Spotlight on: Alan Arkin
Alan Arkin is, I think, one of the best American actors alive and working today. He is fabulous!
He is also not this guy:
He is this guy!
Alan Arkin's first big screen role was in 1966 in The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!, which is about as good as it sounds. Which is to say, not very. A Russian submarine accidentally runs aground near a town full of American morons. Lt. Arkin is sent ashore with a small crew to try and steal a boat. High jinks ensue. At the end, the town and the Russians band together to save an annoying red-headed boy from falling to a well deserved death, followed by love and vodka for everybody. It's a pretty admirable message for a movie that came out at the height of the Cold War. Alan Arkin was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, one of only six actors to be nominated for that award for their first film. Here is a picture of him in his cute little sailor hat:
The next year he was in a really awesome movie called Wait Until Dark with Audrey Hepburn. Audrey is a little blind lady who innocently gains possession of a doll filled with heroin. Arkin is Harry Roat, Jr., a badass drug dealer who wants the doll. Okay, that sounds kind of stupid now that I've typed it out, but I promise it's good, scary little thriller, the kind that used to be on A&E when it was still a good channel that didn't show crappy reality shows all day. Roat tries a variety of disguises and ruses to trick Audrey into giving up the doll, but in the end he just says fuck it and goes after her with a knife. The last 10 minutes is tense as hell, and works great it you turn all of your lights out. Bonus - Harry Roat kinda is hot. See below:
Two years later, he was nominated for another Academy Award for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. In 1970, he played Yossarian in an adaption of Joseph Heller's classic novel Catch-22, and got to wear another jaunty hat:
In 1976, he played Sigmund Freud trying to help Sherlock Holmes break his cocaine addiction in The Seven-Percent Solution. Yeah, that's weird. Then in 1979 came a real fan favorite: The In-Laws."Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!" I once thought that this had been remade into a crappy film starring Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks, but a loving God would never allow that to happen so I must of dreamed it up.
Ok, now - if you're a child of the late '70s, early '80s you might remember a freaky Rankin Bass movie about a little white unicorn that is chased by a giant flaming bull and then turns into a blonde girl while America (the band, not the country) sings in the background. You did not hallucinate this, it is real and it is called The Last Unicorn. It was released in 1982 and I am telling you - this movie, she is fucked up. It includes among other things: a blind butterfly that sings in rhymes, Angela Lansbury as a scary old hag that travels in a side show with her menagerie of monsters, one of which eventually kills her, a sequence featuring the ghosts of Robin Hood and his merry men, a talking skeleton that begs for wine because he can remember it even though he can't see or taste it (shudder), a cat with a wooden leg and an eyepatch that talks like a pirate, and other assorted weirdness. You might not remember Alan Arkin's character in all this craziness. He plays a wizard named Schmendrick:
You probably haven't seen the 1987 film Escape from Sobibor, in fact I only saw it because Mr. Woodcox made us watch it in seventh grade history. But you may have seen some of the following movies that he made over the next decade: Edward Scissorhands, The Rocketeer, Glengarry Glen Ross, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Mother Night, Gattaca, and Slums of Beverly Hills. But I think the best of his roles from the 90s is Dr. Oatman in Grosse Point Blank. He's a psychiatrist who's fed up with, not to mention terrified of, his hitman patient John Cusack. I like this movie a lot, it's one of the last performances Cusack gave before he stopped being cool and started to suck.
I've actually skipped over dozens of his movies (and some TV appearances). I think you get the point, though - the man has great range. He's played so many characters, and - here's the trick - they are all different. He's not like some supposedly great American actors (cough*Nicholson*cough) who play the same guy over and over again. He's not just Alan Arkin reacting to different situations, he is a motherlovin' artist that thinks about his characters, about their environments and histories and personalities, and creates real, believable human beings. We don't have enough of that in American movies, or anywhere, really.
Which brings me to his most recent career highlight. In 2006, he appeared in Little Miss Sunshine as Grandpa. And exactly 40 years after he was nominated for an Oscar for The Russians are Coming!, he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Sunshine. And guess what:
HE WON!
Other reasons to love Alan Arkin:
* His middle name is Wolf.
* He wrote a children's book called The Lemming Condition. I mean, are you kidding me?
* He appeared on Sesame Street and Faerie Tale Theatre.
* He is the father of Adam Arkin of Chicago Hope and Northern Exposure.
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