Film critics often love character actors more than leading men or women. With good cause, too: as we saw with our Leading Men and Leading Ladies Top 25 lists, some of the people at the top of the ticket couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag. But they have charisma in spades, and that's what it takes for a leading actor to make the big bucks. Character actors, on the other hand, are the craftsmen of the profession, learning how to bring their own sense of self to many different roles. They have charisma, too, but it's a weird, flawed charisma. Character actors seem more like regular people, although they are usually the hardest-working actors in the trade. They often don't have the luxury of choosing their projects, and many seem happy to be earning a paycheck. But they don't just spin their wheels, no. They bring their game to even the paltriest of projects. For them, acting is about the love.
Often character actors gather around strong directors. John Ford had a company of them that appeared in various permutations in his films. So did Sam Peckinpah. David Milch brought together one of the greatest assortment of character actors in recent history for HBO's Deadwood (Brad Dourif, Ricky Jay, Powers Boothe, Molly Parker, Jason Jones, Brian Cox, Jim Beaver, and this list could just keep going) and returned to many of them for John From Cincinnati. But Judd Apatow's tv shows and films have done something exciting: they lift the weirdos who would normally be on the edge of the screen to the central spot. And Apatow is not the first person to think of this, just one of the more recent. The Coen Brothers have certainly played with the idea of leading actors, often pushing tried-and-true lead actors to their weirdest performances and othertimes asking honest-to-goodness character actors to take the central role of the film. Preston Sturges, a clear antecedent to both Apatow and the Coens, was a similar proponent of the charming weirdness of life, and his decision to hang a couple of his great movies on the nervous shoulders of Eddie Bracken is more than perversity.
Let's hope someone takes this to heart and makes a buddy movie starring Stephen Root, Ricky Jay, and Jon Polito. Sometimes filmmakers put a character actor in the lead role out of expedience or budget. Sometimes filmmakers want to let the world see just how special this actor on the periphery is. Whatever the reason, here's a list of five of the best character actors who have made classic movies when they ascended to the lead.
1. Warren Oates. With his droopy mouth and off-center face, Oates was the guy directors used to telegraph ROUGHNECK to the cheap seats. But Oates wasn't just any redneck peckerwood, but a powerhouse able to make the most stockish of stock characters bleed for you, and you for them. Consider his parts in the Peckinpah movies: the roughest Hammond brother in Ride The High Country, unwilling to bathe for his brother's wedding; the reddest of the Rebel soldiers in Major Dundee, who has a death scene that steals the whole damn movie away from Charlton Heston and Richard Harris; the skankier Gorch brother in The Wild Bunch, forever the butt of the joke. Phil Nugent just wrote a brilliant article about his all-too-small role in Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, to which I'll link in lieu of adding anything. Then he popped up in Malick's Badlands as Sissy Spacek's doomed father, unprepared for the amoral type of generational backlash. That was the year before Hellman and Peckinpah independently put Oates front-and-center for two movies, each one among their finest, both impossibly uncommercial and both utterly raw and honest about the nature of human struggle and strife: Cockfighter and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.
Hellman's Cockfighter, which Paul Clark recently reviewed here, is stunningly simple. Oates plays Frank Mansfield, a competitive cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence until he wins the cockfighting championship. The sport - as unsportsmanlike as it is - is appalling, and the movie doesn't try to hide that. But the characters are immersed in it. Most of them being products of farm life, they don't even notice the dubious morality. It's hard to value the life of a chicken when you've raised them. The vow of silence, explained in a flashback, means that Oates hardly speaks a word in the whole movie, despite being in every scene. But Oates carries the character through body language alone, and there's no doubt whatsoever about who Mansfield is and what he's about. I can hardly think of another actor who could come close to doing what he does here. Paul neglected to mention my favorite scene, the last in the movie, where Mansfield rips the head off of a chicken and presents it, plumage upwards like a flower, to his disgusted lady love. It's equal measures horror and beauty. You will never forget it.
Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia is another celebration of ugly beauty. It's unbelievable crude in parts, but it's the crudity of a master craftsman. Oates plays Bennie, a down-and-out pianist who takes a road trip through Mexico with his prostitute girlfriend to recover the head of her deceased ex-lover. A powerful man has put a bounty on the head, and Bennie sees the money as a way to turn his life around. He's very wrong. The movie follows him from debasement to debasement until there's nothing left, which is where he finds his last shred of dignity and humanity. I don't know if I can overemphasize the intensity of this movie, especially through the second half, but I will say that it's a completely rewarding and powerful experience, and no one other than Warren Oates could have played Bennie.
2. Forest Whitaker. Whitaker is a huge presence in the movies that he's in, but he's also always on the sidelines. He had almost no words in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. He smiled at Robin Williams a lot in Good Morning, Vietnam, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart. He played the lead in Bird, Clint Eastwood's stillborn ode to Charlie Parker, but let's not speak of that. Since Bird, he's made a lot of movies where he plays key supporting roles, often involving that "still waters run deep" face that he has perfected, where his smile is tempered by the pain in his eyes. However, Jim Jarmusch made him the lead again in Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai, which was batshit crazy enough to assert that the hulking Whitaker could be a whisper-silent urban ninja taking down hardened mobsters. Jarmusch's movies never bat an eye at the battiest behavior, and many of his movies allow guys with a character-actor affinity (like Johnny Depp and Bill Murray) to pretend they haven't moved up to the major leagues as leading men. But Ghost Dog was special sort of pastiche, a movie where the Wu-Tang Clan met The Sopranos in a Shaw Brothers kung fu movie. Well, there's no real kung fu in Ghost Dog, just the apparent agreement of everyone involved that kung fu is awesome. And Forest Whitaker, playing the same damaged-but-noble guy he often plays, makes you believe that this tremendous bear of a man is capable of these amazing feats of stealth and cunning.
3. Richard Farnsworth. Farnsworth went from stuntman to character actor to The Grey Fox and The Straight Story, all in 62 years. That's a heck of a career arc! Although he started off doing stunt in Westerns in the 1930s, his acting career didn't take off until the 1970s. His IMDB page shows that he appeared mostly uncredited and unnamed in a number of great movies in the early 70s, but by the end of the decade, he'd been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Comes A Horseman. In 1982, he played the lead in the entertaining train robber throwback The Grey Fox. Seventeen years later, David Lynch cast him as the lead in his only G-rated movie (produced by Disney!), The Straight Story. Lynch is fascinated by the weirdness that crops in on everyday life, and The Straight Story was both deeply weird and as wholesome as apple pie. Farnsworth plays the same old-timer that he usually played, but his Alvin Straight was a man who knew how to look beyond his limitations. In the movie, he leaves his mentally-challenged daughter (played by Sissy Spacek, who might have been a character actor if she hadn't crossed over to leading lady so early in her career) to travel across the Midwest by lawnmower so that he can make up with a long-estranged brother (Harry Dean Stanton, keeping the weirdness real). It's an amazing movie, and it was also his last film.
4. Takashi Shimura. Shimura, like Oates, has a great droopy face that carries the weight of the world. Perhaps he was a great star in Japan, but in almost all of the movies I've seen, he's the guy on the side. Toshiro Mifune usually plays a guy who either looks up to him or treats him like trash (if he even notices Shimura's character at all, that is), but in every case, Shimura's characters have been passed by time. His hangdog look is the crux of his lead role in Kurosawa's Ikiru, one of the finest films made by anyone in cinema's all-too-brief history. Ikiru (Japanese for "To Live") is about a bureaucrat who, upon discovering that he is dying, decides to leave a tiny little legacy after a lifetime of invisibility. It is also, by a large margin, the most tearjerking tearjerker ever made. Shimura is a master of conveying his character's every little emotion, often without saying a word, and one would need to have a heart of dust not to be moved by his final scene.
5. Klaus Kinski. Is Kinski a character actor or a leading man? I really don't know. I have not seen many of his pre-Herzog movies, but my impression is that he was too odd and spooky for leading man status. In For A Few Dollars More, he doesn't have much to do other than creep out everyone around him. I'd forgotten he was in Doctor Zhivago, which may say more about how long it's been since I watched it than his performance. None of his many, many spaghetti westerns seem to center on his character. But then Werner Herzog made put him front-and-center for Aguirre, Wrath of God, and thus loosed his insanity on the world, as ordained in the Book Of Revelations. Herzog and Kinski had a complicated relationship, to say the least. I'm fairly certain that Kinski had a complicated relationship with any and all other human beings and several inanimate objects, as well. As Burden of Dreams shows, Herzog was coming fairly close to completely losing his mind during the midpoint of their collaboration. Still, after being the Wrath of God, Kinski appeared as the lead in Herzog's remake of Nosferatu, then in Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde. All are worth a viewing, but none matches the greatness of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Kinski appeared in a number of other movies around the same time, mostly European productions. He doesn't appear to have played the lead in any of them. Too weird, as I say. Too uncontrollable. One would have to be used to exploring human behavior at its breaking point to even attempt to deal with Kinski's mad energy.