The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (434 page)

His most original performance in Britain was as a clean-shaven nerve-wracked Herman in
The Queen of Spades
(48, Dickinson), wonderfully suggesting the breakdown of a scheming opportunist persuaded to believe in both ghosts and luck at cards. His last years moved from the sublime to the ridiculous, as though he had something else on his mind: as well as the two Ophuls films,
Wiener Walzer
(51, Emile Edwin Reinert);
L’Affaire Maurizius
(54, Duvivier);
Oh, Rosalinda!!
(55, Powell/Pressburger);
König für eine Nacht
(56, Paul May); Cauchon in
Saint Joan
(57, Otto Preminger); and a sardonic Esterhazy in
I Accuse
(57, José Ferrer).

Jerry Wald
(1911–62), b. New York
Wald had thirty busy years in cinema; when he died it seemed incredible that a fifty-year-old could have had a hand in so many films. Perhaps it was the hectic activity on humdrum ventures that earned Wald the reputation of being a model for Budd Schulberg’s novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
Certainly he was a vulgarian in the Selznick mold, combining a brutal instinct for the lowest common denominator with earnest literary pretensions. Originally a writer himself, when he died he was flexing his muscles over
Ulysses
, having already conquered Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. It made him the sort of producer that outsiders laughed at. But plenty of professionals—from Joan Crawford to Fritz Lang—attested to his enthusiasm for movies, and to the foolish good nature that swept him along.

The irony of a producer’s role was often that he had immense power but childish insights. In many cases, it was the director who needed a producer’s tact with people, to mollify and manipulate his own muddleheaded boss. Wald seems to fit that specter, just as his career shows the grim fate of inadequate men once they emerged from the shelter of smooth-running film factories and talented directors. In human terms, many producers may have been victims, highly paid and heavily armed, but out of their depth, unable to grasp the nature of a film, the logistics of a schedule, or the aspirations of a director. The producers who survive with any credit are those who maintained at least a love of movies. If only on that score, Wald is worth remembering.

He had worked on radio and as a journalist before he began writing for Warners: the fascinating
Living on Velvet
(35, Frank Borzage);
Sing Me a Love Song
(36, Ray Enright);
Hollywood Hotel
(37, Busby Berkeley);
Hard to Get
(38, Enright);
Going Places
(38, Enright);
Naughty But Nice
(39, Enright);
The Roaring Twenties
(39, Raoul Walsh); and
They Drive by Night
(40, Walsh).

In 1942, Warners promoted him to the rank of producer. He stayed there eight years, either producing or supervising a variety of genres, supporting the career of Joan Crawford and striking a happy partnership with Michael Curtiz. In retrospect, there are signs that he turned Warners from crime to the women’s picture. His output included films like
Mildred Pierce
(45, Curtiz) that seems the epitome of highly organized studio hokum. Did they need producing? Perhaps Wald sensed that
Mildred
had a lasting chemistry missing in the more mundane virtues of
Navy Blues
(41, Lloyd Bacon);
Across the Pacific
(42, John Huston);
Desperate Journey
(42, Walsh);
Destination Tokyo
(43, Delmer Daves);
Background to Danger
(43, Walsh);
The Very Thought of You
(44, Daves);
Objective Burma
(45, Walsh);
Pride of the Marines
(45, Daves);
Humoresque
(47, Jean Negulesco);
Possessed
(47, Curtis Bernhardt);
Dark Passage
(47, Daves);
To the Victor
(48, Daves);
Key Largo
(48, Huston);
Johnny Belinda
(48, Negulesco);
One Sunday Afternoon
(49, Walsh);
Flamingo Road
(49, Curtiz);
Task Force
(49, Daves);
Young Man with a Horn
(50, Curtiz);
Caged
(50, John Cromwell);
The Glass Menagerie
(50, Irving Rapper);
The Damned Don’t Cry
(50, Vincent Sherman); and
Storm Warning
(51, Stuart Heisler).

Wald left Warners, and he was hired by RKO where he would form a unit with Norman Krasna. Two films there were both highly original projects and great artistic successes:
Clash by Night
(52, Fritz Lang) and
The Lusty Men
(52, Nicholas Ray). Both films deal with a sort of life and middle-aged character seldom seen in American films. He also produced
The Blue Veil
(51, Bernhardt) for RKO. But if Wald was finding himself, he next became vice-president at Columbia, where he necessarily had to be wired to Harry Cohn’s ass. He stayed at Columbia for four years as executive producer, involved (if only nominally, as a producer of producers) on
From Here to Eternity
(53, Fred Zinnemann);
The Big Heat
(53, Lang);
Gun Fury
(53, Walsh);
It Should Happen to You
(54, George Cukor);
Pushover
(54, Richard Quine);
Human Desire
(54, Lang);
The Long Gray Line
(55, John Ford);
The Last Frontier
(56, Anthony Mann);
Picnic
(56, Joshua Logan);
Jubal
(56, Daves);
The Eddy Duchin Story
(56, George Sidney); and
The Harder They Fall
(56, Mark Robson).

He then moved on to Fox as an independent producer. With more effective power than ever before, he blew most of his reputation on literary melodramas:
An Affair to Remember
(57, Leo McCarey);
No Down Payment
(57, Martin Ritt);
Kiss Them for Me
(57, Stanley Donen);
Peyton Place
(57, Robson);
The Long Hot Summer
(58, Ritt);
The Best of Everything
(59, Negulesco), with Joan Crawford;
The Sound and the Fury
(59, Ritt);
Hound Dog Man
(59, Don Siegel);
The Story on Page One
(59, Clifford Odets);
Sons and Lovers
(60, Jack Cardiff);
Let’s Make Love
(60, Cukor), scripted by Krasna and reuniting Wald and Marilyn Monroe, whose calendar picture he had exploited for
Clash by Night; Return to Peyton Place
(61, José Ferrer);
Wild in the Country
(61, Philip Dunne);
Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man
(62, Ritt); and
The Stripper
(63, Franklin Schaffner). The remarkable thing about those last films is how many of them are based on glaring mistakes—in casting, script, or approach—that a competent producer should have eliminated at an early stage.

Christopher
(Ronny)
Walken
, b. Queens, New York, 1943
There is something a touch too chilly, or alien, about Walken to make a lead actor. He calls it “a natural kind of foreignness—very hard for me to play a regular guy.” So he has made himself a rarity: the supporting actor who changes his look, his voice, and his demeanor at will. He can be frightening, and unexpectedly funny; he has been a credible cowboy, a dancer, a figure of evil, and, in
The Deer Hunter
(78, Michael Cimino), a remarkable portrait of disintegration and self-destruction.

He was educated at Hofstra University, but as a child actor he had done a lot of live television. His movie debut was
The Anderson Tapes
(71, Sidney Lumet), after which he did
The Happiness Cage
(72, Bernard Girard); the poet in
Next Stop, Greenwich Village
(75, Paul Mazursky);
Annie Hall
(77, Woody Allen);
Roseland
(77, James Ivory); winning the supporting actor Oscar in
The Deer Hunter; Last Embrace
(79, Jonathan Demme);
The Dogs of War
(80, John Irvin); as Nate Champion in
Heaven’s Gate
(80, Cimino); a dazzling dancer in
Pennies from Heaven
(81, Herbert Ross); and
Brainstorm
(83, Douglas Trumbull), the last film of Natalie Wood’s—Walken was on the boat when she died.

He was the actor in
Who Am I This Time?
(82, Demme) for TV; and the man who can see terrible futures in
The Dead Zone
(83, David Cronenberg); the villain in the James Bond film
A View to a Kill
(85, John Glen); Sean Penn’s father in
At Close Range
(86, James Foley); the sergeant in
Biloxi Blues
(88, Mike Nichols);
Homeboy
(88, Michael Seresin);
The Milagro Beanfield War
(88, Robert Redford); as Whitley Strieber in
Communion
(89, Philippe Mora); as creepy as fog in
The Comfort of Strangers
(90, Paul Schrader); not quite hard enough as
King of New York
(90, Abel Ferrara); with Glenn Close in
Sarah, Plain and Tall
(91, Glenn Jordan), as the widowed farmer;
McBain
(91, James Glickenhaus); as Max Schreck in
Batman Returns
(92, Tim Burton);
Mistress
(92, Barry Primus), as a suicidal actor;
Skylark
(93, Joseph Sargent);
True Romance
(93, Tony Scott); and
Wayne’s World 2
(93, Bill Duke).

Alas, Walken has become the ghost that haunts American film, hired so often to be spooky, pale, staring, eccentric, Satanic, and so on. And there’s a lot of “so on” in modern American film. This has nearly buried the brilliant actor from
The Deer Hunter
or
At Close Range;
it has forgotten the dancer and the potential comic. And it seems to bore him as much as some of his fans. He is remarkable, but he has been turned into a “type”:
A Business Affair
(94, Charlotte Brandstrom); excellent in
Pulp Fiction
(94, Quentin Tarantino);
Search and Destroy
(95, David Salle);
The Prophecy
(95, Gregory Widen);
The Addiction
(95, Ferrara); who else could be the lead in Donald Cammell’s last, misbegotten film,
Wild Side
(95);
Nick of Time
(95, John Badham); grotesque in
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead
(95, Gary Fleder);
Celluloide
(96, Carlo Lizzani);
Basquiat
(96, Julian Schnabel); excellent in
The Funeral
(96, Ferrara);
Last Man Standing
(96, Walter Hill);
Touch
(97, Schrader);
Excess Baggage
(97, Marco Brambilla);
Suicide Kings
(97, Peter O’Fallon);
Mouse Hunt
(97, Gore Verbinski);
The Prophecy II
(98, Greg Spence);
Illuminata
(98, John Turturro);
Trance
(98, Michael Almereyda). He was terrific as the voice of Colonel Cutter in
Antz
(98, Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson);
New Rose Hotel
(98, Ferrara);
Blast from the Past
(99, Hugh Wilson);
Vendetta
(99, Nicholas Meyer); the Hessian Horseman in
Sleepy Hollow
(99, Burton);
Sarah, Plain and Tall: Winter’s End
(99, Jordan);
Kiss Toledo Goodbye
(99, Lyndon Chubbuck);
The Prophecy 3
(00, Patrick Lussier);
The Opportunists
(00, Myles Connell);
Scotland, PA
(01, Billy Morrissette);
Joe Dirt
(01, Dennie Gordon);
America’s Sweethearts
(01, Joe Roth);
The Affair of the Necklace
(01, Charles Shyer);
Poolhall Junkies
(01, Gregory Martin);
Inside Job
(01, Laszlo Papas);
Down and Under
(01, David McNally);
Plots with a View
(02, Nick Hurran);
The Country Bears
(02, Peter Hastings).

He was excellent as the father in
Catch Me If You Can
(02, Steven Spielberg); Cato in the TV
Julius Caesar
(02, Uli Edel);
Kangaroo Jack
(03, McNally);
Gigli
(03, Martin Brest);
Envy
(04, Barry Levinson);
Man on Fire
(04, Scott);
Wedding Crashers
(05, David Dobkin);
Domino
(05, Scott);
Romance and Cigarettes
(05, John Turturro);
Click
(06, Frank Coraci);
Man of the Year
(07, Levinson);
Fade to Black
(06, Oliver Parker);
Hairspray
(07, Adam Shankman);
Five Dollars a Day
(08, Nigel Cole);
The Maiden Heist
(09, Peter Hewett);
Citizen Brando
(09, Ridha Behi)—in which he seems to have replaced the great man;
The Irishman
(10, Jonathan Hensleigh);
Hairspray 2
(10, Shankman).

Robert Walker
(1918–51), b. Salt Lake City, Utah
Robert Walker had the kind of heartbreaking smile that tells an audience he is doomed. He was so thin, so earnest, so likeable, so brittle as Jennifer Jones’s soldier boyfriend in
Since You Went Away
(44, John Cromwell), we know how short-lived their idyll must be, and we guess that the laws of melodrama will prove his courage too late to win a crusty grandfather’s love and forgiveness.

You want to reach out and warn Walker, or put an umbrella over his head. And that’s without knowing that the love scenes in the picture were shot as the marriage between Walker and Jones came apart, and as Jones pursued her affair with the picture’s producer, David Selznick.

Walker and the then–Phylis Isley were married in 1939: they had two sons (one of whom, Robert Jr., had an acting career and an uncanny resemblance to his father). But in 1941, Phylis met Selznick, and before long she was “Jennifer Jones.” Walker had a few bit roles as early as 1939: he asks Ann Sheridan for a dance in
Winter Carnival
(39, Charles F. Riesner);
These Glamour Girls
(39, S. Sylvan Simon); and
Dancing Co-Ed
(39, Simon).