Pat Hingle, 1924 - 2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Pat Hingle, who died this past weekend at the age of 84, was one of the most familiar and dependable of all American character actors, over the course of a career in film, TV, and the stage that spanned some fifty years. Born in Denver, Colorado, he served in the navy during World War II and studied acting at the University of Texas. In the first several years of his career, Hingle appeared in the Broadway productions of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (as Gooper, father to the no-neck monsters), Archibald Macleish's J.B. (in the title role), and William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (for which he received a Tony nomination). He also made his movie debut (not counting an uncredited small role in On the Waterfront) in the 1957 Method melodrama End as a Man (A.K.A. The Strange One, based on a play that he had also appeared in. Hingle was offered the title role in the 1960 Elmer Gantry, but before the film started shooting, he suffered a horrendous accident, falling more than fifty feet down an elevator shaft. He was laid up for more than a year recovering from his injuries, which included a fractured skull, his left leg broken in three places, and the loss of a finger. Elmer went ahead with Burt Lancaster , who won an Academy Award for it. Hingle maintained a good-natured attitude towards the whole thing: ""I know that if I had played Elmer Gantry, I would have been more of a movie name. But I'm sure I would not have done as many plays as I've done. I had exactly the kind of career I had hoped for. And I never, never forget that I'm the recipient of the blessing that is life. It was given to me to try again."

Hingle returned to work looking older, gruffer, squatter, and craggier: an easy casting call for authority figures at a time when those roles often meant dads who don't understand their kids (as in Splendor in the Grass, where he played the father of Warren Beatty, who was all of fourteen years his junior) or cops who were either crooked or self-righteously brutal or both. He appeared with Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High, The Gauntlet, and Sudden Impact, played Sally Field's father in Norma Rae, starred in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller's The Price, and did an unholy shitload TV, notably playing Colonel Tom Parker to Kurt Russell's Elvis Presley in John Carpenter's 1979 Elvis and Sam Rayburn to Randy Quaid's Lyndon Johnson in the 1987 LBJ: The Early Years.

Unlike a lot of actors who work that much, Hingle has the distinction of having continued to get better, tapping into deeper veins of regret and exposing a streak of wry humor as he started to get almost as old as his characters. Reviewing the 1985 The Falcon and the Snowman, in which he played the hardass FBI-agent father of Timothy Hutton, Pauline Kael wrote, "It's a role Hingle has played dozens of times --he's a pop-culture joke in this role--but I doubt if he has ever done it as well." Five years later, he went to town in perhaps his best movie role, the terrifying cracker crime lord Bobo Justus in Stephen Frears's Jim Thompson adaptation The Grifters, giving Anjelica Huston the shivers and making it seem as if all the secrets to the universe might be contained in the line, "You'll never shit right again." He also played Commissioner Gordon in the 1989 Batman, a role that he would reprise in three other movies, playing it alongside a total of three different different--Batmans? Batmen? Whatever. More recently, he played Ben Franklin in a late-'90s revival of the Broadway musical 1776 and turned up in the movies A Thousand Acres, Muppets from Space, Shaft, and Talladega Nights. He died at his home in Carolina Beach, North Carolina, where he decided to settle after working there shooting the 1986 Maximum Overdrive, Stephen King's directing debut. ""I really do believe there was a divine hand that headed me here," he had told a local reporter.. "I am happy that I think it's going to end here."

The Albert Popwell Collection

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The release this week of all five "Dirty Harry" movies starring Clint Eastwood on DVD and Blu-ray gives fans the chance to settle in for a long weekend spent admiring the charismatic intensity and skillful range of a familiar but sometimes underappreciated American actor--Albert Popwell. Popwell, who died in 1999, goes way back in the Dirty Harry franchise: he has a small role as a hippie in the movie that many see as a precursor to the Harry Callahan character (as it was molded by Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the 1971 Dirty Harry) and TV's McCloud to boot: the 1968 Coogan's Bluff. In that film, the first collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood--they'd later team up for The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Escape from Acatraz--Eastwood plays a shitkicker cop from Arizona who hits New York City at the height of the counterculture era to track down an escaped hood and inspires everyone's reluctant admiration for the effectiveness of his uncivilized approach enforcement. Popwell would go on to appear in a small but key role in Dirty Harry and return, in a different role each time, in the first three of its four sequels. Grady Hendrix recently noted that Popwell "twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series;" his repeat appearances also serve as a handy guide to what possibilities were open--and closed--to talented African-American character actors in movies of the period. (I don't necessarily mean to imply that things have changed a whole hell of a lot.)

In Dirty Harry, Popwell has perhaps the movie's most memorable scene, albeit one that he has to spend lying on the sidewalk with a gun in his face. He plays the survivor of a bank robbery that interrupts Harry's lunch. A crackerjack action set piece peerlessly directed by Siegel in his knuckle-cracking prime, it establishes Harry's unearthly cool and mastery of the violent approach to crime-solving; he figures out what's going from one look at the getaway car and proceeds to foil the robbers by shooting their car. He then proceeds to fake out Popwell, who's lying within reach of his gun, by taunting him with the famous speech about just what Harry's gun could do to him if he had any bullets left, which he may or may not--"Do you feel lucky?" After backing down, Popwell calls out to the departing Harry in raspy-voiced desperation--"I gots to know" he says, with as much dignity as imaginable under the circumstances--and Harry points the gun in his face, pulls the trigger--click!--then walks away chuckling. The audience is meant to cheer Harry for not only defeating the fallen criminal but messing with his head and rubbing his face in it, and most of them do cheer, but Siegel's inclusion of a small grace note--a close-up of Popwell muttering, "Son of a bitch" as Harry walks away--can perhaps be taken as the director's covert acknowledgment that, for all his bitching and moaning about the things he's forced to do to compensate for the ineffectual lily-livered politicians and other liberals who would shackle the lawgiver, there's a big part of Harry that enjoys his job way too much.

There are no such grace notes in Popwell's flashy, repulsive scene in 1973's Magnum Force; he plays a pimp who brutally murders a hooker. But by then, grace notes in the "Dirty Harry" franchise were already getting to be few and far between. (Magnum Force is itself conceived as a raised middle finger to those who criticized the first film as a reactionary endorsement of vigilante police power. It pits craggy old Harry against a secret police death squad consisting of fresh-faced young up-and-comers--Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, David Soul--and their fearless leader, Hal Holbrook.) In 1976's The Enforcer, made in the wake of the SLA kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and other manifestions of the last insane, dying ripples of "revolutionary" counterculture politics, Popwell turns up as "Mustapha", a troubled-looking black militant who slips Harry some information that will help him bring down the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force", a bunch of pimps and hookers posing as a terrorist cell. (Like the Mothers of Invention, they're only in it for the money.) However we're meant to view his character, he does again manage to suggest a much deeper and more complicated range of thought and emotion than Harry. Popwell made the full jump to good guy in 1983's Sudden Impact, the only film in the series directed by Eastwood himself. By now, the tensions of the sixties are fully submerged and the movie is in total action-cartoon mode. There isn't much Popwell can do to leaven it, but he does get more screen time than ever before. He plays Harry's partner, which is the series equivalent to being the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is a role traditionally assigned to representatives of "minority groups", such as the Hispanic rookie detective played by Reni Santoni in Dirty Harry and the woman cop played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, so that Harry can show that for all his angry-white-male bluster, he can respect and work with the unwhite and the unmale when they prove to him that they have the right stuff. Paradoxically, they invariably prove it by getting taken out of the action by getting injured or killed, so that Harry can also show that only he is tough enough to single-handedly prevail in the end. Popwell's role does not break the cycle.

Popwell's career was hardly limited to his association with Clint Eastwood. He was a very active presence in TV, appeared in Siegel's Charley Varrick, and left a fond impression among fans of family-blacksploitation films with his role as Matthew Johnson, who, with his brother Melvin (Caro Kenyatta), lent their martial-arts skills to the efforts to keep heroin out of the neighborhood in two films starring the late Tamara Dobson as the amazon avenger Cleopatra Jones. But he deserves to be remembered for being to Dirty Harry what Frankie Faisan has been to Hannibal Lector. Faison, it will be remembered, appeared in all the movies featuring everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist--Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--up until the more recent and less successful Hannibal Rising. It would be nice to surmise that Popwell's absence from the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, was closely connected to that film's disappointing returns, but it did have, mmmmmmmmmmm, other problems. Eastwood himself was 58 at the time, and the appearance of this box set, twenty years later, can probably be taken as a declaration, should anyone have been in doubt about it before now, that we have indeed seen the last of Harry Callahan and his big phallic killing device. Eastwood may not be the master filmmaker and great actor that a number of critics have insisted on taking him for in his dotage, but, give him a little credit: he's less shameless than Sylvester Stallone.

The Screengrab : sudden impact

Pat Hingle, 1924 - 2008

The Albert Popwell Collection