So Far So...

Marvellous Marvin

So hello and welcome to this week’s SO FAR SO…

Our target this week then is the late, great, enigmatic, total one-off LEE MARVIN. Now as ever there’s any number of his movies one could talk about at length and with sheer joy - I know you’ll have your own favourites - but I’ve plumped for two very different movies that had Marvin give two excellent but very different performances, namely CAT BALLOU (1965) and POINT BLANK (1967).

Lamont Waltman Marvin Jr. was born in New York City on Feb 19th 1924, not as one might have expected to a tough working class situation in the tenements but to an advertising executive father and a fashion writer mother. There however the nice stuff ends as Marvin’s upbringing involved an abusive father and loveless, disinterested mother combined with dyslexia and what we now refer to as ADHD. It wasn’t long therefore before our boy started getting expelled from numerous schools for smoking & fighting, ending up unsurprisingly enlisting aged 18 in the U.S. Marine Corps eight months after Pearl Harbor in 1942.

Marvin had a busy war, participating in 21 Japanese islands landings and culminating in the assault on Mount Tapochau during the Battle of Saipan which resulted in heavy casualties amongst his fellow marines as well himself being peppered with machine gun fire that resulted in his sciatic nerve being severed and a sniper damaging his foot badly. Over a year of medical treatment in various naval hospitals ended with his being given a medical discharge with the rank of Private First Class despite his having been a Corporal, because - you guessed it - he’d been demoted for troublemaking.

After the war and some pretty shit jobs it was while working as a plumber's assistant at a local community theatre in upstate New York that Marvin was asked to replace an actor who had fallen ill during rehearsals. He caught the acting bug, got a job with the company at $7 a week, moved to Greenwich Village and got funding via the new G.I. Bill to study at the American Theatre Wing.

Now the G.I. Bill of 1944 may sound like some boring shit, but in fact it was a hugely important thing which provided a range of benefits and funding to WW2 veterans, and in terms of Hollywood and the movies it had a huge impact as various working class vets including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, George C. Scott, Rod Steiger, Charles Bronson, Ernest Borgnine and our boy Marvin - to name but 10 - were able to pay and make their way as young actors thanks to it. Frankly with the the plethora of posh, monied, privately educated actors dominating here in the UK (and Hollywood) and having reversed all the advances of the late 1950’s and 60’s for working class actors, something akin to this kind of funding for working class actors (and artists in general) is desperately needed here in the UK (and again in America I’m sure), and not just for ex-military. Chippy? Fuck yeah. As a working class actor how could I not have a chip on the old shoulder. Anyhoo moving on, point is Marvin rode that G.I. Bill funding from Greenwich Village theatre into Television and within a couple of years bagged his film debut in a post-WW2 Gary Cooper vehicle called You’re In The Navy Now (1951). Our boy was on the ladder.

Skipping ahead quickly Marvin was involved in lots of 50’s movies from The Caine Mutiny (1954) to Bad Day At Black Rock (1955) to The Rack (1956) but finally hit a bit of pay dirt with 100 episodes or so of the hit TV series M Squad (1957-60). Lots more TV work & money followed when the series ended resulting in Marvin landing a juicy role for Michael ‘Casablanca’ Curtiz in The Comancheros (1961) opposite John Wayne followed by even more importantly a terrific performance as ‘Liberty Valance’ in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) for John Ford. Now he was flying.

Belting roles in corkers like Donovan's Reef (1963) and The Killers (1964) leads us neatly to the first of our two-film focus for this week - CAT BALLOU (1965).

Based on Roy Chandler’s (serious can you believe) 1956 novel - The Ballad of Cat Ballou - Marvin plays two characters, ‘Kid Shelleen’ and ‘Tim Strawn’. Kirk Douglas was one of a number who passed on the movie (including Ann-Margret who’s Agent passed on the titular character - played brilliantly by Jane Fonda - without even telling her, something she remained rightly angry about forever), but those who didn’t including a very ill Nat King Cole (who died 4 months before it’s release) and Stubby Kaye, found themselves in a movie nominated for 5 Oscars with our boy Marvin winning the Best Actor Oscar a mere 8 years after moving from plumbers assistant to Greenwich Village spear carrier.

Marvin is HUGE fun in the role (as he is in so many of his movies) and total value for his gold statuette, as well as his BAFTA, Silver Bear and Golden Globe best actor wins for the movie. The film itself is both a parody of the Western oeuvre and a classic Western in its own right. Indeed it’s a comedy, a musical, and a rip-roaring action-adventure all in one, and a thoroughly entertaining watch which if you don the right ‘hat’ I’ll wager you’ll enjoy the hell out of.

POINT BLANK (1967) is of course a very different beast.

The basic premise is, the Organization has taken Lee Marvin's $93,000 away from him, and he wants it back again. Boy does he want it back.

After a recent glut of spies, counterspies, funny spies, anti-hero spies and spy-spier movies in the 60’s, Point Blank gets back into the groove of Hollywood thrillers. Marvin’s protagonist is pissed, angry-pissed in this instance, and in spite of being asked “"Do you mean to say you'd bring down this immense ‘organization’ for a paltry $93,000?" he’s seriously fucked off about the principle as much as the money and goes about laying waste to most of the board of directors, several hired gunmen and a secretary or two. He means serious fucking business and Marvin gets his military face on and then some as he (famously) pounds corridors, kicks down doors, smashes cars, shoots slaps and smacks the crap out of all and sundry.

Brit director John Boorman helming his Hollywood debut does a fantastic job employing as Nick Schager put it in a 2003 review “avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism." Slightly poncy language, but actually, he’s right on the money.

To be brutally honest with you I don’t think it’s as awesome as many other cinephiles and movie nut jobs cock on it is as I think it’s taken on the mantel of one of those “you’re cool if you say it’s cool cos it’s gotta be cool as everyone else says its cool so it must be cool” reputations. That said it is actually a fucking great movie, with a director totally looking to make an artistic as well as professional mark in risk-taking 60’s Hollywood, and a dude by the name of Lee Marvin in top hard-man-ex-marine form.

By the end of the 60’s and projects like Paint Your Wagon (1969) old Marvin was pulling in a million bucks a movie, but as he headed into the 1970’s and his mid-40’s Lee Marvin’s best movies & performances were pretty much behind him. Of course things might have been very different had he not famously turned down the role of ‘Quint’ in Jaws (1975) stating "What would I tell my fishing friends who'd see me come off a hero against a dummy shark?". But then again it’s now impossible to see anyone else captaining the Orca, as Robert Shaw took the part and made it iconic.

Unsurprisingly Marvin was an anti-war Democrat, pro JFK and anti-Vietnam. He was married twice, had 4 kids, and was a big old bag of drunken trouble and fun his whole life. But he was a star, a massively charismatic enigmatic STAR. When he was on screen and in a scene it was almost impossible to take your eyes off him. You simply never knew what the fuck he was going to do next. Did he even?

He’d been a U.S. Marine involved in a lot of fighting in WW2 and seen a lot of shit, seen a lot buddies and good men slaughtered. His past made him dangerous on screen (and in person apparently), gave him an edge you can’t acquire at Juilliard or RADA (or Oxford or Eton). He was a hard man, a tough bastard. He had proper PTSD. He’d been to hell, seen hell, and had the fucking scars to prove it.

So if you know anything about the late great LEE MARVIN then you’ll understand not just how but also why he ended up being buried among his colleagues & buddies in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.

You see in my opinion, LEE MARVIN thought of himself a Marine first, Actor second. That was the chronological order, that was the real order.

Well, that’s it for this week then folks. See you on Twitter of course, and to all of you always - good night and good luck.

Michael