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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).

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Given that many of his films reflect what you might call the broad sweep of black history, a way-too-clever writer might try to compare Denzel Washington – exemplary family man, matinee idol with a conscience, two-time Academy Award winner and the first African-American to win a Best Actor Oscar – to our current president. A smarter writer, however, might compare him to other actors, perhaps including those of other ethnicities.

Washington is, among other things, an old-fashioned movie star. Trained on the stage, he confesses to being influenced by “the method,” yet his acting has none of the emotional fetishism that is so common in the post-Marlon Brando movie world. Indeed, his complete ease before the camera and his low-key joy of performance is probably most similar to Spencer Tracy. The stocky, un-pretty Tracy was nearly the physical opposite of Washington. Still, the relaxed charisma, the ability to generate a laugh or a shiver with a simple expression, and Washington’s awe-inspiring commitment and confidence mirrors the ability of the classic era great, whose only advice to young thespians was to learn their lines and avoid bumping into the furniture.

Indeed, as the meticulously handsome Washington steps into the shoes of slob par excellance Walter Matthau in director Tony Scott’s remake of “The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3“, it’s an opportune time to take a look at some of the lesser-known films from the actor’s back catalog. They’re quite an assortment, sometimes messy and imperfect, but always worthy of your attention. Denzel Washington rarely makes a boring choice.

CLICK HERE FOR TEN FROM WASHINGTON’S BACK CATALOGUE.

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Special FtY Not Really Exclusive Bonus: Denzel Sings!!!!!

It seems to me there might be a movie in henry porter’s DailyKos diary, or rather in the fascinating later life of Marine Interrogator and Asian art scholar Sherwood Moran, who died two years shy of his hundredth birthday in 1983.  The opening of porter’s diary is bit lengthy, but the far lengthier essay  by Moran is, according to his moving online tribute, something of a cult classic among Marine “interviewers” (Moran’s preferred term for his art). The character of the semi-saintly, ex-pacifist, tap-dancing, utterly devoutly Christian liberal who helped defeat the Japanese militarists of World War II with his love of Japan and his sincere compassion for the Japanese people seems like a great star part for any late-middle-aged actor and an profound example of the best of Christianity. Yes, we need at least one more WWII movie, at least.

There are, of course, obvious political resonances as Dick Cheney dominates our airwaves for reasons known only to Dick Cheney, and this really should be “front and center” in the torture debate. Also, a movie based on him would drive our friends at Big Hollywood insane, who really should take a moment to reflect on the very radical and unconservative implications of what they’ve been saying.