If you’re like me, and getting really old, you may remember the 1970’s and 80’s.
If you do, you can’t not know actor/director Burt Reynolds, who it was announced yesterday passed away at the age of 82.
Mr. Reynolds rose to prominence in the earlier 1970’s, specifically with his fantastic performance in 1972’s Deliverance as Lewis, the would-be alpha male outdoorsman who takes a group of fellow city folk friends to a nature/river weekend trip which rapidly spirals into horror…
The movie was incredibly faithful to the James Dickey novel it was based on, so much so it even had the author play a small but vital role in the movie’s closing minutes!
Reynolds’ Lewis is, IMHO, the most fascinating character in the film, someone who is outwardly virile, charismatic, and clearly the “leader” of his pack. He’s the one who gets his friends into the woods and when things go bad, he looks to be the one who will deal with the dangers and get everyone out. Deliverance, to my mind, is like an Americanized version of Joseph Conrad’s wonderful book Heart of Darkness, which was the basis of Apocalypse Now. We have “civilized” people venturing into the wilds of nature, where the rules of a polite society no longer apply and where the danger is very real.
Here’s the thing that makes Lewis so damn fascinating (MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW!): He’s ultimately not all that different from the others in his group and something of a paper tiger. In less capable hands, Lewis could have been presented as the movie’s villain, someone who dragged his friends to near doom and, when the going gets really tough is taken out of action.
But this performance and this character is far more nuanced. Yes, he’s a man who got himself and others in over their proverbial heads, but Reynold’s performance following one of this movie’s pivotal sequences, after he kills a man, shows some incredible acting on his part. Lewis kills one of the mountain men/rapists, but as the man dies from the arrow shot through his heart, one is riveted by Reynold’s acting here. He is tough at first, but then, as the man slowly, agonizingly, dies, the look on his face changes to horror, to a realization of the trouble they’re in and how he, the alpha male, is also in over his head (pay particular attention to his facial expressions from 1:44 seconds or so):
Unfortunately, this clip ends before what I consider the best bit, where Lewis says, almost in a whisper, that he hit the man with a “Center shot”. His whisper is the sound of a man’s soul dying.
Here’s a funny bit from the Conan show, where Burt Reynolds talks about that famous scene and how one of the roles was cast:
Here’s the thing: By the time Burt Reynolds appeared in Deliverance in 1972, he had already racked up a LARGE number of roles, dating back to 1958 (14 years!), in numerous TV shows and movies and including roles in Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Perry Mason, The Twilight Zone (the original!), Hawk (a detective show starring Mr. Reynolds), Navajo Joe (a “spaghetti” type western from 1966 which starred Mr. Reynolds), Sam Whiskey (another movie, from 1969, where he was the protagonist), Dan August (another TV series featuring Reynolds in the starring role), and, just before the release of Deliverance, he starred in Fuzz, a movie based on the famous Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) 87th Precinct novels and also featured Raquel Welch and Yul Brynner.
So Mr. Reynolds, following years of hard work and appearances in a number of roles, was suddenly “hot”. He would follow up Deliverance with mostly starring roles in movies during the rest of the 1970’s. Some movies fared better than others, most were interesting, including White Lightening (the first of his two “Gator” films), Gator (the second of the, you guessed it, Gator films), The Longest Yard, and Nickelodeon.
But Reynold’s biggest hit was to come in the year 1977…
Smokey and the Bandit was a HUGE hit, a film that was second in the Box Office that year, beaten by this long forgotten film called Star Wars, and it was a freaking delight.
The movie featured Reynolds, Sally Field (cute as a button!), Jerry Reed, and a spectacularly foul mouthed Jackie Gleason as the main cast in what amounts to a comedic full length car chase film. It was wonderfully light-hearted and never had a dull moment and Reynold’s charisma was on full display.
From that point on Reynolds would continue working hard, appearing in films that were quite good if not quite as memorable as those that came before. I loved The End, a movie Mr. Reynolds directed, though today people don’t remember it that much…
… and Hooper, a return feature with Smokey and the Bandit director Hal Needham (I reviewed that here). He had a hit with The Cannonball Run, a sorta/kinda reworking of The Gumball Rally, but the film wasn’t as good as one would have hoped, though Roger Moore, of all people, was quite hilarious in it…
He would direct and star in the 1981 film Sharky’s Machine, which I feel is one of Mr. Reynold’s last great movies before he seemed to “lose it” with audiences…
He lost it, unfortunately, due to a number of middling films like Stroker Ace (back together with director Hal Needham), Cannonball Run II (though I wasn’t the biggest fan of the original, it was a masterpiece of comedy compared to the sequel), Stick, Heat, and Malone.
Though it wasn’t a great film, it was fun to see Reynolds paired with longtime friend Clint Eastwood in City Heat…
Mr. Reynolds, going into the later 1980’s and into the 1990’s, looked like his time had come and gone. Yet he still worked, quite frequently, appearing in roles both large and small on the big and small screen. And then in 1997 he appeared in Boogie Nights and, after too many years, received great kudos for his acting…
Sadly, Mr. Reynolds, in his later years, suffered from a number of health problems and, for the last decade or so, has looked increasingly frail.
So it wasn’t too big a shock to hear of his passing yesterday but, as you can tell by the length of this posting, I admired the hell out of him and his work.
Here’s to you, Mr. Reynolds. You will be missed.