(This post is also featured at Premium Hollywood)

Like all character actors, Karl Malden never got quite the same level of attention as costars like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Michael Caine, and George C. Scott. Even the seventies TV series he starred in, “The Streets of San Francisco” found him being overshadowed in the eyes of the teenybopper set by his young punk of a male ingenue costar, Michael Douglas. That was largely because Malden was the kind of performer who understood that acting is a team sport. His best scenes were like great duets with near perfect communication between him and his scene partners. The exception were American Express travelers’ checks; those, he wiped off the screen.

Karl Malden died today at age 97, having been more or less fully retired since appearing in a 2000 episode of “The West Wing.” While he was never precisely an A-lister, he was a go-to actor for secondary leads, president of the Motion Picture Academy, and as far as I can tell a universally respected figure among actors and everyone else associated with the movie industry. He was also married to the same woman for seventy years, a rare enough Holllywood achievement to merit it’s own special Oscar. Not a bad life.

Below the fold is a video tribute I found that, from the misspellings, I gather may come from Serbia. (Malden, whose real name was Mladen Sekulovich, was the son of a Serbian father and a Czechoslovak mother.) The image quality could be better and some of the clips are a little too brief, but it does give you an excellent overview of his truly diverse film career, which included work with some of the greatest Hollywood directors including Elia Kazan, John Frankenheimer, and Alfred Hitchcock. It also includes some interesting moments from two oddball spy films, “Murderer’s Row,” which I haven’t seen, and the underrated “Billion Dollar Brain,” which included some pretty amazing scenes between Malden and Michael Caine as his old spy buddy, Harry Palmer, as well as Françoise Dorléac as his treacherous spy girlfriend (though he’s pretty tricky himself).

(more…)

Up to now, I’ve been a no-show at the several cinephile exams that have been hosted over the last couple of years at Dennis Cozzalio’s legendarily brainy film geek blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Well, before splitting for a hard-earned vacation, Dennis has posted a new exam on film-related matters, up in honor of the cartoon dog genius, Prof. Peabody, which you’re all encouraged to take.

I’ve posted my responses in the comment thread over there already, but now that I’m a SLIFR slacker no more, I thought I’d make ‘em do double duty here because we know that my opinions matter, or something.

Here goes….

1) Favorite Biopic

“Lawrence of Arabia” – an obviously great film and a rather pedestrian choice given that I really like biopics, sometimes the cheesier and and more ridiculously fabricated the better. Therefore, quasi-demi-honorable mention is alluded this triumvirate of absurdly wrong biopics – “The Jolson Story” (it’s amazing how much Al Jolson’s life was just like the plot of “The Jazz Singer”!), “They Died With Their Boots On” (the love affair between Custer and the Indians your socialist history teacher doesn’t want you to see!) and “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” (he didn’t just appear in action movies…he lived them!).

2) Dyan Cannon or Tuesday Weld?

It’s close, but I give it to Dyan Cannon for being hilarious onscreen and genuinely wacky offscreen.

3) Best example of science fiction futurism rendered silly by the event of time catching up to the prediction

The Jetson’s treadmill? I’m drawing a blank here.

4) Annette Funicello & Frankie Avalon or Troy Donahue & Sandra Dee?

Frankie & Annette – I grew up watching those movies on channels 5 & 9 (I think) out here up to age 10 or so. Not that those movies are in any sense “good” (I wonder if I could sit through any of them now?), but F&A at least have a certain amount of charm and sense of humor, which I really can’t say about Troy Donahue, at least.

5) Favorite Raoul Walsh movie?

Not really “White Heat,” and no, definitely not “They Died with Their Boots On”… The winner is “The Roaring Twenties” – by far. Just a magnificent entertainment. I need to see that one again some time soon.

6) Sophomore film which represents greatest improvement over the director’s debut

This is tough, but I guess I’m going to say Polanski’s “Repulsion” as it’s brilliant and “Knife in the Water” left me feeling merely 90 minutes older after it was done. Though, that was in college and I might have a very different reaction now. (Another possibility is “Rushmore” – though I loved “Bottle Rocket” quite a bit, so it’s dicey.)

7) Ice Cube or Mos Def?

Mos Def – because he convinced me he was actually English in “Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Favorite movie about the music industry.

Many, many fun movies in this category, but I guess I’m going to have to go with “Nashville.”

(more…)

An extremely interesting actor and one of the main creative forces behind an early relative of just about everything interesting on your modern TV screen has passed on at age 80. Irish-American by birth and British by upbringing, after turning down the role of James Bond in Dr. No (and he would have been about as great as the bloke who actually agreed to do it) McGoohan made it big on a pair of English spy series, probably today best known in the U.S. as the source of the Johnny Rivers hit, “Secret Agent Man.”

That led to a 1967-1968 non-sequel, The Prisoner, which had McGoohan playing a secret agent (which he always denied was Secret Agent Man John Drake) who tries to quit but instead finds himself in “the Village” — basically the ultimate gated community with just a dash of Gitmo (waterboarding not included), where the not-secret-agent-man is given a number, 6, and his name is really taken away. Despite constant prodding and head games (which get ever more heady as the show progresses), No. 6 fails to cooperate — but just why and what he’s fighting is not a simple matter of something you can quote at an ACLU meeting.

McGoohan appears to have effectively been the showrunner of the series, which for decades was often cited by critics as probably the single best TV series of all time. Though the competition for that title has increased exponentially over the decades, it was without a doubt, a major force in my adolescence, and world geekitude in general, when it was revived on PBS and later on cable and home video. McGoohan went on to a solid movie career as a character actor, usually playing very interesting antagonists/bad guys in movies like Escape from Alcatraz and Silver Streak, but The Prisoner was always the one that people talked about when they talked about McGoohan.

It was for good reason. Like his acting, the show bore an unmistakable stamp of originality and commitment that’s impossible to forget.  His L.A. Times obit includes this quote from Peter Falk, who exposed him as a murderer not once but twice on Columbo.

There are many very, very talented people in this business, but there are only a handful of genuinely original people….I think Patrick McGoohan belongs in that small select group of truly original people.

I think Falk would know.

More from master-compiler David Hudson at his new IFC locale and also from Bullz-Eye’s esteemed TV maven Will Harris.

Be seeing you, Mr. McGoohan…

And now, well, you know I can’t resist. Best. TV show opening. Ever.

I really think so.

UPDATE:  In memory of #6, Jim Emerson has reposted his analysis of the above. Definitely recommended.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Brian Doan, some words from Glenn Kenny, who also digs up a revealing quote from David Cronenberg about the rough going he experienced with McGoohan on Scanners, a movie I really should be able to handle, now that I’ve got my gorephobia partially under control. Why, I wouldn’t mind seeing it right now (except that I won’t).

AND YET ONE MORE UPDATE: The amazing Kimberly “Cinebeats” Lindbergs has some good stuff up on the subject as well, though I disagree with her that the prospect of a new Prisoner TV show is necessarily depressing. To me, everything is basically a remake of something, admitted or not — it’s just a matter of whether the remaker has something new and worthwhile to bring to the party. On the other hand, after what I’ve been through with Frank Miller’s vile travesty of The Spirit and Neil Labute’s ridiculously clueless and bluntly misogynist The Wicker Man, I can very definitely see her point.

About five decades ago, a young, real-life MI6 spook named David Cornwell became irritated by the popularity of a certain pulp fictional assassin for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. He took the pen name John le Carré, and commenced writing about a world of hard-working, habitually depressed British spies without a license to do much of anything they weren’t specifically ordered to do. Though his first two novels were relatively conventional mysteries, his style quickly evolved into tales that were immensely closer to reality but, in their way, no less brutal than the violent escapades of James Bond. His tendency to blend thriller writing with biting liberal politics continues into his 70s, including his more recent novels-into-films, “The Tailor of Panama” and “The Constant Gardener.”

“The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is the film version of le Carré’s third, breakthrough novel – not just a great espionage tale, but also one of the great novels of the 20th century. The spy in question is Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), a burned-out hard case recalled to London in disgrace after his last Berlin agent is gunned down within a few feet of the Berlin Wall — one of a series of British spies targeted by the vicious head of East German intelligence, Mundt (Peter van Eyck). Leamas’s code-name-only boss, Control (Cyril Cusack), knows he’s drinking heavily and on the edge of sanity, but he offers Leamas a chance at redemption and revenge. He is to make himself a target for recruitment by East German intelligence, become a double agent, and feed incriminating disinformation to Mundt’s #2, an intellectual Jew named Fiedler (Oskar Werner) who will only too eagerly use the planted evidence to have his ex-Nazi boss shot. Prior to that, however, Leamas must attract the Stasi’s attention by dramatically hitting the skids. While working at the kind of job the English welfare state gives to educated drunks, Leamas meets Nan Perry (Claire Bloom), an idealistic young librarian who ironically enough turns out to be an ardent, card-carrying Communist. The two start up a love affair that turns out to be a lot more than a simple fling.

With a screenplay by Paul Dehn (“Goldfinger,” “Murder on the Orient Express”), a writer with real-life espionage experience of his own, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” represents some of the best and most purely cinematic work of the great Hollywood left-realist director, Martin Ritt (“Hud,” “The Front” and “Norma Rae”). It is, if anything, harsher and more unrelenting than the book. Le Carré was still a loyal member of Britain’s secret service when he wrote his novel, but director Ritt had few reasons to feel sympathy towards any spy agency of the west or east, and he brings a real sense of outrage to the proceedings. The results are potent enough to make you forget that less realistic movie spies even exist.

Read the Rest at Bullz-Eye.com