The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (321 page)

From
A Boring Afternoon
, a jeweled observation of mild entropy, to
Nomad
, the most expensive Kazakh film ever made, just a little hysterical with over-effort, you have the bittersweet progress of Ivan Passer. He has had so many difficulties—being pursued by the Nazis; being blackballed by the Communists; being hailed for the warmth and observation of
Intimate Lighting
(about the reunion of two musicians) all the way to
Cutter and Bone
, which is one of the best American films of the 70s mood, shot through with feelings of betrayal and compromise, and with three burning performances from Jeff Bridges, John Heard, and Lisa Eichhorn. Did Passer go wrong somewhere? But when and where?

I suppose he had a moment with the respect given to
Cutter and Bone
when he might have done a run of important pictures, but that piece of Santa Barbara noir is close to a dead end. No one was to blame, but there was too little there for the system to grasp, and it may be that in America Passer was always reliant on screenplays while bringing very little “clout” to the assembling of a production. So
Cutter and Bone
passes as one kind of masterwork, as far away from
Intimate Lighting
as it could be. And in the meantime, Ivan Passer, refugee, wanderer, and exile, has got to be seventy-seven.

Yet this is not all:
Silver Bears
is a lively thriller;
Kidnapped
is a good TV serialization, with Armand Assante as Allan Breck Stewart and Patrick Malahide as Uncle Ebenezer; and
Stalin
is an immense epic that turns upon a galvanic central performance from Robert Duvall, to say nothing of its sense of eastern European dread. Of course, he was also the screenwriter on the early Milos Forman films
Peter and Pavla, Loves of a Blonde
, and
The Firemen’s Ball
. So he needed other screenwriters later?

Bill Paxton
, b. Fort Worth, Texas, 1955
Bill Paxton can vary his action hero by several degrees one way or another—towards introspection or loudmouthed enthusiasm.
One False Move
(92, Carl Franklin) is easily his best film, but not that many directors are as interested in ambivalent heroes. So it may be to the point that Paxton is getting older in a genre that has scant patience with middle age (unless it is a source of wickedness). So it’s worth noting that Paxton is now trying out as a director, on a picture intriguingly titled
Frailty
(02).

He got a job dressing sets on
Big Bad Mama
(74, Steve Carver), but there was a gap of several years before he began acting:
Stripes
(81, Ivan Reitman);
The Lords of Discipline
(83, Franc Roddam);
Streets of Fire
(84, Walter Hill);
Impulse
(84, Graham Baker);
The Terminator
(84, James Cameron);
Weird Science
(85, John Hughes);
Aliens
(86, Cameron);
Near Dark
(87, Kathryn Bigelow);
Next of Kin
(89, John Irvin);
Navy SEALS
(90, Lewis Teague);
Predator 2
(90, Stephen Hopkins);
The Vagrant
(92, Chris Walas);
Trespass
(92, Hill);
Monolith
(94, John Eyres);
Boxing Helena
(93, Jennifer Chambers);
Indian Summer
(93, Mike Binder);
Tombstone
(94, George Pan Cosmatos);
True Lies
(94, Cameron);
Apollo 13
(95, Ron Howard);
The Last Supper
(96, Stacy Title);
Twister
(96, Jan de Bont);
Evening Star
(96, Robert Harling);
Traveller
(97, Jack N. Green), which he coproduced;
Titanic
(97, Cameron);
A Bright Shining Lie
(98, Terry George);
A Simple Plan
(98, Sam Raimi);
Mighty Joe Young
(98, Ron Underwood);
U-571
(00, Jonathan Mostow);
Vertical Limit
(00, Martin Campbell);
Resistance
(03, Todd Komarnicki).

There he was, playing dads and regular guys—
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
(03, Robert Rodriguez);
Club Dread
(04, Jay Chandrasekhar);
Haven
(04, Frank R. Flowers);
Thunderbirds
(04, Jonathan Frakes); directing
The Greatest Game Ever Played
(05) about golf; then along came one of the more original roles of the decade, Bill Henrickson in the HBO series
Big Love
(06–). He took it with unflappable assurance, as if doing
Father Knows Best
. Since that,
The Good Life
(07, Stephen Berra); and
The Slammin’ Salmon
(09, Kevin Heffernan).

Gregory Peck
(1916–2003), b. La Jolla, California
Peck’s one failing as an actor—that he wants to be respectable—is excused because it confirms the aura of responsibility and commitment to proper causes that surrounds him. It was a sign of blocked feelings among politicians that the Nixon White House should have rated Peck one of its most serious enemies. For Peck’s modest radicalism clearly preferred stability.

From his debut, Peck was always a star and rarely less than a major boxoffice success. The image of a sound protagonist, of an escort who will not exploit a lady, of a lawyer who will diligently pursue just cases, still comes through, despite a few interesting attempts to escape it.

But, first to deal with Peck the noble, Gregory the champion of uncomplicated emotions: his debut in the enterprising
Days of Glory
(44, Jacques Tourneur), where he plays a Russian partisan and looks faintly Slav; as the Roman Catholic priest, turning away all wrath, and with flour in his hair recalling each of his young good deeds in
The Keys of the Kingdom
(44, John M. Stahl); as the father in
The Yearling
(46, Clarence Brown), as pristine as the heroes from Inspiration pictures of 1920; as the reporter uncovering anti-Semitism in
Gentleman’s Agreement
(47, Elia Kazan); resisting all Richard Widmark’s threats in
Yellow Sky
(48, William Wellman); implacably resourceful beneath a tricorn hat in
Captain Horatio Hornblower
(51, Raoul Walsh); making a Bering Straits seal pirate into an instrument of American mercantilism in
The World in His Arms
(52, Walsh); squiring the young Audrey Hepburn in
Roman Holiday
(53, William Wyler); stoically enduring that moment in
Designing Woman
(57, Vincente Minnelli) when Lauren Bacall tips a plate of spaghetti in his lap; never fighting rough in an immense fist bout with Charlton Heston in
The Big Country
(58, Wyler); as the conscience-laden platoon commander in Korea in
Pork Chop Hill
(59, Lewis Milestone); the submarine commander sailing into the nuclear haze in
On the Beach
(59, Stanley Kramer); the center that holds firm in
The Guns of Navarone
(61, J. Lee Thompson), the idea of a moral officer who might protect a nation against the excesses of its own brutal soldiers; the wronged father in
Cape Fear
(61, Lee Thompson), battling Robert Mitchum’s depravity; winning an Oscar for his liberal country lawyer and kindly, widower father in
To Kill a Mockingbird
(63, Robert Mulligan); as a hardworking psychiatrist in
Captain Newman, M.D
. (63, David Miller); leader of the expedition again in
MacKenna’s Gold
(69, Lee Thompson); and as the Mission Controller in
Marooned
(69, John Sturges).

He is a protagonist for middle American aspiration, pathfinder of the straight and narrow, and able to suggest a false ease and gloss that go with probity. This Peck never succumbs to the awful doubts that drag down Gary Cooper. He is Kennedy-like, preferring to act in crisis, and always cosmetically vindicated. It is a cardboard character, but carried off with a heavy sense of care and usually the figurehead of major productions. This is the actor turned producer as proud of
The Trial of the Catonsville Nine
(72, Gordon Davidson) as of
The Dove
(74, Charles Jarrott).

It is a good deal harder to remember Peck’s relaxations. Some of these were offered at the time as follies, but some reach down to a real man who might find it a strain looking so Lincolnian: originally, as the fake head of a clinic, himself haunted by ski trails beneath the smooth surface in
Spellbound
(45, Alfred Hitchcock); bringing a sardonic pleasure to Lewt in
Duel in the Sun
(46, King Vidor), riding into the bloody sunset, singing “I’ve been working on the railroad,” and engaged in a constant knife fight of sensuality with Jennifer Jones; in
The Macomber Affair
(47, Zoltan Korda); as the lawyer fatally in love with his client in
The Paradine Case
(47, Hitchcock); staidly dissolute as the Dostoyevsky figure in
The Great Sinner
(49, Robert Siodmak); quite riveting as the colonel with a breakdown in
Twelve O’Clock High
(49, Henry King), and again for King, with a drooping moustache, weary of killing as
The Gunfighter
(50); if that pair suggested a special rapport with King, they then made the stuffy
David and Bathsheba
(51) to dispel such hopes; as Hemingway’s wounded husband in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(52, King), although as prettied up as the changed ending, and spared that gangrenous smell; in
Night People
(54, Nunnally Johnson); excellent, isolated in the jungle, in
The Purple Plain
(55, Robert Parrish); socializing wartime adultery in
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
(56, Johnson); not half as bad an Ahab in
Moby Dick
(56, John Huston) as some alleged, and actually suggesting the ingrained, heroic misanthropy; stern and vengeful in
The Bravados
(58, King); helplessly adrift as Scott Fitzgerald in
Beloved Infidel
(59, King); led astray by Tuesday Weld in
I Walk the Line
(70, John Frankenheimer); chewing on an oaty Scottish accent in
Billy Two Hats
(73, Ted Kotcheff).

The older man out of control of his life in
I Walk the Line
came as a startling admission after the 1960s had been filled by comedy thrillers such as
Mirage
(65, Edward Dmytryk) and
Arabesque
(66, Stanley Donen). Peck still looked less than his real age, still too complacent for great suffering, too bland to rule in an age of Watergate.

His dignity and solidity were used well as the impossibly harassed ambassador in
The Omen
(76, Richard Donner), and he was intelligent and proud as
MacArthur
(77, Joseph Sargent), even if he could not quite expose himself to overweening arrogance or sublime wrongheadedness. Reserve had always been Peck’s charm, and his liability. He was too genteel and restrained for the Nazi in
The Boys from Brazil
(78, Franklin Schaffner), so he wasted the part’s evil in overacting.

After that, he was in
The Sea Wolves
(80, Andrew V. McLaglen);
The Scarlet and the Black
(83, Jerry London) on TV;
Amazing Grace and Chuck
(87, Mike Newell); as Ambrose Bierce in
Old Gringo
(89, Luis Puenzo)—touching but never catching fire;
Other People’s Money
(91, Norman Jewison); as a shady lawyer helping an old nemesis in
Cape Fear
(91, Martin Scorsese)—another hint (to him) to lay off the honor thing; on TV in
The Portrait
(93, Arthur Penn); and as Father Mapple in another
Moby Dick
(98, Franc Roddam).

Peck was for years Hollywood’s most distinguished veteran. Young people even conclude that he was of the golden age—though he only came to films in the forties. He did state occasions very well—he did the tribute to Audrey Hepburn at the 1993 Oscars with evident feeling.

But the old man was very staid, and it came as a shock to see how lethally handsome he had been in, say,
Spellbound
or
Duel in the Sun
.

Sam Peckinpah
(1925–84), b. Fresno, California
1961:
The Deadly Companions
. 1962:
Ride the High Country/Guns in the Afternoon
. 1965:
Major Dundee
. 1969:
The Wild Bunch
. 1970:
The Ballad of Cable Hogue
. 1971:
Straw Dogs
. 1972:
Junior Bonner; The Getaway
. 1973:
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
. 1974:
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
. 1975:
The Killer Elite
. 1977:
Cross of Iron
. 1978:
Convoy
. 1983:
The Osterman Weekend
.

In the years since Peckinpah’s death, the “rogue” in him has taken on a clear but absurdly distant glow—like Monument Valley at magic hour seen in the rearview mirror. In other words, it seems farfetched that Peckinpah existed, let alone that we witnessed and wrestled with his films as they appeared. He could be just a warning or a hope painted on the sky: the director who got out of line. Not that this indicates stumbling or mistake. No, he got out of line from sheer, willful resolve, as if certain that self-destruction would be his only peace. Was there really a movie director that rueful, that passionate, that dangerous? That beautiful? Surely “they” would have disappeared him.

Peckinpah was born into a ranching family, and military school and service with the marines hardened his deliberate masculinity. He studied drama at the University of Southern California and worked in the theatre as an actor and director. After small jobs on TV he entered movies as a dialogue director and, eventually, as a writer. He had a small acting part in Don Siegel’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(56), on which he also worked as a writer, before making a reputation in TV Westerns—creating
The Rifleman
and
The Westerner
. After the freshness of his first two Westerns, Peckinpah was fired from
The Cincinnati Kid
and then quarreled badly with producer Martin Ransohoff so that
Major Dundee
emerged a broken thing, with intriguing moments jostling together. For several years he was unemployed as a director. He scripted
The Glory Guys
(65, Arnold Laven) and
Villa Rides!
(68, Buzz Kulik) and only after more TV work—including a notable direction of Katherine Anne Porter’s
Noon Wine
—did he make a comeback with
The Wild Bunch
, a significant advance into “authentic” violence, and the basis for his “commercial” career.