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One of the great entrances in movie
history belongs to Jack Palance. In the
1953 George Stevens western Shane,
Palance, as the heartless hired gun
Wilson, ambles into town on a horse
that’s walking, just walking, at an
unhurried pace. He dismounts in front of
a saloon, walks through the front door,
and a moment later a little dog scurries
discreetly out. Without a word, Wilson’s
evil is established.
I once heard Palance claim that the
reason for the horse’s plodding gait,
which seems so oddly sinister, wasn’t
simply an inspired choice by director
Stevens. It was, rather, because Palance,
who was born Volodymir Palahniuk in
Pennsylvania coal mining country in
1919, had at that early point in his
career no idea how to ride a horse,
though he had led his employers to
believe otherwise.
The script called for Wilson to come
galloping into town, but when it became
clear that Palance couldn’t manage this,
Stevens simply had him walk in.
It’s a good tale whether or not it’s
true, and Palance’s performance helps to
make Shane one of the
quintessential westerns. Palance, who
died this month at 87, appeared in
dozens of movies and, while by his own
avowal most of them were junky
potboilers, a few were first-rate. Even
in the worst of them Palance himself was
great—a commanding, gutsy presence
capable of sly psychological complexity
as well as grand-scale ham.
Shane
earned him an Oscar nomination, but it
was his second—he’d been nominated the
previous year for the thriller Sudden
Fear, in which he had appeared
opposite Joan Crawford. It was almost 40
years later that he finally won his
Oscar, for his self-parodying turn as
Curly in the 1991 Billy Crystal comedy
City Slickers, and it may be that
Palance will be remembered more for his
eccentric acceptance speech, in which he
suddenly began doing one-handed
push-ups, than for anything else.
But there was a lot to remember. Palance
played villains, and the occasional
tough, forbidding anti-hero, in a wide
variety of films, ranging from period
thrillers like Man in the Attic
to hard-boiled dramas like I Died a
Thousand Times and The Big Knife
to westerns like The Professionals
and Monte Walsh, to costumers
like The Silver Chalice, Sign
of the Pagan and Barabbas to
war and gangster pictures. He even
played Fidel Castro in the legendary
bad-movie classic Che!
He was also active in television. As a
kid, I was terrified by his vigorous
portrayal of the title roles in a
rousing Dan Curtis production of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
A few years later, also for Curtis, he
gave an excellent, baleful, even
somewhat poignant performance in a 1973
TV production of Dracula. Perhaps
no other actor was ever more ethnically
suited to the role of the count—with his
sharp-boned Eastern European face,
Palance was a ringer for portraits of
Vlad Tepes, the prince who was Dracula’s
historical model.
In his later years, Palance was allowed
to give the villainy a rest now and then
and play kindly old-timers. My favorite
of these latter-day roles was in the
oddball 1987 comedy Bagdad Cafe.
After you’ve watched Shane, you
might want to check out his sunnier side
in this film—sweet, funny and strikingly
boyish as the gentle, flirtatious old
Mr. Cox.
We lost another Hollywood luminary in
recent weeks—director Robert Altman
passed on at 82. This prolific
orchestrator of overlapping, improvised
dialogue delivered by huge and
prestigious ensemble casts made some
masterpieces, like M*A*S*H and
Nashville, along with many artsy
misfires. But it’s nice that he was able
to finish his career on a lovely—if
characteristically uneven—high note: the
delightful film of A Prairie Home
Companion, now available on DVD. |
