Lee Marvin: rising above the reputation
He was a drunk, on-screen and off, and starred in the most violent films of his age. But, first and foremost, he was a fantastic actor
This week's re-release of John Boorman's magnificent 1967 thriller Point Blank is all the evidence we really need of Lee Marvin's inextinguishable greatness as a movie icon. But since I've written elsewhere about Point Blank this week, let's imagine it never existed, and recall all the other reasons to love Lee.
Because for a couple of decades from the 50s to the 70s, whenever people referred to a movie as the most violent ever made, the chances were pretty good that Lee Marvin would be close to, if not the actual cause of, the very worst of the mayhem. Prime example: throwing a pot of scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in Fritz Lang's potent big city crime thriller The Big Heat. Oh, Marvin is scumbag embodied in that movie – the last time I saw it on TCM it was 59 years old and still rated TV-MA.
Add The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank, representing state-of-the-art movie violence in the year before the Production Code was overthrown, and Marvin emerges as the emblematic homme du violence du jour. Be sad, however, that he fell out with Sam Peckinpah in pre-production on The Wild Bunch (the sine qua non of most violent movies ever made), and never got to play Pike Bishop, the role that went to William Holden. The greatest Peckinpah actor who never worked with Peckinpah? Add that to the list.
Because Marvin was also the greatest macho Hollywood drunk of all time, as evidenced by his blitzed appearance in Peter Whitehead's Tonite Let's All Make Love In London (on a night off from filming Dozen), to say nothing of a half-dozen famously half-/wholly cut chatshow appearances in his 70s maturity. Remember Boorman's famous memory of Lee, shitfaced in Hollywood at dawn, hailing a cab and saying, "Take me home; hills above Sunset Plaza … Uh, somewhere." Failing to find it, Marvin found a kid selling maps to the stars' homes. "OK, this is me, drive up here." And arriving to hear the new owner of the house tell him, "Ah, Mr Marvin, you sold me this house four years ago."
Because, macho as he was – the sponsor of his 1957-60 TV cop show M Squad was Pall Mall cigarettes – with that humiliating bullet wound from storming Saipan island with his Marine battalion, a harrowing percentage of whom were slaughtered around him (shot in the ass, all his buddies dead, and you wonder why he drank?), he was also a beautiful, sensitive actor, as can be seen in the quiet 1970 mud-and-rags western Monte Walsh and in the wrenching 1960 TV drama The American, his quiet side almost as imposing as his barking psychopathic side. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and – who knew? – came out in favour of gay liberation in 1969, in the week of the Stonewall riots. Yeah, Lee Marvin.
He's dead and gone – died on my birthday in 1987 and ruined it – and there will never be another. Thank God he made all those movies.
