In Memoriam: Eli Wallach 1915-2014

Actor. Preferred the stage, but appeared in over 90 films and TV productions anyway.

"What is in my makeup that makes me want to fly halfway around the world to play a character? Why can't I just take it easy?"

Wallach first studied under the noted acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the National Playhouse School of the Theater in New York City. After serving in World War Two, Wallach resumed his studies under the noted acting teacher Lee Strasberg at the newly-opened Actors Studio. The two acting teachers were themselves followers of the teachings of Constantin Stanislavski, a Russian thespian and theater manager who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Meisner and Wallach wanted to disseminate Stanislavski's theories to a whole new generation of American actors (though they both sometimes grumpily disagreed as to what those theories were; more about that in a later post.) Wallach, of course, was one of those young actors, often described, when he was no longer young, as a "method" actor, though I don't believe he ever referred to himself that way. Let's just say all the studying paid off brilliantly.

The person at the Actors Studio who had the most impact on Wallach wasn't Lee Strasberg but fellow classmate Anne Jackson, whom he married in 1948. 

Wallach appeared on Broadway alongside Maureen Stapleton in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, for which he won a Tony in 1951.

Another Actors Studio classmate of his.

Wallach made his film debut in 1956's Baby Doll, playing a sleazy businessman who tries to get between fellow sleazy businessman Kurt Malden and his child bride Carrol Baker. Based on a hoot of a screenplay by the aforementioned Tennessee Williams, it was quite controversial in its day, but now is merely a good time, assuming your idea of a good time is watching sleazy businessmen trying get between other sleazy businessmen and their child brides (Baker also sleeps in a crib.)

Two on a swing.

As  Mexican baddie Calvera in The Magnificent Seven. Not the last time he'd play a Mexican baddie.

Wallach finally got to appear alongside that Actors Studio classmate of his in The Misfits, her final film. He thought she might have talked director John Huston into casting him as a working-class widower. 

Here's a couple of posters from the time of the movie's 1961 release. In the one at the top, Clark Gable's (it was his final film, too), Marilyn Monroe's, and Montgomery Clift's names are all prominently displayed, above the title, above everything. Eli Wallach's, meanwhile, is lower and smaller, to the right of Thelma Ritter's. On the bottom poster "GableMonroeClift" stands out, whereas Wallach's name is even smaller than before, and now underneath Thelma Ritter's. This all echoes the credits as they appear in the film. So why am I pointing this out? Because in the actual movie, not only does Wallach get more screen time than Ritter, but also MONTGOMERY CLIFT! His character is a major catalyst for much of what happens in the story, but you wouldn't know that from these ads.  In 1961, Wallach simply wasn't as big a name as Gable, Monroe, Clift, or even Ritter. Having seen this film several times I can assure you he's just as memorable.

Wallach tries out some pickup lines--in a pickup! 

One of many actors to appear in How the West Was Won (1962). He played an outlaw. Not his last Western, nor his last outlaw.

Wallach's relatively burgeoning film career didn't prevent him from appearing on stage. In 1964, he and wife Anne starred in the mildly successful comedy Luv by Murray Schisgal. That's Alan Arkin on the left.

Wallach, Jackson, and Arkin as Mystery Guests on the popular 1950s-60s game show What's My Line, emceed by John Daly. All the way up to 25. Must be stumping the panel (whom, if you've never seen the show, are blindfolded.)

“Actually I lead a dual life...In the theater, I’m the little man or the irritated man, the misunderstood man...[but in films] I do seem to keep getting cast as the bad guys.”

So let's get to one of those bad guys. But first allow me to introduce...

...Sergio Leone, an Italian director who in 1964 had never been to the United States and couldn't speak a word of English, yet had an abiding interest in the American West. He decided he'd like to make a western, and cast in the lead Clint Eastwood, an actor on the popular American TV show Rawhide (his first choice, Eric Fleming, from the same show, turned him down.) The result, translated in English, was A Fistful of Dollars, a hit--in Italy, that made Eastwood a movie star--in Italy. There was a sequel, also with Eastwood, called For a Few Dollars More, another hit--in Italy. Word of these Italian hits did make its way to Hollywood. United Artists approached Leone about distributing the two movies in the United States, but asked if he could make a third to go along with them. As Leone was interested in breaking into the American market--after all, his films took place in America--he readily agreed. For this third picture...

...he again cast Clint Eastwood...

...as well as Lee Van Cleef, who had been in A Few Dollars More, but was playing a different character this time around. Finally, Leone cast an actor he hadn't worked with before...

...Eli Wallach as Tuco, a more hapless, and hilarious, variation of the Mexican baddie he had played in The Magnificent Seven.

Now, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on the whole wasn't a comedy, but Leone definitely took a tongue-in-cheek approach whenever Wallach appeared on screen. In fact, Van Cleef , "the Bad", was occasionally forgotten about so the director could focus on the comic (if occasionally violent) you-scratch-my-back-I'll-stab-yours relationship between Eastwood and Wallach. As for Clint--who finally did become a movie star in the United States thanks to this film--he may have missed his true calling as a comedy team straight man, albeit a straight man who scowls a lot. 

Tuco and the Man with No Name forge an uneasy alliance...Their third or fourth uneasy alliance, actually.

Can't a man get a little privacy?

What better sign that a second-tier actor had arrived in the 1960s than to appear as a villain on Batman? Wallach was the third person (following George Sanders and Otto Preminger) to play Mr Freeze. Several decades later the character would pop up again in a movie, which raises the tantalizing question, will Arnold Schwarzenegger ever star in a remake of The Misfits?

 Wallach won an Emmy for a supporting role in the 1966 made-for-television movie The Poppy Is Also a Flower, an anti-drug spy film.

Wallach and Milo O'Shea (on the left) played an aging gay couple in the Broadway comedy Staircase.

 Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson did most of their acting together on the stage--they were often compared to the one-time famous Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, another married acting couple--but did appear on the big screen in a couple of 1960s comedies, The Tiger Makes Out, where they played the leads, and How to Save a Marriage (and Ruin Your Life), in which they played  supporting roles. I've only seen the latter, a dated sex farce starring Dean Martin and Stella Stevens. Nice to see them together, even in sub-par material.

Wallach chats with a writer whose plays helped give him his start, Tennessee Williams.

In Godfather III (1990) Wallach played a ruthless Mafia mastermind, whom is nevertheless oddly trusting when it comes to accepting pastries. The woman is Talia Shire, whose brother, director Francis Ford Coppola, told Wallach his character was an old Corleone family friend. Wallach asked, "If he's an old family friend, then why wasn't he in Godfather I or II?"

 Wallach and Eastwood remained friends.

And the latter cast the former as a liquor store owner in Mystic River (2003)  

In 2010, Wallach recieved an honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement. Not bad for a guy who resisted going into movies in the first place.

Anne Jackson survives him.   






 

Above Our Poor Power to Add or Detract

 Charleston, S.C., circa 1903

At a cemetery somewhere in Charleston, several young women examine the graves of Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War, which had been over for quite some time, almost 40 years, when this picture was taken. By then every former rebel state was back in the Union, and Woodrow Wilson, who spent his childhood in Confederate Virginia, was a mere decade away from assuming the presidency. Yet as you can see from the above photo, the war was far from forgotten. At least not by these three women. The one kneeling on the left may be crying, but it's hard to tell. Indeed, maybe I shouldn't have used the word young to describe these three. The one on the right looks a bit older. Taller, anyway. Possibly she's the mother of the two on the left.

Now, I find the cause that the men buried in this cemetery gave their lives for to be morally repugnant. The Confederacy was about nothing more than the perpetuation of slavery. States rights, you say? I'm sorry but human rights trump states rights. Yet I don't begrudge the three women visiting, possibly grieving, over this place. All the men buried here had either wives, fiances, children, parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, friends, and possibly more than friends that they dare not talk about. The three women look too young to have been wives. The one on the left could have been a daughter. Or they could have been complete strangers. The number of Confederate dead is said to have been around 258,000. The loss of so many young men may have still resonated 40 years later.

The Confederate soldiers for the most part weren't slaveholders. Indeed, poor whites may have been at something of a disadvantage in the Old South. How does one find a decent job when the blacks are doing all the work (albeit unwillingly) for free? So, then, why did so many poor whites fight and die to preserve slavery? They probably thought they were fighting for some other reason, like the aforementioned states rights. The politicians and the plantation owners propping them up told--warned!--all those poor whites that the damn Yankees wanted to come in and change their whole way of life. Given their destitution, you'd think they'd welcome such a change. But the damned that you know is better than the damned that you don't. The term wouldn't come into vogue until the 21st century, but these poor whites may have seen the Union army as an "existential threat."

Speaking of that Union army, though I find them to be on the acceptable side of the conflict, all the soldiers didn't necessarily find slavery to be morally repugnant. Historians will tell that Northerners were in fact divided about the issue. And even the ones against it were divided as whether to end it immediately (by force, I guess) or just keep it confined to the South, a kind of 19th century version of containment. Though he personally found slavery to be morally repugnant, Abraham Lincoln initially favored the latter. When he finally did issue the Emancipation Proclamation, it was as a tactical move, hoping that it would deprive the South of any international support it may have gotten by driving home the message the war was indeed about slavery (even if he previously had claimed it wasn't.)

So, if the Union soldiers weren't all fighting to end slavery, what else could have been motivating them? Well, the South was rebelling. That was treason. And they had attacked Fort Sumter, a artificial island run by the U.S. Army in Charleston Harbor, the same Charleston as in the above photo, though that was taken inland. In a way, you could say that the North was acting in self-defense. For different reasons you could say that about the South, too. Two sides fighting in self-defense. What a war.

It's also quite possible that the soldiers in the North and the South  had no idea what they were fighting for or had any strong feelings about it. That's more common than you might think, as wars are fought on the ground by people unaware of how history will categorize them, pigeonhole them, at some future date. But if the soldiers had no strong feelings about it, why were they even there? Well, they could have gotten in trouble if they weren't. Both the North and the South had a draft (I myself probably would enlist in a war fought over bubble gum if I thought jail was the only alternative.) 

Beyond that, however, I think the soldiers on both sides figured their respective leaders had their reasons. Good reasons, or they wouldn't have let such a terrible thing happen in the first place, right? We Americans like to bitch about government, yet nevertheless are quite willing to suspend our judgement, our skepticism, to give our politicians the benefit of a doubt, in matters of war and peace. We need to believe that they know what they're doing. If they don't, then that in itself could constitute an existential threat.

At any rate, until someone can convince me otherwise, I think the North was on the right side of that particular conflict, even if at the time everybody from Lincoln on down didn't always seem so sure themselves. 

What about the various other wars the United States has gotten itself into? Were they worth it?

World War II. Worth it. Though it wasn't the precise reason the United States got involved, and the G.I.s doing the fighting didn't know about it until very late in the game, all it takes is a few minutes of film shot at Dachau to convince me of the rightness of that cause.

The Revolutionary War. True, King George III wasn't exactly Adolf Hitler, and modern-day Britain is more alike the United States than it is different (I'm told they even speak the same language as us) I still have to think it was worth it. Chalk it up to my dislike of royalty. The whole concept of royalty. I strongly feel that Arthur person should have run for office instead of pulling some stupid sword out of a stone. It also irks me when my fellow Americans show too much interest in royal affairs. Especially royal weddings. The fascination people here in the States showed for the nuptials of Charles and Diane, and then, a generation X later, William and Kate, makes me wonder if Benedict Arnold shouldn't replace George Washington on the dollar bill.

Besides, it's kind of hard to be against the Revolutionary War when I was born and raised in the very nation-state that resulted from it. To not give the Continental Congress the benefit of a doubt might yet invite another existential threat.

(A while back, I read about people who refuse to fill out 1040 tax forms on the grounds that the United States is an illegal country and that they're in fact citizens of Great Britain. If that's true, I think the U.K. equivalent of the IRS should get after them. They owe them some money.)

How about the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan? Look, I don't want to start any arguments here, especially not with those of you who seem to believe there's an invisible ray emanating from the U.S. Constitution that magically prevents our leaders from ever going to war unless it's absolutely necessary. Can we at least agree that the soldiers and sailors fighting those wars assumed some good would come out of them, whether it actually did or not?

This Memorial Day weekend, let's once again remember all those who gave their lives to ensure that the rest of us remain free.

But let's also remember those who gave their lives for less exalted reasons. Who gave their lives for no good reason at all.

If you think about it, they may have made an even bigger sacrifice.

This Day in History

On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 was launched. The crew consisted of astronauts Eugene Cernan, John Young, and the commander of the mission, Thomas Stafford.

A dry run for the more momentous Apollo 11--the one with Neil Armstrong--launched a few months later, it did all the same things, but minus a lunar landing. OK, that's one helluva minus. Let's see if I can get some addition going here

Stafford, Cernan, and Young were the second crew to orbit the moon. That's the command module above. So who got close enough to photographed it?

Either Cernan or Young, who flew the odd-looking contraption above, the Lunar Module.

The Lunar Module eventually came within 8.4 nautical miles (that's 15.6 km for all my foreign readers out there) of the moon.

Somewhere along the way somebody snapped a picture of an "Earthrise". It wasn't the first such picture, as an earlier (and more iconic) photo was taken on Apollo 8 in December, 1968.

In fact, Apollo 10 seemed destined to be the least iconic of all the 1960s space flights. Second moon orbit, second Earthrise, a lunar lander that never actually landed. Yet it was necessary. So how to make it more interesting, more entertaining, to the taxpaying public footing the bill? NASA turned to a pop culture phenomenon bigger than even the space program itself.

That's the Command Module on the left, the Lunar Module on the right.

Though the two modules were named after Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the comic strip characters were never "official" mascots for Apollo 10. However, if after looking at the above pictures you thought otherwise, you're forgiven.

If you were at a NASA visitors center 45 years later and thought otherwise, you're forgiven.

Let's briefly return to 1969.

As the astronauts walk down a brightly lit hallway, a young NASA secretary holds out a stuffed Snoopy for them to pet.

 

The petting threatened to turn heavy.

I know that one fellow's behavior might seem a bit boorish (or worse), but, remember, it was the 1960s. As Tom Wolfe and others have pointed out, the astronauts of that era tended to be on the horny side. 

Perhaps with some encouragement.