6 Movies | December 28, 8 p.m.
Roger Ebert, blogging in 2012, ruminated on death after several of his friends passed. “We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters,” he wrote, “and one by one those clusters fade and disappear.” Not on TCM’s watch. Dedicated to preserving the world’s film heritage, TCM ends its programming year by honoring unforgettable artists who we lost during the year with a screening of a significant film.
Paul Reubens (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, 1985)
In 1997, I spoke with monologist Spalding Gray about his video-watching habits. Gray cited Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as a family favorite in his household. “I never laugh at sophisticated humor,” he said. “It takes enormous amounts of simplistic childhood regression to entertain me. There is something so surreally delightful and obsessive about that movie. I keep coming back to it.” Paul Reubens, who passed away in July after a six-year bout with cancer, was a scene-stealing character actor in films (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1992, Mosaic, 2018) and television (Murphy Brown, 1995-97), but the character for which he will be forever known and beloved is Pee-Wee Herman, the poster child for arrested development and a comedy icon for the ages and the ageless, The Pee-Weeverse comprised two more films and a brilliantly inventive Saturday morning children’s show he described as his personal “Norman Rockwell version of the ‘50s,” but way more inclusive. The cast included Laurence Fishburne as Cowboy Curtis, S. Epatha Merkerson as Reba the Mail Lady and Gilbert Lewis and William Marshall who shared the role of the King of Cartoons. A statement was released after his death, in which he thanked his friends, fans and supporters for their love and respect. “I have loved you all so much,” he shared, “and enjoyed making art for you.”
Melinda Dillon (Absence of Malice, 1981)
Melinda Dillon, who died last January at the age of 83, should be enshrined in the Movie Mom Hall of Fame. She received an Academy Award nomination as the single mother whose son is abducted by aliens in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Perhaps her most iconic role is Ralphie’s mom in Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story (1983). Writing in The New York Times, Dina Gachman proclaimed, “One look at her disheveled hair and shabby robe and exasperated stare and I thought: This woman is a damn hero.” At the age of 23, Dillon became an overnight sensation for her Tony-nominated performance as Honey in the original production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe. Mental health issues compelled her to withdraw from acting, but she returned when she was in her 30s following the end of her marriage. Her first film, Edward Bland’s The Cry of Jazz, an independent short made when she was 19, was recently inducted into the National Film Registry of “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films. It joins several of her films, including Close Encounters, A Christmas Story, and The Muppet Movie, 1979. She earned a second Oscar-nomination for her heartbreaking performance in Absence of Malice as a fragile Catholic woman outed by a reporter (Sally Field) after admitting she had an abortion. But she will for generations to come be associated with an indelible line of dialogue from A Christmas Story, dismissing her son’s Christmas gift wish with “the classic mother-BB gun block”: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”
Glenda Jackson (Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971)
No one could call two-time Oscar-winner Glenda Jackson’s career conventional. As she told an interviewer, “I like to take risks.” These included starring in challenging roles in adult-themed films that pushed the boundaries of the screen’s new freedoms in the 1970s, such as Ken Russell’s adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1969), which earned her her first Oscar nomination. In John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, she stars opposite Peter Finch and Murray Head in a story about a transgressive love triangle. She had a “difficult” reputation, throwing down with directors and antagonizing castmates. Her New York Times obit quotes Gary Oldman, who called her “a nightmare” when they costarred in a play. Jackson was unapologetic. To The Guardian, she said, “When you’re working in a team producing something creative, you have to be prepared to be honest to get the best results, she says. “I expect people to say to me: ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?’ Not that I would ever say that to anybody, but that’s what you’re looking for; there is that shared sense of responsibility.” In 1992, Jackson gave up acting after being elected to Parliament. She returned to acting in 2016, portraying the title role in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. She won a Tony Award for her role in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women. Onscreen, other memorable performances include her critics award-winning role in Stevie (1978) about poet Stevie Smith and her Oscar-winning turn in the romantic comedy A Touch of Class (1973), a rare victory for a comic performance. Characteristically, she did not attend either Oscar ceremony in the years she was nominated. Jackson was fiercely dedicated to her craft. For her Emmy-winning performance in the 1971 BBC miniseries Elizabeth R, a hit in this country when broadcast on PBS, she shaved her head, learned how to ride sidesaddle, and learned archery and calligraphy. In a 2022 interview in The Guardian, she was asked which was most fake, Hollywood or parliament. She responded, “Neither of them are games. They are both for real. In a way, that’s a compliment to actors and politicians as well as being an insult.”
Treat Williams (Hair, 1979)
Give me a film with Treat Williams, a character actor with a leading man presence. His first starring role in Milos Forman’s 1979 adaptation of the groundbreaking Tony Award-winning musical Hair brought him to the attention of Sidney Lumet, who cast him as the lead in Prince of the City (1981), a criminally underseen drama based on a true story of a New York cop who exposed corruption in his department. Williams, praised Roger Ebert in his four-star review, gives “a demanding and grueling performance. Williams is almost always onscreen, and almost always in situations of extreme stress, fatigue, and emotional turmoil. We see him coming apart before our eyes.” (That he was not nominated for an Oscar is one of the Academy’s most grievous snubs). Williams died last June in a motorcycle accident. A Golden Globe and Emmy-nominee, he was featured in a 1981 Newsweek cover story titled “A New Breed of Actor.” “I’m a traditionalist,” he told the writer. Lumet praised at the time, “He had an incredible impact. A life force, a kind of inner energy, bouncing off the screen. There’s no telling where he can go.” He went to Broadway as Danny Zucko in Grease and to television, fronting the series Everwood for four seasons. Other memorable roles included his electric performance opposite Ann-Margret as Stanley Kowalski in a made-for-TV adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire (1984) and his sinister turn in Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk (1985) as a predator who targets a 15-year-old girl (Laura Dern).
Jane Birkin (Blow-Up, 1966)
The Blonde. That’s how Jane Birkin’s character is credited in Michelangelo Antonioni’s elusive mystery Blow-Up, a time capsule snapshot of swinging (like a pendulum do) 1960s London. She was so much more. Birkin, who died last July at the age of 76, was a prolific actress, singer and style influencer. In 1984, while on an airplane, her carry-on bag broke. She complained to her seatmate that Hermes did not make a bag that could hold all her things. Her seatmate just happened to be the fashion company’s chairman and head designer. A new larger-sized bag, dubbed the Birkin bag, was released that year. Birkin was the muse of singer Serge Gainsbourg. They met in 1968 following the end of her marriage to composer John Barry. She auditioned for a French film starring Gainsbourg despite being unable to speak French. Their more-than-a-decade relationship captivated the French public, and she collaborated with him until his death in 1991. Their most notorious collaboration was the scandalous 1969 French language hit, “Je t’aime…mon non plus.” The Vatican banned it, but in the year of “Sugar Sugar,” it was a sexy and sultry sensation. One of Birkin’s most memorable films was La Piscine (1969), which boasts an absurdly gorgeous (and scantily clad) cast including Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. The film was rediscovered in the United States in 2021 and enjoyed an art house revival. The London-born Birkin was eulogized by France’s President Emmanuel Macron as “a French icon.”
Bert I. Gordon (Village of the Giants, 1965)
Director Bert Gordon was born in Wisconsin and, at the age of 100, died in Wisconsin, which is apt because his detractors dismissed his oeuvre as cheese. Like Jane Birkin, he was made for his times, in his case, the Atomic Age. His films, made on the fly and on the cheap, often with homemade special effects, fed off the anxiety fueled by the bomb and radiation: The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), The Cyclops (1957), Beginning of the End (1957, giant radioactive ants) and The Food of the Gods (1976, giant radioactive rats, chicken and wasps). TCM is screening Village of the Giants, which has everything you want in a Bert Gordon movie, plus the rock group the Beau Brummels (that’s the Beau Brummelstones, for you Flintstones fans): Ridiculous special effects, a cast of 1960s teen idols (Tommy Kirk, Beau Bridges, Johnny Crawford), cult goddesses (Joy Harmon) and a future Oscar-winning director (Ron Howard as Genius, who invents a “goo” that makes whomever ingests it grow 10 times their normal height, just the kind of kicks a band of delinquents are looking for). Not for nothing were eight of Gordon’s films given the riff-roaring Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. In his, um, “appreciation” of Gordon, the Chicago Tribune’s Christopher Borrelli quotes Roger Ebert, who once said of another B-movie, “When they no longer make movies like this, a little light will go out of the world.”
The passing of all these artists has made our world that much dimmer.
