RIP M. Emmet Walsh: He Had a Great Face

Plus: A short assignment!

M. Emmet Walsh in ‘Blade Runner’

I forget who it was, but I recall someone once saying that the Coen Brothers are among the last directors to make movies about guys with interesting faces. That’s always stuck with me, because once you hear it you can’t unsee it.

Raising Arizona is a perfect example: from the weathered Tex Cobb to the craggy Trey Wilson to the rubbery Sam McMurray to and the baby-faced William Forsythe, the film’s practically a compendium of interesting faces, all of them revolving around the more classically attractive Holly Hunter and Nicolas Cage (though Cage himself has one of the most interesting faces of any major movie star to emerge in the post-New Hollywood era). Or think of Peter Stomare and Steve Buscemi in Fargo or Javier Bardem and his bowl cut in No Country for Old Men or Fred Melamed in A Serious Man.

But the first of these faces came in their directorial debut: M. Emmet Walsh’s private detective-cum-hitman in Blood Simple. You could practically see the smirk on his face when he told the cuckolded husband he could get the pictures of his wife in flagrante delicto framed. You believed him when he said he’d do anything legal for the right price and then dropped the requirement of lawfulness a second later. You wondered precisely what his capability for violence was when that husband threw his money on the ground; a dark shadow flickers across his face, his eyes twitching slightly, and then—laughter, high-pitched, a hyena giggle that feels incongruous from the big man sitting at that table.

The incongruity is what often made Walsh so good. One of my favorite moments in Blade Runner comes early on, when Walsh’s cop, Bryant, sits across from Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) and tells him he’s got to come back for one last job. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t quite register on first viewing, but once you know the central philosophical struggle—whether Deckard is human or replicant, and whether it matters one way or the other—you realize just how much of a master class Walsh is putting on. You hear Walsh say he’s got “four skin jobs walking the streets” and then Ridley Scott cuts to Walsh, sitting behind that desk, and it’s a short thing, a small thing, but there’s a little squint, a minute furrowing of the brow. “Skin jobs.” Is he nervous that he crossed a line with Deckard? What does he know that Deckard doesn’t? Or is he just naturally twitchy because he’s trying to strongarm the Blade Runner into doing his dirty work?

Walsh is one of those guys you can just watch talk for ages, almost absent context. If you haven’t seen Glenn Gordon Caron’s Clean and Sober, you should; Michael Keaton’s turn as coked-up real estate agent is both wonderful and mildly terrifying in a real-world sort of way. Walsh plays his sponsor and delivers these monologues:

You just see the junkie’s desperation in his “is that him?” at the 38-second mark; no one squinted as well as Walsh did.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone quite like him working in major movies at the moment. Walsh was never a leading man, precisely, but even modern character actors tend to be trim and tidy save for a few holdovers like Stephens Root and Tobolowsky or Bill Camp. Walsh will be missed.

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Across the Movie Aisle Live returns to DC on Tuesday, April 9, at 7 PM. We’re showing Arrival and then chatting about it. We’re pretty much down to the front two rows, people! But don’t worry: as Peter Suderman said on this Tuesday’s episode, those are some fine seats too. Make sure to check out today’s episode, in which we go deep on sad sci-fi movies. Solaris! Ad Astra! Star Trek: The Motion Picture! (Wait, what?)

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Links!

This week I reviewed Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which is kind of fun moment to moment but doesn’t really gel as a feature-length production. There’s too much going on!

I hope you check out last week’s Bulwark Goes to Hollywood with Dallas Film Commissioner Tony Armer. If you’ve ever wanted to learn about the wild world of film subsidies and rebates, now’s your chance!

There’s an interesting little controversy brewing over the use of an AI-generated image in the forthcoming horror film Late Night with the Devil. Basically: the film, which was made two years ago and has been making the festival rounds for the last year or so, uses a piece of AI-generated art “as very brief interstitials in the film.” Hardliners against AI have said this is an outrage, that it’s replacing human labor, an abomination, etc. But, as others have noted, the film was made two years ago, before the strikes turned AI into a creative flashpoint. Will be curious to see how this plays out.

Bruce Willis is beloved by all.

Noah is a fascinatingly weird movie and I’m glad people are checking it out on Netflix.

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Assigned Viewing: “The Last Brunch” (Vimeo)

This week I’m assigning a short film, “The Last Brunch,” from writer-director Jim Cummings. You can watch it above for free right now (or click here, though I want to be very clear ahead of time that this is a not safe for work production). “The Last Brunch” debuted at SXSW, and it is marked by the sort of awkward humor that helped make Cummings’s features—Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and The Beta Test—must-watch indie productions for a certain sort of sardonic individual. I have to say, I really admire Cummings’s continued efforts to just get stuff made outside of the system: between his crowdfunding and his VOD distribution efforts, he is doing a great job of not just getting stuff made but also getting it seen by people who want to see it. Yes, raising awareness of these productions can be difficult, but hey: that is why we have newsletters.