come back, lee marvin...we miss you (pt 1)

Lee Marvin could not have chosen a more fortuitous time to start a career in motion pictures than the early 1950s. Before the war, Hollywood movies were primarily built around female stars; it’s hard to maintain even a 3 to 1 ratio when compiling a list of 20’s and 30’s stars along gender lines. It was after the end of World War Two when the male star finally came in to his own; suddenly it was his name the marketing department exploited to promote a movie, his face across the posters and magazines. Part of the reason actresses suddenly found themselves, with few exceptions, marginalized in 1950’s Hollywood is a refection of the culture of repression and infantilization imposed upon the general female population that had experienced far too much freedom during the war, and needed a ‘retraining’ in subservience and domesticity; there is also the basic fact that the kind of movies being made in the post-war years simply didn’t need women. Rising from the silly Singing Cowboy fare it had been, the American Western found its’ language of mythology during that period, in large part through the work of John Ford. Westerns, along with war movies, rarely have choice parts for actresses, other than as damsels in distress-endangered virgins whose rescue provides a mettle proving opportunity for the hero. Even Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 “Paths Of Glory”, a subversion and condemnation of the romanticizing of war, is painted with an all-male cast, excluding the final scene, when a terrified German girl is forced to sing for her captors (it is, to be fair, the pivotal moment in the film-the only glimmer of beauty or humanity in an otherwise bleak and hopeless world).
During this same period the other cinematic celebration of masculinity, the crime drama, at its’ creative peak, and it was here that Lee Marvin made his first impression. Arriving from the New York stage, Marvin kicked around with bit parts on television and in now-forgotten movies (all westerns or war films), but it was as Vince Stone in Fritz Lang’s 1953 thriller “The Big Heat” that the public was formally introduced to his scene stealing talents. With surprising dexterity, Marvin manages to transform his considerable height from menacing sadist in one scene, to cringing coward in the next. In one of the most brutal acts of 1950’s cinema, he throws a pot of boiling coffee in his (loose-lipped) girlfriend’s face, hideously disfiguring her. Later, when she corners him with her own pot, he writhes and cowers, as loathsome in his weakness as he was earlier in his cruelty. While only a supporting role, this movie would be the beginning of Lee Marvin’s decade long apprenticeship.

Hollywood still had in place an elaborate set of rules for ascending to star status, involving a long series of parts that slowly increased in importance. It is perfectly common these days to have someone with little experience acting suddenly sucked up into the vortex superstardom, but into the studio system collapsed in the mid-1960’s, performers were expected to ‘pay their dues’ with a series of supporting and character roles. This was certainly true with the generation of tough guy actors who started in the 50’s; James Colburn, Steve McQueen, Warren Oates, Robert Mitchum, Sterling Hayden, Ben Johnson and slightly later, Clint Eastwood, all climbed the rungs of supporting roles and b-movies (consider McQueen in “The Blob”). Some of the two-fisted actors of this period never rose above villain roles (Jack Palance), b-movie purgatory (Charles Bronson and Lee Van Cleef) or where quickly transformed into lovable box-office heartthrobs (William Holden and Paul Newman). But regardless of what level of success they achieved, what they all had in common was an authenticity of masculinity. These were men who looked believable mounted on a horse or machine-gunning nazis. Unlike action heroes today, these men were not muscular idealizations of manhood-none of them would have made a very impressive superhero, nor could any of them believably kick and judo their way through feats of superhuman strength. But what they did offer, that is woefully lacking in today’s current heroes, is a genuine rawness, a manhood based less on prettiness (most of these men were actually quite homely) and more on rugged understatement.

So Lee Marvin served his apprenticeship, usually either as a villain’s henchman, hero’s buddy or as comedic relief. While these parts offered limited screen time, Marvin became a master of stealing scenes. Marlon Brando’s pouting mumble-mouthed Johnny in “The Wild One” has become a camp-culture icon; the homoerotic tight leather and teeny cap jauntily placed on his head as he sits on his motorcycle, fondling the trophy he’s strapped to his handlebars…the power of this image has long since surpassed the mediocrity of the film it appears in. But the reason the Brando image from “The Wild One” has become a household saint, while Marvin’s hasn’t, it’s because Lee Marvin is so utterly strange, so completely off the wall as Chino, that we lack the language to even define his performance. Looking like a post-apocalyptic pirate, Marvin literally throws himself across the screen, constantly falling to the ground or flying from one side of the screen to the other, his Chino, while trapped in the (confusing) sub-plot about the rival gang, explodes in manic delight every time the camera focuses on him.
His Meatball in “Caine Mutiny” (1954) was almost identical to his Chino a year before, but less noteworthy only because Humphrey Bogart (the father of all hard-livin’ tough guy actors) delivered the most bizarre character study of his career. Further supporting roles and television work followed, including “Bad Day At Black Rock” (1955) and as the quickly dispatched title character of John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962). It wasn’t until 1964 that Lee Marvin was offered a lead role in a major motion picture, Don Siegel’s remake of “The Killers”. Remake is the key word here, because this film has always suffered in the shadow of the 1946 Robert Siodmak original (Criterion is so cruel as to package them as set, offering a poor contrast). But while the second version paled in comparison (not helped by the soon to retire from acting Ronald Reagan, who plays the villain with such obvious boredom and discomfort that it's difficult for the veiwer not to feel the same two emotions every time he's on screen), Lee Marvin shined all the brighter, earning a BAFTA for his performance. Even though Clu Gulager has almost as much screen time as Marvin (and John Cassevettes more), Lee Marvin is the star of this film, a deserved top-billing. And while another villain role (and the last of his career), Marvin uses this film to refine the image that would serve him through the peak years of his career. Gone was the frantic energy of his earlier films; his newly developed screen presence was economical in both movement and speech, a silver-haired panther silently waiting, ready to spring at any moment. Marvin's Charlie Strom watches impassively as Clu Gulager smacks first Claude Akins and later Angie Dickinson around. But it is when Marvin is finally rises and threatens them (going so far as to dangle Dickinson out a window) that they readily share their information. He moves through this movie like the Grim Reaper, slowly marching toward an inevitable armageddon. One of the great tradgedies of American film is that Lee Marvin never worked with director Sam Peckinpah; they both shared a belief that there is no such thing as a too elaborately choreographed death scene-the more ambitious the death, the more memorable the character. Having dispatched both Reagan and Dickinson, a fatally wounded Marvin staggers out of the house, flailing on the front doorstep. He stumbles several times, losing his gun but retaining the briefcase of money that had been his single obsession all along. When the police arrive, Marvin aims at them with his finger, 'firing' at them with his empty hand. He then all but flips backward, collapsing on the ground dead (like the blind children playing 'cops and robbers' in the opening scene). Although a flawed film, it is in "The Killers" that Lee Marvin matures into the weary, chainsaw-voiced wanderer locked into a specific purpose, neither understanding nor caring about the world beyond his fixation on the singular goal. It was a shift in persona that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The major transformation America was going through during the 1960’s has been addressed so endlessly, with such exacting detail, that it would be a redundant waste of space to reexamine that period here. But what is worth mention is how those transformations affected Hollywood movies. By the mid-60’s the motion picture industry could no longer ignore the changing world beyond its’ gates. The era of grand heroism had passed, and the image of a noble John Wayne marching into battle had become an over-weight old man railing insanely against progress. Through the lenses of directors like Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman (and even the later work of John Ford) the American Western was no longer a vehicle to codify a particular set of values, but rather a forum to question those very same values. American audiences were increasingly suspect of movies that promoted the glories of war, the honor implicit in bloody sacrifice and blind obedience. These issues were not new to Hollywood, or even new as subject matter for masculine consideration (Ford’s “The Searchers” from 1957 touched on the dangers of machismo years before it came into vogue). While there still was a market for reactionary ideas in the south and amongst the middle-aged, Hollywood needed desperately to transform itself into a current, socially relevant industry. Lee Marvin's best work served as a vital bridge between the classic screen image of manhood, and the 'new' self-doubting men who would dominate 70's cinema, like Warren Beaty, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. Marvin's masculinity is completely stripped of grandiose speeches and self-rightous posing typical of a John Wayne or Clark Gable performance. His presentation of manhood is such a blank, such a void, that the viewer can easily fill it with his or her own prejudices-a male totem that can either signify a wholesome commitment to duty and sacrifice, or a man beaten down and betrayed by the society that demands he sacrifice himself for some obscure and obsolete reason. It seems more than coincidental that the five years his name appeared on the "Top 10 stars of the year" list (1967-1971) were also the years the Vietnam conflict was at its' most bloody and controversial. A nation ideologically split down the middle found in Lee Marvin and the projects he chose a blank slate on which to inscribe their personal moral, political and social beliefs.

Bigger and more successful movies followed. “Cat Ballou” and “Ship Of Fools” both came out in ’65, and while neither is particularly good, that didn’t keep the public from embracing them. “The Professionals” in ’66 brought him back into westerns, and “The Dirty Dozen” the following year returned him to the war genre (although now as commanding officer and star). But it was the movie he chose as follow-up to the box-office success of “The Dirty Dozen” that Lee Marvin would make his greatest contribution to American cinema…the movie that would over shadow everything else he did his remaining twenty years of life...to be continued