The Wanderers: Paul Benjamin

It's been a while since I've done a Wanderers post so for those unaware, it's a feature here at Cinema Styles celebrating actors who aren't generally known to the casual movie-going public (although the last one I did was Robert Forster who's probably as big a name as you'll ever get on this feature but that's the point). So many writers, critics and movie fans in general (myself included) spend an inordinate amount of time celebrating the stars and major character actors who filled the big supporting roles that the journeymen, I call them the wanderers, get overlooked. They're the actors who appear in movie after movie and fill various small roles on television but never become familiar by name to too many people.

Regular readers are probably already well aware that I love celebrating uncelebrated actors, and write about them often, whether it be for this feature, the short list or just a particular actor I want to single out, like Len Cariou.

Well, recently, when thinking about an actor I wanted to write about for The Wanderers, one actor kept popping into my head: Paul Benjamin. Despite most of his roles in movies being small enough to barely qualify as minor supporting, he stands out and when you show him to someone unfamiliar with his name they immediately recognize him, or at least his voice, his marvelous, inimitable voice.

Paul Benjamin first made an impact on me in the late seventies in Don Siegel's Escape from Alcatraz. I can still hear him talking about the "counts" at the prison:

"Sometimes I think that's all this place is. One... long... count. The prisoners count the hours, the bulls count the prisoners and the king bulls count the counts."

It was that voice of his and his undeniable screen presence that stuck with me and years later, he's still the main thing I remember about the movie, despite the participation of Clint Eastwood, Patrick McGoohan and Fred Ward (all very good, of course).

He continued to pop up in movies and on television through the eighties, always a welcome sight, before landing the role most would associate with him forever, the street corner commentator known as ML in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Joined by the late Robin Harris in the middle and Frankie Faison (an easy contender for another Wanderer post) on the right, Benjamin was the philosopher of the group, the de facto leader and brains of the outfit. While Harris and Faison provide the reactions, Benjamin provides the substance they are reacting to, and does so exquisitely, bringing to his statements an underlying tension that is mirrored by other characters throughout the movie.

Here's one of his more famous scenes from the film, which starts here (click for first part) and finishes here (click for second part).

After Do the Right Thing Benjamin found more work on television, playing a recurring character, homeless man Al Ervin, on E.R. and even took time away from his acting to write plays as well. Benjamin continues to work steadily and even if his name is not as well-known as it should be, one thing is certain: Once you've seen him perform, you never forget him. His talent and presence won't allow it.

The Wanderers: Robert Forster

In The Wanderers, a long neglected series here at Cinema Styles, I discuss actors who never did a lot of leads or many famous supporting roles but stayed busy throughout a long career, taking what parts they were given and never letting foolish pride stand in the way of good, solid work. It's not a series for chronicling the works of A-listers like Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Sylvia Sidney, Thelma Ritter or Thomas Mitchell. It's for people like Geoffrey Lewis, James Edwards and Diane Baker , the first three actors profiled in the series. And now, finally, a fourth, Robert Forster.


Now it's true, Robert Forster is a little more famous than those three but mainly, or possibly only, because of Jackie Brown, although he was famous to fans of indie cinema, before there was such a thing, for Medium Cool and later, on tv, for his television show Banyon. Before he landed the role of Max Cherry, Bail Bondsman, in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, Forster accepted any number of roles in low budget action thrillers to keep the paychecks coming in and the acting skills honed. He also took the lead in Disney's The Black Hole, a film that failed to live up to the box-office expectations of the studio and thus didn't contribute to any sort of career boost for Forster. Years later, at the age of 56, he landed the part that would net him his first, and as of this writing, only Oscar nomination, in this case for Best Supporting Actor. The role was for the previously mentioned Jackie Brown and in it, Forster is a revelation.

Sometimes an actor has to go through an entire career before someone finds them a role that's made just for them. In 1997, Forster got that role and even though it wasn't written for him (Elmore Leonard created the character in the original novel upon which it's based, Rum Punch) it seemed written for him and Tarantino may have had him in mind when adapting the screenplay (although I have no proof of that). Seeing Forster play Max Cherry is more like seeing a 56 year old bail bondsman named Max Cherry who bears a striking resemblance to Robert Forster, if that makes any sense. Forster is Cherry, Cherry is Forster.

It's a remarkable performance but you won't find it on many "Greatest Supporting Performaces" lists because there's very little about it that is showy and very little that feels urgent or needlessly energetic. What it does feel like is a tired man who doesn't get excited even at the prospect of walking away with half a million dollars. He's tired of his job and wonders, while sitting on the couch of a man for whom he's laying in wait to stun and drag to the police, if he should just quit. He falls for a woman, Jackie Brown, but is so undemonstrative about it that you wonder if he is emotionally stilted or reliant upon an overly developed defense mechanism of nonchalance. By the end, when the audience may finally get its answer, Max Cherry recedes into a soft-focus blur as Tarantino shows his final respect for this hardened man's privacy.

As noted above, Robert Forster received the nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Jackie Brown, and in one of the greatest (or perhaps just the most recent) disappointments in the category, he lost to Robin Williams for Good Will Hunting. Words simply fail. Forster has spent his entire career taking what parts he could find and didn't give a damn if you knew or cared that he was capable of delivering greatness. In Jackie Brown he proved it and if that's the only role he ever had it would be enough. Forster remains a wanderer, but one with a performance that ranks with the best the cinema has to offer. Or as Max Cherry might say, "Yup."

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This post done in tandem with "Max Cherry meets Jackie Brown" at Unexplained Cinema.

The Wanderers: Geoffrey Lewis

Here at Cinema Styles I occasionally showcase what I refer to as a wanderer, an actor who goes from job to job, is constantly working and has no major lead role to his credit but at the same time isn't a supporting player with Oscars or recognition like a Thomas Mitchell or Thelma Ritter. These are the actors that don't get the credit they deserve for a lifetime of hard, consistent, quality work. Today is the birthday of one of those actors, Geoffrey Lewis. He's 74 today.

I'd like to write a brilliant essay on the talents of Geoffrey Lewis but all I can get out is that I love the guy. If you watched television or the movies in the seventies through the mid-eighties, you know Lewis. He was everywhere. I probably couldn't say with any accuracy when is the first time I saw him. He guested on The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, Police Woman, Streets of San Francisco, Alice, Laverne and Shirley, The Six Million Dollar Man, McCloud, Hawaii Five-O and on and on and on. I could have seen him for the first time in any one of those shows and not known I was looking at future favorite Wanderer Geoffrey Lewis.

The first time I remember seeing him was in 1978's Every Which Way but Loose with Clint Eastwood. A good movie? Hardly. But Lewis stood out for me. That face and his almost defeated way of speaking, like the world had destroyed his dreams before the first word even came out of his mouth, stuck with me. I recognized him every time I saw him after that. The most notable occasion would probably be Salem's Lot. The rocking chair, the dirt covered clothes (from Danny Glick's grave) and the line, "Look at me, teacher. Loooook at me." This casting choice fascinated me. It fascinated me because I found Lewis to be so non-threatening as a vampire. I just assumed any vampire played by Lewis would eventually, and quickly, give up on trying to lure and kill human victims and just drink the blood from whatever dead animal he happened across. And in fact his quick exit out the window when confronted with opposition lent credence to this hypothesis. That's because Lewis excelled at playing the guy who's been beaten down by life. The undead life shouldn't be any different.

The Oscars are rarely held up by a cinephile as an actual measure of quality in filmmaking and yet there is a heavy air of legitimacy that hangs over them. An unfair sense of legitimacy that goes to a very few. Even though we can all admit the awards have little actual meaning it doesn't stop me from wishing sometimes that a lifetime achievement award would go to someone who, just once, was never nominated for anything in their career prior, never had a role bigger than a minor supporting role and never achieved name recognition beyond a few dedicated fans but achieved facial recognition the world over. Actors like Geoffrey Lewis, with over 200(!) credits on his IMDB page, who have never disappointed, never phoned it in and never stormed off a set.

Happy Birthday Geoffrey. It may not be an Oscar, but you're a Lifetime Achievement Wanderer as acknowledged by Cinema Styles. And you deserve it.

The Wanderers: James Edwards

Years ago I watched Bright Victory for the first time on cable. As I watched it I thought what most people probably think while watching it: "Arthur Kennedy is really great in this! Too bad he didn't get used more often in quality lead roles."

Then I thought the second thing most people probably think: "The guy playing his friend is great too!"

That actor was James Edwards. It took me a moment or two to realize it was the same actor who had played the paralyzed Private Peter Moss in Mark Robson's Home of the Brave (1949). In that film, as well as Bright Victory, Edwards plays the "black man." He's not a character who happens to be black, but rather a character whose skin color is of vital importance to the plot. In fact, in the play Home of the Brave, upon which the movie is based, the character is Jewish but thanks to the 1948 legislation that desegregated the Armed Forces the character was changed to a black soldier to keep up with the headlines, even if it meant being completely historically inaccurate by placing a black soldier in the same unit as white soldiers in World War II.

Edwards' characters in both films are noble black characters suffering under an oppressive system of inequality. Thanks to the time these movies were made the messages are a bit heavy-handed, falling more on the side of Clifford Odets' obviousness than subtle, nuanced psychological study. But that's what makes Edwards so good in both. When the blunt points have been made up front it's up to Edwards to provide the subtext with a look, a tremor in the voice or a simple body movement. His performance in Home of the Brave is justly celebrated but in Bright Victory too, he excels with very little to work from.

Bright Victory tells the story of a blinded war veteran, Larry Nevins (Arthur Kennedy), going through rehabilitation at an Army hospital. While there, he befriends another blinded veteran undergoing the same rehabilitation, Joe Morgan (James Edwards). Neither one knows the race of the other and at one point someone mentions that some new soldiers from a Negro unit will be showing up soon. Kennedy is surprised to hear this, thinking it's an all-white hospital and soon uses the word that quickly establishes his race to Morgan, and by Morgan's reaction, his to Kennedy. The friendship ends there and the rest of the film is concerned with Larry Nevins' guilt and changing attitudes as he returns home and finds he cannot be with his family and friends anymore who have racist beliefs. In the end, he meets up with Morgan and asks if they can be friends again. As in the rest of the film, Edwards uses subtlety in the face of an unsubtle (but still good) script. The pause, the look on his face, a look that can be interpreted a thousand different ways, the look that says, "Can I trust this guy again? Should I tell him to 'go to hell?'" Edwards isn't given much to work with in Bright Victory (it is, in the end, Kennedy's movie through and through) but what he is given he works with in ways a lesser actor never could.

Edwards never became a big star, working steadily in small and sometimes bit parts, always strong, always reliable. A wanderer, taking whatever work he could get to satisfy his need to perform, to hone his craft. In her excellent piece on him at TCM, Moira Finnie wonders about the fact that Edwards never became a star.

While Edwards and Poitier both entered movies at the same time, it is possible that Poitier’s disarming manner was easier for audiences to relate to in that period. Perhaps too, Poitier was the more natural star, as his timely performance in Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones would prove, while Edwards was simply a good, hardworking actor whose potential would find only fitful expression.

Or maybe, at the time, there was room for just one "black actor" in Hollywood. Oh sure, others could get roles, like Edwards and Harry Belafonte, but only one could be a star. Hollywood often figures out a way to sell one performer as the genuine article (Marilyn Monroe) and everyone else as the knock-offs(Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, Diana Dors) and it would appear no different here. Besides, it was the fifties and there weren't exactly a lot of roles for black actors and parts in which a black actor could be cast where race didn't matter were small, so once the big roles were filled by Poitier there wasn't much left for Edwards. Too bad, because as much as I like Poitier, I like Edwards better. It's an impossible comparison of course since Poitier had so many more roles to analyze and Edwards so few. Still, Edwards subtle gifts as an actor portray a confident and skilled artist less inclined to some of the histrionics Poitier sometimes fell victim to (and Edwards command of speaking dialogue naturalistically far outshone Poitier's). Of course, in a perfect world they would have both been stars but Edwards worked steadily nonetheless. His final role was that of General George Patton's valet in Franklin Schaffner's Patton (1970). Shortly after completing his work on the film, and before it was released, he died of a heart attack.

I like to think had he lived the seventies and the type of independent movies being made then would have afforded him the opportunity to explore roles that had never been available to him before. Either way, he established himself early on a hard-working actor dedicated to his craft on both the stage and film. He was a wanderer, a pioneer, a journeyman, a professional and, above all else, a damn fine actor.

The Wanderers: Diane Baker

You know who that is in the photo? It's a young actress in 1958 named Diane Baker. When the photo was taken she had just signed her first movie contract and was on her way to ... well, not stardom but work, steady work. She's been in dozens of movies and even more television shows with the number of her IMDB credits stretching well past the century mark. But most people know her for one thing and one thing only and it's a bit part with only a few lines. And this is an actress who right out of the starting gate played Anne's sister Margot Frank in 1959's The Diary of Anne Frank so it's not like she hasn't had any decent roles. But in 1991 she played a character whose daughter was abducted and her one scene involved talking to another character who possibly had information on the abduction. At the end of that scene the character with the information says to her, " Oh, and Senator, just one more thing: love your suit!"

Yes, in 1991 she played Senator Ruth Martin in The Silence of the Lambs. She still works steadily today and as previously stated has acted in over a hundred movies and television shows but if you had to explain to someone who she was you'd probably have to say, "You know, the Senator in The Silence of the Lambs, the one whose daughter got abducted."

Diane Baker is what some people call a Journeyman Actor, taken from the Journeyman term applied to those with skill in a trade but no workshop, no permanent locale. They travel from job to job and earn a day's wages for a day's work. They're nomadic by nature and I like to romantically refer to them as wanderers. They're the kind actor that doesn't get the big parts, supporting or lead, but they're always there, always working, always ready to play whatever part they've been given and do a good job with it. And Baker's done more than most people realize.

Aside from The Diary of Anne Frank and The Silence of the Lambs she also costarred in Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason and Pat Boone. I don't care what anyone says about that movie either, I love it. Yeah, I know, the dinosaurs are lizards with plates glued to their back and Boone gets a little annoying with the concertina but I still have a great time watching it.

She also had a small part in Marnie and played the love interest of David Janssen in the final two episodes of The Fugitive, making her one of the most seen actresses in television history. But most bloggers would also know her as Joan Crawford's daughter in the 1964 William Castle directed Strait-Jacket. After that her movie career tapered off into primarily television work but it was steady work and up to an episode of House, MD just last year, she was still going at it. Her career started 50 years ago with a part in The Diary of Anne Frank and she's been working steadily ever since, always reliable, always professional, always on top of her craft.

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This is the first post in the Wanderer series that will be included under the Acting category on the sidebar. After writing up Charles Bud Tingwell last week I decided I wanted to highlight more of the lesser known actors in the movies on this blog, the ones we all know but whose name might escape us.