
(93, Herbert Ross), a flop, and then another—
Wilder
Napalm
(93, Glenn Gordon Caron); with Ryan again in
Flesh and Bone
(93, Steve Kloves); trying to loosen Julia Roberts up in
Something to Talk About
(95, Lasse Hallström);
Dragonheart
(96, Rob Cohen);
Switchback
(97, Jeb Stuart);
Gang Related
(97, Jim Kouf); the neglected
The Savior
(98, Predrag Antonijevic); then rather ominously in
The Parent Trap
(98, Nancy Myers);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll).

In 1998, he directed
Everything That Rises
—a warm, family Western. He was the injured quarterback in
Any Given Sunday
(99, Oliver Stone), and then he had a kind of hit in the ludicrous
Frequency
(00, Gregory Hoblit);
Traffic
(00, Steven Soderbergh);
Dinner with Friends
(01, Norman Jewison);
The Rookie
(02, John Lee Hancock). But the marriage with Ryan broke up.

He showed further proof of acting ambition as the guilty gay husband in
Far from Heaven
(02, Todd Haynes);
Cold Creek Manor
(03, Mike Figgis); Sam Houston in
The Alamo
(04, John Lee Hancock);
The Day After Tomorrow
(04, Roland Emmerich);
In Good Company
(04, Paul Weitz);
Flight of the Phoenix
(04, John Moore);
Yours, Mine and Ours
(05, Raja Gosnell);
American Dreamz
(06, Weitz);
Vantage Point
(08, Pete Travis);
Smart People
(08, Noam Murro);
The Express
(08, Garry Fleder);
Horsemen
(09, Jonas Akerlund);
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
(09, Stephen Sommers);
Pandorum
(09, Christian Alvart);
Legion
(10, Scott Stewart); as Clinton in
The Special Relationship
(10, Richard Loncraine).

Richard Quine
(1920–89), b. Detroit, Michigan
1948:
Leather Gloves
(codirected with William Asher). 1951:
The Sunny Side of the Street; Purple Heart Diary
. 1952:
Sound Off; Rainbow Round My Shoulder
. 1953:
All Ashore; Siren of Bagdad; Cruisin’ Down the River
. 1954:
Drive a Crooked Road; Pushover; So This Is Paris
. 1955:
My Sister Eileen
. 1956:
The Solid Gold Cadillac
. 1957:
Full of Life; Operation Madball
. 1958:
Bell, Book and Candle
. 1959:
That Jane from Maine/It Happened to Jane
. 1960:
Strangers When We Meet; The World of Suzie Wong
. 1962:
The Notorious Landlady
. 1963:
Paris When It Sizzles
. 1964:
Sex and the Single Girl
. 1965:
How to Murder Your Wife; Synanon
. 1967:
Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad; Hotel
. 1970:
The Moonshine War
. 1974:
W
. 1979:
The Prisoner of Zenda
.

Quine was a child actor, first in the Broadway production of
Counsellor at Law
in 1931 and then in movies:
The World Moves On
(34, John Ford);
Counsellor at Law
(33, William Wyler);
Dames
(34, Ray Enright); and
A Dog of Flanders
(35, Edward Sloman). After a few years on the stage and radio he returned to the movies as an adult and dancer:
Babes on Broadway
(41, Busby Berkeley);
For Me and My Gal
(42, Berkeley);
My Sister Eileen
(42, Alexander Hall);
Stand By for Action
(42, Robert Z. Leonard); and
We’ve Never Been Licked
(43, John Rawlins). After war service, he coproduced and codirected
Leather Gloves
, and acted again in
Words and Music
(48, Norman Taurog);
Command Decision
(49, Sam Wood);
The Clay Pigeon
(49, Richard Fleischer); and
No Sad Songs for Me
(50, Rudolph Maté). Having directed a few comedy shorts, he graduated to features.

It was predictable that Quine should begin with musicals, and
So This Is Paris
and
My Sister Eileen
are engaging works. But by the mid 1950s Quine’s ambitions grew, as did his instinct for imitation.
Drive a Crooked Road
and
Pushover
are excellent minor thrillers, but the latter was a rehash of
Double Indemnity
and
Rear Window
. In the same way, Quine’s two Judy Holliday pictures
—The Solid Gold Cadillac
and
Full of Life
—were sub-Cukor.

But at this stage, Quine briefly flourished.
Operation Madball
was an unusually zany comedy, owing much to Mickey Rooney;
Bell, Book and Candle
had a thorough cast and James Wong Howe’s photography of Kim Novak at her most beautiful. Quine’s best and most personal picture again involves Novak:
Strangers When We Meet
, a wistful study of suburban adultery that melted Novak’s reserve better than most of her films.

But as soon as he had seemed on the point of finding a character, Quine’s career wasted away into fainthearted comedies in which sexual sophistication was regularly missed and in which even his skill with actors seemed jaded. Gone the onetime dancer’s lightness and his interest in beautiful women, he was barely tolerable in the advocacy of
Synanon
, the bizarre rural muddle of
The Moonshine War
, and the espousal of Twiggy.

He committed suicide, after a period of depression. He had not worked in ten years, and very few recalled the special frenzy of
Operation Madball
or the melancholy of
Strangers When We Meet
.

Anthony Quinn
(1915–2001), b. Chihuahua, Mexico
Quinn had an Irish father and a Mexican mother. Before he established himself as a star, he had worked twenty years as Hollywood exotic—Redskin, dago, wop, greaser: his mixed origins swallowed every variation. He grunted, leered, had bad table manners, made suggestive remarks to the ladies, and generally cultivated the uncouth. But this roughness already had the phony swagger of a professional wrestler.

Before movies, Quinn had been boxer and painter, and while he dutifully let every Paramount white man slug him, he married Katherine De Mille, the adopted daughter of Cecil B. After a debut in
Parole
(36, Louis Friedlander), he played a Sioux in De Mille’s
The Plainsman
(37), and generally hammed up the background in
Swing High, Swing Low
(37, Mitchell Leisen);
Daughter of Shanghai
(37, Robert Florey);
The Buccaneer
(38, De Mille);
Dangerous to Know
(38, Florey);
King of Alcatraz
(38, Florey);
Union Pacific
(39, De Mille);
Television Spy
(39, Edward Dmytryk);
Emergency Squad
(40, Dmytryk);
Road to Singapore
(40, Victor Schertzinger);
Parole Fixer
(40, Florey);
City for Conquest
(40, Anatole Litvak);
Blood and Sand
(41, Rouben Mamoulian);
The Ghost Breakers
(40, George Marshall);
The Black Swan
(42, Henry King);
Larceny Inc
. (42, Lloyd Bacon);
Road to Morocco
(42, David Butler);
The Ox-Bow Incident
(43, William Wellman);
Buffalo Bill
(44, Wellman);
Roger Touhy, Gangster
(44, Florey);
Guadalcanal Diary
(44, Lewis Seiler);
China Sky
(45, Ray Enright);
Back to Bataan
(45, Dmytryk);
Black Gold
(47, Phil Karlson);
California
(47, John Farrow);
Tycoon
(48, Richard Wallace).

After three years in the theatre (the road show of
Streetcar
), he remained in second features, but began to play the first of his shaggy romantics in whom boisterousness turned to a humorless apprehension of the life force. The adventures were
Mask of the Avenger
(51, Karlson);
Against All Flags
(52, George Sherman);
The World in His Arms
(52, Raoul Walsh);
Ride, Vaquero!
(53, Farrow);
Blowing Wild
(53, Hugo Fregonese); and four Budd Boetticher movies:
City Beneath the Sea
(53);
Seminole
(53);
East of Sumatra
(53); and
The Magnificent Matador
(55). That last, a film à clef for Boetticher, undoubtedly stirred Quinn’s cojones.

The specious nobility of the bullfighter, plus the Mexican references, had already lured the ponderous, heroic Quinn into the open in
The Brave Bulls
(51, Robert Rossen). In 1952, the would-be Mexican peasant won a supporting actor Oscar in
Viva Zapata!
(Elia Kazan). Since that was a characterization that had passed unremarked in countless smaller films, no wonder Quinn began to suppose he might be a neglected actor, in touch with the wellspring of primitiveness.

The matter was clinched when, after
The Long Wait
(54, Victor Saville), Quinn went to Italy and played in Fellini’s
La Strada
(54), as something alarmingly like a life force. Sincerity, anguish, and significance were Quinn’s to command: this was great acting, or a daft spaniel doing its tricks, depending on your point of view. Wrapping up frivolity, he played
Attila
(54, Pietro Francisci); in
Ulysses
(55, Mario Camerini);
Man from Del Rio
(56, Harry Horner); and
The River’s Edge
(57, Allan Dwan). But then he set himself at fame with a piratical Gauguin, straight out of la vie bohème, in
Lust for Life
(56, Vincente Minnelli). It is hard to be angry with a dog so pleased with itself, but a second supporting Oscar for Quinn and widespread abuse for Kirk Douglas’s Van Gogh were hard to digest.

Having played Quasimodo in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(57, Jean Delannoy), Quinn shed his moustache, put on weight, and let his hair go gray. He threw in his lot with vulgar emotional dramas:
Hot Spell
(58, Daniel Mann),
Black Orchid
(58, Martin Ritt), and, most comically, with Anna Magnani and a flock of sheep in George Cukor’s very silly
Wild Is the Wind
(57). Then in 1958, Quinn directed De Mille’s remake of
The Buccaneer
, an uneasy case of pirate turned patrolman. Dull in two Westerns,
Last Train from Gun Hill
(58, John Sturges) and
Warlock
(59, Dmytryk), he was beautifully restrained by Cukor in
Heller in Pink Tights
(60) and by Nicholas Ray in
The Savage Innocents
(60). Of all his noble savages, only Ray’s Eskimo possesses a simplicity that seems honest and interesting.

By the 1960s, however, Quinn was an earth-father, settling ever deeper into the ground:
The Guns of Navarone
(61, J. Lee Thompson);
Barabbas
(62, Richard Fleischer);
Requiem for a Heavyweight
(62, Ralph Nelson);
Lawrence of Arabia
(62, David Lean);
Behold a Pale Horse
(64, Fred Zinnemann);
Zorba the Greek
(65, Michael Cacoyannis);
A High Wind in Jamaica
(65, Alexander Mackendrick);
The Happening
(67, Elliot Silverstein);
The Shoes of the Fisherman
(68, Michael Anderson);
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
(69, Stanley Kramer);
A Walk in the Spring Rain
(69, Guy Green);
The Last Warrior
(70, Carol Reed);
R.P.M
. (70, Kramer);
Across 110th Street
(72, Barry Shear);
Los Amigos
(73, Paolo Cavara);
The Don Is Dead
(73, Fleischer); and
The Marseille Contract
(74, Robert Parrish).