November 6th | 5 Films
Ever since he was five years old, Alan Arkin wanted to act.
“At five, acting was already a fever in my blood, and somehow I knew even then, that the decision was made and there would be no turning back,” Arkin wrote in his memoir, “An Improvised Life.”
He would see movies and imitate the characters he watched on screen, from Louis Hayward in The Man in the Iron Mask (1939), Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940) or the antics of Danny Kaye. He sought out every film he could see.
“In short, at a very young age, I’d become an addict. A film junkie,” he wrote. “With all the dangers found in any other type of addiction. And like many addictions, it pointed the way to something real and beautiful, but it also ran the risk of ruining my life.”
Arkin was a self-proclaimed terrible student, especially in high school, because he only wanted to act and only gave his attention to school plays, according to his memoir.
While trying to become an actor, Arkin briefly performed with a folk band, The Tarriers. After trying unsuccessfully to get stage work in New York City, Arkin reached out to Paul Sills in Chicago, who told him to call him for a job. Arkin thought this job would be the end of his acting career.
“Making that call was like phoning in my own obituary,” he wrote. “Taking this job would absolutely end my chances of doing anything major in either New York or Los Angeles… Chicago had no theatrical importance in those days; this felt like a death sentence for my career.”
The opportunity ended up doing the opposite: boosting Arkin’s career. The job was with the improv group Second City, which is still performing in Chicago to this day.
“The serious start of my professional life began with Second City,” Arkin wrote. “Everything up to that point was prelude and rehearsal.”
While performing with Second City, Arkin fell in love with the art of improv, where sometimes he and the cast would play 10 to 20 different characters throughout an evening.
“The thing that separated my experience at Second City from every other endeavor I’ve ever been connected with was that we were in an arena where we were allowed to experiment,” he wrote. “To change. To grow. And not only that, we were allowed to fail.”
Arkin was a versatile actor who could transform into any character, from Mack the Knife to the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev.
“I suppose it wasn’t surprising since, from the beginning, I always thought of myself as a character actor. Someone who transforms himself into other people,” he wrote.
Being chameleon-like served Arkin well in his film acting career, as his screen performances were never the same from film to film, including the six films Turner Classic Movies is showing in memory of Alan Arkin, who passed away on June 29, 2023:
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966)
The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) was Arkin’s first feature-length film. Improv is how Arkin got the job.
“I told Norman Jewison, the director, that I’d do a screen test, but only if I could improvise it,” Arkin wrote. “… I did the screen test, improvising several scenes, working off Norman, who stayed behind the camera. I got the part, and we did the film.”
Arkin continued to improvise throughout the film, and Jewison would keep the camera rolling to see what would happen after the scene was finished, Arkin wrote.
Based on the novel “The Off-Islanders” by Nathaniel Benchley, the comedy is about a Russian submarine that accidentally runs up on the sandbar off the coast of a small New England island town. Some of the Russian sailors go into town to try and tow their submarine off the sandbar, but due to the current conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Americans in the town fear they are getting attacked.
Arkin plays the role of one of the Russian sailors, Lt. Rozanov, and co-stars Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Brain Keith, Jonathan Winters, and Paul Ford, who are Americans in the town.
For the role of Lt. Rozanov, the studio wanted an A-list star, and Arkin had never been in a film. Jewison had seen him in the play “Luv” and wanted to give Arkin a screentest, knowing he was skilled at doing accents, Jewison wrote in his autobiography, “This Terrible Business Has Been Good to Me.”
“Throughout the film, the Russians speak Russian to one another or mangled English to Americans, so I arranged for Alan to work with a Russian-speaking translator at the UN in New York,” Jewison wrote. “In the film, he was so convincing that moviegoers thought he was Russian. Even Russians who saw the film believed he was Russian.”
For his work in the film, Arkin was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, a BAFTA for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles, and he won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.
“One of the things that attracted me to the project was its strong social statement,” Arkin wrote. “We were smack in the middle of the Cold War at the time, and the film had the audacious message that Russians were human beings, pretty much like us… At that moment in our history the Soviet Union was so demonized that making a movie that challenged that view was actually a pretty courageous thing to do. I think most of us in the cast were in accord with that mission, and it helped us bond as a group.”
Arkin and the cast expected backlash for the film, but none came from moviegoers or critics. And Arkin’s career flourished because of the movie.
“From the beginning, film felt like the medium I had been waiting for,” Arkin wrote. “There was none of the terrible pressure of working in front of an audience and none of the endless grind of a long run … Making movies was the answer to my prayers.”
Wait Until Dark (1967)
Arkin played an entirely different character in the thriller, Wait Until Dark (1967).
“He’s a monster. A sadistic, drug-ridden psychopath,” Arkin said in an interview in the 2003 featurette, “A Look in the Dark.”
Audrey Hepburn stars in the film as Susy Hendrix, a woman adapting to losing her sight after an accident. Susy’s husband Sam, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., believes he’s being helpful by taking possession of a doll handed to him by a stranger, Lisa, at an airport. However, he’s unknowingly a target to a drug smuggling plot because the doll is filled with heroin.
When Mike Talman, played by Richard Crenna, and Carlino, played by Jack Weston, arrive at Susy’s empty apartment looking for Lisa, instead, they find Lisa’s body and Roat, played by Alan Arkin, conning them into helping him find the heroin-filled doll.
Unlike his first film role, Arkin’s Roat is a cool, smooth Beatnik drug dealer who wears dark glasses and speaks calmly. Calm until he wields his knife, and you can tell he’s incredibly dangerous.
Arkin said that at first, he wasn’t sure people on set liked or understood how he was playing the character.
“I was playing what looks like a laid-back guy. But it wasn’t laid-back. He’s like a snake being laid back. He’s just waiting for an opportunity,” Arkin said in the 2003 interview.
Arkin interpreted the character as being on every drug known to man, each counteracting the other and putting him in a state of “negative neutrality.”
Producer Mel Ferrer considered Arkin for the role because he could play “a meany when he wants to be,” he said in the 2003 featurette.
The role further exhibited Arkin’s chameleon-like acting and appearance skills, as he plays three different roles: the main drug dealer Roat, and two phony characters used to manipulate Susy.
“He scared the heck out of you,” Ferrer said.
Arkin enjoyed working with actor Jack Weston because he was willing to improvise. He also loved working with Audrey Hepburn, but hated being villainous to her, Arkin said in the 2003 interview.
“I hated terrorizing Audrey Hepburn. I was nuts about her. Whatever you always heard of her, whatever her screen persona appears to be, that’s what she was like,” Arkin said. “I felt like I was working with real royalty.”
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968)
While Arkin is known for being able to use different accents, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968), he doesn’t speak at all.
Based on a 1940 novel by Carson McCullers, Arkin plays Mr. Singer, a man who is both deaf and mute. He moves to a town in Alabama to be closer to his friend, who was admitted to a hospital nearby.
Mr. Singer is lonely because it is difficult to connect with people, but other unhappy people surround him. He boards with the Kelly family, who need money because Mr. Kelly is injured and out of work. The family’s teenage daughter, Mick, played by Sondra Locke, is uncertain of Mr. Singer, but the two form a bond. She loves music and tries to describe how it sounds to him.
Others Mr. Singer interacts with include Dr. Copeland, played by Percy Rodriguez, a Black physician who is ill and also feels disconnected from his daughter, played by Cicely Tyson.
The overarching theme of the film is heartbreak and pain.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was filmed in Selma, Ala., and the cast and crew were concerned about how the Black actors would be treated, Arkin said in an interview with Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne, during the 2014 Turner Classic Movies Classic Film Festival.
“To our amazement, we were treated royally by the entire town of Selma,” Arkin said in 2014. “The residents bent over backward to make everybody feel welcome and get past their image of bigotry.”
Arkin decided to stay in character even while not filming and did not speak on set, according to a film extra and Selma local, Vaughan Russell, in a 2015 article in the Montgomery Advertiser.
Arkin was nominated for his second Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. He wouldn’t be nominated again until 2007, when he was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Little Miss Sunshine (2006), which he won.
Popi (1969)
In his next film, Arkin played a Puerto Rican father in Popi (1969). In the film, Arkin’s character, Abraham works three jobs and is a single father to two young sons, Luis and Junior, played by Reuben Figueroa and Miguel Alejandro. Their current neighborhood in New York City is violent, and he wants a better life for his sons. Abraham devises an elaborate plan for the family to move to Florida and puts his two sons on a boat so that everyone will believe they are Cuban refugees and a wealthy American family will adopt them.
“I was offered the lead in a film called Popi, a biting social satire about the plight of Puerto Ricans in New York,” Arkin wrote in his memoir. “It made a wonderful statement, and finally, I was getting a chance to play a rich and complex character, exactly the kind of material I wanted to do.”
Actress Rita Moreno wrote in her memoir that she was having difficulty finding good film roles when she was offered the role of Arkin’s girlfriend, Lupe.
“I played Alan’s girlfriend, Lupe, whose racial identity remains unspecified in the movie,” Moreno wrote. “Popi was a true pleasure, as Alan was such a gifted actor.”
The In-Laws (1979)
After making films for over 10 years, making The In-Laws (1979) was the first time Arkin said he truly had fun making a film.
“During the shooting, for the first time in my life, I found myself having a good time while working,” Arkin wrote. “There was nothing I could do about it. There was no struggle involved, no mountain to climb. Out of nowhere, acting had become play, and for weeks I worried that I might get fired.”
In the film, Arkin plays dentist Dr. Sheldon Kornpett. In a few days, his daughter Barbara, played by Penny Peyser, is marrying Tommy Ricardo, played by Michael Lembeck. Dr. Kornpett and his wife Carol, played by Nancy Dussault, have not yet met Tommy’s parents.
When they finally do, they find Tommy’s father, Vince Ricardo, played by Peter Falk, to be very odd. Vince tells Dr. Kornpett that he is a United States government agent and drags him from New York City to Central America on a wild adventure.
The film is filled with adventure and madcap comedy. Arkin said that Peter Falk was the most professional actor he had worked with in a June 29, 1979, interview with Dick Cavett.
“Some of the funniest things I do in the film were his (Falk’s) idea,” Arkin told Cavett.
Though Arkin loved improv, there is almost no improvisation in the film, he said in a 2012 interview. The only moment is when Falk is supposed to be driving and he begins talking about his chicken sandwich that day.
Before making The In-Laws, Arkin said he felt he had to work himself into a state to get into the zone, but in this film, he was just himself and had a good time. Since the film was released, he would have several people approach him, saying it looked like they had fun making the movie. He would always reply, “Yes, we had a ball.”
More than 50 years of acting
Arkin’s acting career spanned more than 50 years, with his last acting project in 2022 as a voice in Minions: The Rise of Gru.
After winning the Academy Award for Little Miss Sunshine, he was nominated a final time for Argo (2012).
Away from the cameras, Arkin also held improv workshops with students, something he passionately details in his 2011 memoir. And learning improv is about taking risks and failing, he wrote.
\"Everybody's looking at the bottom line all the time,” Arkin wrote in his memoir. “Failure doesn't look good on the bottom line, and yet you don't learn anything without failing.\"
