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Back in January, I posted a list of my favorite performances by an actress in the 1960s, and a couple of weeks ago, Mary Field challenged me to come up with a similar list of actors. Ms. Field has posted her own list of the top ten greatest acting performances here. Nothing so ambitious for me — I can barely narrow down the top ten performances of any given year — but here is a short chronological list of my personal faves from between 1960 and 1969.
Jack Lemmon (The Apartment) — his finest non-drag performance, maybe his finest, period. And in one of my all-time favorite movies, too.
"Mrs. MacDougall, I think it is only fair to warn you that you are now alone with a notorious sexpot."
James Cagney (One, Two, Three) — not one of Billy Wilder's better-known comedies, but Cagney's performance is finger-snapping good and Katie-Bar-The-Door quotes him every time we go to a baseball game.
"You know what the first thing is I'm going to do? I'm going to lead the workers down there in revolt!
"Put your pants on, Spartacus!"
Tony Randall (Lover Come Back) — My favorite Tony Randall performance, here playing a millionaire CEO living in the shadow of his late father.
"You don't realize how completely he dominated me ever since I was a little boy. Just once I spoke back to him. He cut a switch from a tree and gave me such a whipping, in front of this girl. It was a shattering experience."
"Pete, all kids get whippings."
"But I was twenty five! The girl was my fiancée!"
Robert Preston (The Music Man) — True story: in law school, my pals and I learned all the words to "Marian the Librarian" and sang it to a girl. Named Marian. Who was an undergraduate librarian. Sometimes life just serves it up to you on a platter.
"Oh, my dear little librarian. You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays."
Steve McQueen (The Great Escape) — technically, my favorite performance here is by Steve McQueen's motorcycle, but he's the one riding it, so ...
"Are all American officers so ill-mannered?"
"Yeah, about 99 percent."
The entire cast of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb — you know, a friend once confessed she watched this movie and didn't understand why it was supposed to be a comedy. We're not friends anymore.
"Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks."
The Beatles (A Hard Day's Night) — if you have to ask, I can't tell you.
"Excuse me?"
"Oh, yeah. The lads frequently sit around the telly and watch her for a giggle. One time, we actually sat down and wrote these letters saying how gear she was and all that rubbish."
"She's a trendsetter. It's her profession."
"She's a drag. A well known drag. We turn the sound down on her and say rude things."
Michael Dunn (TV's The Wild, Wild West) — maybe the greatest television villain ever. My favorite, anyway.
"I thought you were dead."
"Oh, no, Mr. West! I'm afraid I shall never die. Death is too ordinary. The humiliation would kill me."
Charlie Brown (TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas) — reaching deep for pathos, comedy and blistering insight into the emptiness of our consumer-driven culture, this round-headed kid really brought it.
"How about cats? If you're afraid of cats, you have ailurophasia."
"Well, sort of, but I'm not sure."
Paul Newman (Harper) — I like Paul Newman. I like his movies, I like his pizza, I like his salad dressing. I like everything there is to like about Paul Newman. Except Paul Newman. How do you account for that? I kid. But I do like Paul Newman.
"What do you do this kind of crummy work for, anyway?"
"What, are you trying to be funny? I do it because I believe in the United Nations and Southeast Asia, and — you think it's funny if your life depends on what goes through the Panama Canal? What about the English pound? I'll tell you something — as long as there's a Siberia, you'll find Lew Harper on the job."
"Are you putting me on?"
"Jeez, I don't think so. "
Lee Marvin (The Dirty Dozen) — Katie-Bar-The-Door once gave me this movie as a Valentine's Day present. No wonder I love her!
"I owe you an apology, colonel. I always thought that you were a cold, unimaginative, tight-lipped officer. But you're really quite emotional, aren't you?"
Zero Mostel (The Producers) — probably one of the three most quoted movies when my pals Muleboy and Bellotoot get together.
"Oh my God!"
"You mean 'oops,' don't you? Just say 'oops' and get out! "
Hal 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey) — saw this in the theater as a kid in 1968, and I say, while a lot of computers turned in fine work in the 1960s, particularly the Robot on Lost in Space, the Hal 9000 topped them all.
"I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a... fraid."
The Professionals is a well-made, fast-paced action-adventure western starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Woody Strode. It's a sharp, witty caper flick with a team of amusing specialists engaged in a job—rescuing a rich man's wife from a Mexican revolutionary—that should get everybody killed by the end of the first reel but you damn well know won't. A sort of Ocean's Eleven, if you will, set in the Mexican desert.
But underneath all the rousing action is a melancholy meditation on the end of things (in this specific case, the Mexican Revolution) that, to me at least, makes The Professionals both a sublime western and something other than a simple caper flick.
"La Revolución," Jack Palance says in a great speech toward the end of the film, "is like a great love affair. In the beginning, she is a goddess. A holy cause. But every love affair has a terrible enemy—time. We see her as she is. La Revolución is not a goddess but a whore. She was never pure, never saintly, never perfect. And we run away, find another lover, another cause. Quick, sordid affairs. Lust, but no love. Passion, but no compassion. Without love, without a cause, we are nothing! We stay because we believe. We leave because we are disillusioned. We come back because we are lost. We die because we are committed."
It's a very good western, and may be the best of a list of those that, despite its cast and three Oscar nominations, no one seems to have ever heard of. Written and directed by Richard Brooks, with Oscar-nominated cinematography by the great Conrad Hall.
Oh, and Claudia Cardinale is spectacularly bosomy.
My rating 4.5 stars (out of 5).
A fool who is unaware he is a fool is a ripe subject for comedy. A fool who knows he is a fool, but who hopes and believes he is loved not just in spite of his foolishness but because of it only to discover at the critical moment that he is in fact despised, that's the stuff of tragedy.
And thus it is that Shakespeare's greatest comic creation, the blustering, cowardly, buffoonish Falstaff, who made appearances in the Henry IV plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor and finally in Henry V, winds up a tragic figure in one of the Bard's saddest story arcs.
In 1965, Orson Welles, a director of Shakespearean film adaptations rivaled only by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, put Falstaff front and center where he belongs, stitching together all the fat fool's scenes into a single production. The result, Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff), tells the story of Prince Hal's rise to power through the eyes of theater's greatest clown, and despite technical limitations arising from Welles' lack of funding, belongs on a list with Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as the best work of the great director's career.
It's also the most personal of Welles's films, a lacerating self-portrait of a man fully aware of the cost of his life of excess and wasted potential—but who's had a good time nevertheless.
Highly recommended—if you can find it. There's a DVD available in Brazil that I hear might work on a U.S. player. Otherwise, it's pretty much YouTube or nothing.
P.S. And on a side note, a point I'd make a few paragraphs further down if I were writing a full-blown essay, I think Shakespeare dispatched Falstaff in such a coldblooded manner largely to get him off the stage—his outsized presence would have thrown the tone of Henry V out of whack—but I think he also wanted to make the point that our greatest leaders necessarily have within them a streak of ruthless pragmatism that's not pretty to look at but which separates them from the Don Quixotes of the world.
It's the price you pay for getting things done.
PICTURE (Drama)
winner: Chimes At Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff) (prod. Ángel Escolano, Emiliano Piedra and Harry Saltzman)
nominees: Doctor Zhivago (prod. Carlo Ponti); For A Few Dollars More (Per qualche dollaro in più) (prod. Arturo González); The Hill (prod. Kenneth Hyman); A Patch of Blue (prod. Pandro S. Berman); The Pawnbroker (prod. Philip Langner and Roger Lewis); Repulsion (prod. Gene Gutowski); The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (prod. Martin Ritt); The Train (prod. Jules Bricken)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical)
winner: The Sound Of Music (prod. Robert Wise)
nominees: Help! (prod. Walter Shenson); A Thousand Clowns (prod. Fred Coe)
PICTURE (Foreign Language)
winner: Obchod na korze (The Shop On Main Street) (prod. Milos Broz and Jaromír Lukás)
nominees: Akahige (Red Beard) (prod. Ryûzô Kikushima and Tomoyuki Tanaka); Pierrot le fou (prod. Georges de Beauregard)
ACTOR (Drama)
winner: Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker)
nominees: Claudio Brook (Simón del desierto a.k.a. Simon of the Desert); Richard Burton (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold); Sean Connery (The Hill); Burt Lancaster (The Train); Sidney Poitier (A Patch of Blue); Terence Stamp (The Collector); Orson Welles (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)
ACTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou)
nominees: The Beatles (Help!); Jean-Paul Belmondo (Pierrot le Fou); Jason Robards (A Thousand Clowns)
ACTRESS (Drama)
winner: Julie Christie (Darling and Doctor Zhivago)
nominees: Catherineo Deneuve (Repulsion); Samantha Eggar (The Collector); Elizabeth Hartman (A Patch Of Blue); Ida Kamiska (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop on Main Street)
ACTRESS (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Julie Andrews (The Sound Of Music)
nominees: Anna Karina (Pierrot le fou); Guiletta Musina (Giulietta degli spiriti a.k.a. Juliet of the Spirits); Rita Tushingham (The Knack ... And How To Get It)
DIRECTOR (Drama)
winner: Orson Welles (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)
nominees: John Frankenheimer (The Train); Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop on Main Street); David Lean (Doctor Zhivago); Sergio Leone (For A Few Dollars More a.k.a. Per qualche dollaro in più); Roman Polanski (Repulsion)
DIRECTOR (Comedy/Musical)
winner: Richard Lester (The Knack ... And How To Get It and Help!)
nominees: Milos Forman (Lásky jedné plavovlásky a.k.a. Loves of a Blonde); Jean-Luc Godard (Pierrot le fou); Robert Wise (The Sound Of Music)
SUPPORTING ACTOR
winner: Paul Scofield (The Train)
nominees: Harry Andrews (The Hill); Martin Balsam (A Thousand Clowns); Keith Baxter (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff); Tom Courteney (Doctor Zhivago); John Gielgud (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff); Edward G. Robinson (The Cincinnati Kid); Oskar Werner (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold)
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
winner: Silvia Pinal (Simón del desierto a.k.a. Simon of the Desert)
nominees: Joan Blondell (The Cincinnati Kid); Claire Bloom (The Spy Who Came In From The Cold); Ruth Gordon (Inside Daisy Clover); Maggie Smith (Othello); Peggy Wood (The Sound Of Music)
SCREENPLAY
winner: Orson Welles, from the plays "Henry IV: Part I," "Henry IV: Part II," "Henry V," "Richard II" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor" by William Shakespeare, and the book Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed (Chimes At Midnight a.k.a. Falstaff)
nominees: Robert Bolt, from the novel by Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago); Ladislav Grosman, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos; story by Ladislav Grosman (Obchod na korze a.k.a. The Shop On Main Street)
SPECIAL AWARDS
"Help!" (Help!) music and lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Song); The Beatles (Help!) (Original Song Score); Maurice Jarre (Doctor Zhivago) (Score)
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