Ron Silver has died, at 62, after a two year battle with esophageal cancer. The living image of the "New York actor", Silver, was something of a specialist in fast-talking, saturnine cynics, an association that became even greater after he won a Tony Award for his semi-legendary performance as a Hollywood shark in David Mamet's 1988 Broadway hit Speed-the-Plow. Silver's performances in the Mamet play and in David Rabe's 1984 Hurlyburly--neither of which, sadly, he got to repeat on film--cemented his image as the great white way's modern notion of a successful movie industry sleazeball. Ironically, he never became the star in movies that he was onstage, but he had a long and healthy career in TV and movies anyway. After a barely detectable film debut in the unfunny underground comedy Tunnel Vision (1977) and a recurring role alongside a fellow Broadway baby on 1980's The Stockard Channing Show, Silver began to develop a name for himself in movies with his rambunctiously funny performances in the romantic comedies Best Friends (1982), in which he played, yes, a Hollywood producer, and Lovesick (1983), in which his character, a Hollywood star returning to his New York stage roots, gave him the chance to mock Al Pacino.

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NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster.

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John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is one of the most unusual pieces of Oscar bait laid out before the public this holiday season. Based on Shanley's play of the same name, which is set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964, and which the playwright-filmmaker has managed to transpose to the screen with every bit as much style and as full a grasp of the movie medium as one expects from the director of Joe vs. the Volcano. Superficially, at first glance, it appears to be a simply a filmed version of the play. The text is the blueprint for a naturalistic acting contest in which the four main characters dance around each other, trying to determine what, if anything, Father Flynn did with little Donald Miller in the rectory with the communion wine. However, in an audacious choice, the movie subtly shifts into a science fiction fantasy, about how a stable-seeming institution is driven insane by the presence in it midst of an alien intruder. This major change is entirely the work of one of the principal performers, Meryl Streep, who plays the unforgivingly snoopy old nun who has Father Flynn's backside in her rifle scope, and who makes it clear from her entrance, trailing alongside the benches stuffed with children attending a service and leaving a path of popping eyes and frightened mugging in her wake, that the character is...not of our world. Just as the movie seeks to keep viewers in...doubt!!--as to whether or not Father Flynn has been a dirty, dirty boy, it never spells out just what universe Sister Aloysius Beauvier may have come from, or to what species she might belong. (Her name is a grim indication of the flailing effort she has made at self-invention since coming to live among the humans; presumably, having entered our world from God knows what unguarded cosmic border, she adopted the name of the dead president's widow.)

Is she an extraterrestrial? Or is she a distant cousin of the Wicked Witch of the West, having fled Oz steps ahead of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman's Republican Guard? While that possibility might be a stretch, Streep's ever increasing resemblance to Margaret Hamilton automatically brings it to mind. It's only a physical resemblance, because Margaret Hamilton was a much subtler performer.

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Gerard Damiano has died, at 80, of complications following a stroke. His major, not-inconsiderable achievement was the creation of what trendspotters in the 1970s called "porno chic," by directing (under the name "Jerry Gerard") the 1972 Deep Throat. That film had modest, mostly unrealized, aspirations, to break the mold in skin flick entertainment value: it had a novel premise--young woman finds that her clitoris is in her throat-- that was inspired by Damiano's discovery of a young leading lady-- Linda Boreman, who he rechristianed "Linda Lovelace"--who, in the words of Nora Ephron, had "no gag reflex whatsoever", and an actor ("Harry Reems", known to his mama as Herbert Streicher) who cavorted like the guy who was voted the funniest member of his high school class doing a bad Groucho impression. Through some combination of a quirk of timing and lucky accidents--as Richard Corliss notes, Lovelace's "inexperience on screen played like freshness, innocence"--Deep Throat caught on big, becoming a cultural phenomenon. At a time when advocates of greater cultural freedom were arguing about nudity and simulated sex on screen, with the 500-pound gorilla (so to speak) of Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris just around the corner, a lot of people began thinking that it might be their duty to pencil in at least one hardcore movie on their schedules, and Deep Throat was the porn movie to see. Another explanation was offered by Norman Mailer in the 2003 documentary Inside Deep Throat: "It was a giggle," Mailer says, "and the worst thing that can be said about Americans as a people is that we'll sell our souls for a giggle." In terms of the ratio of costs (next to nil) to box-office take, there's a pretty good chance that it's the most profitable movie ever made, though hard figures are hard to come by, for the same reason that Damiano would never see any of it: he had gotten his funding from organized crime figures, and it turned out that Mafia bookkeeping made Hollywood bookkeeping look like Scrooge on Christmas morning.

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As you read here earlier today, Vanity Fair has cancelled their Oscar party, but there’s no stopping their annual movie issue. Somewhere amid the hundreds of glossy ads and smelly cologne strips, you’ll find articles on the films of Norman Mailer, the glitzy life of producer Jerry Weintraub and “A Guy’s Guide to Chick Flicks” by the ever-vigilant James Wolcott. The web site offers none of these, but it does feature a slideshow of all the Hollywood Issue covers photographed by Annie Liebovitz. It’s fun to flip back through the years and have a good chuckle at some of Vanity Fair’s picks to click from days gone by (after first pausing briefly to once again admire Scarlett Johannson’s rear flank in the March 2006 edition). For instance, without peeking at the caption, how many of the stars on the 2000 cover can you identify on sight?

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Michael Sragow discusses the late, great Sam Peckinpah and finds his imprint on the Coen brothers' violent modern Western, No Country for Old Men. Taking a cue from Paul Seydor, Sragow also links Peckinpah with Norman Mailer "as artists defined by their pursuit of extreme action, their rebellion against official culture and bureaucratized society, and their recognition that the quest for authentic manhood is absolute and never-ending. Their paradoxical linkage of fragility with appetite and strength — so different from the cheap certainty of macho camp — drove Peckinpah to create the most dynamic of all visual lexicons and Mailer to master a dazzling variety of rhetoric in both intimate and epic modes." Although a quick scan of what's playing in theaters today might suggest that neither artist is having much of an influence on current cinema, Sragow believes that "No Country for Old Men renews the legacy of Mailer and Peckinpah, who extended the reach and freedom and redefined the positive and negative limits of the male character in American literature and movies." — Phil Nugent

Norman Mailer's death on November 10, at the age of eighty-four, was a great blow to American letters, and also to film lovers, robbing us as it did of a major literary artist whose relationship to the movies was just about unique. Mailer always said that he was seduced into writing by the novels of James T. Farrell, and he claimed Ernest Hemingway as a personal hero. Both Hemingway and Farrell reacted to the new primacy of movies by stripping their writing down, but Mailer wasn't really quite of that school. His style was sometimes downright baroque, and he loved to delve deep into the psyches of his characters, of real people, of himself and the events in which he was taking part. Nor did he have much truck with the common attitude among literary figures of his era that the movies were the enemy. Mailer loved the novel as a form and feared that it might be dying out, but he tried to keep it alive by writing as if he were making a movie on the page. And he went about that goal not cynically or opportunistically but whole-heartedly.

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