With Lawrence Montaigne, Gordon Jackson, and David MacCallum in The Great Escape, John Sturges, 1963.
Garner’s screen work gently rebuffs hard analysis. It isn’t that what he did lacked complexity or sophistication. But he had a way of relaxing into whatever character he was playing that only made you want to be by the character’s side, rather than “understand” the character. Strain, either visible or subtextual, was not part of his performing vocabulary. This could have the almost paradoxical effect of bringing an unusual depth to less-than-fully-conceived persons. While Charlie Madison in 1964’s The Americanization of Emily has righteousness on his side, scripter Paddy Chayefsky’s writing, eloquent as it is, has an unrelenting stridency that, coming out of pretty much any other actor’s mouth, would have made him a scolding drag. Garner’s voice, the set of his jaw and brow, his gait, make you warm to the character even at his most uptight. Similarly, part of what makes The Great Escape such a great sit is the fact that you’d follow Garner’s Hendley anywhere, any time.
He clearly had an innate sense of his limitations. No, he was not Stanley Kowalski, nor was meant to be, and he did not waste his or his audience’s time pursuing such feats. Which didn’t mean he couldn’t swing a little; to watch him run a near-full gamut of sexual confusion in Blake Edwards’ 1982 Victor/Victoria is to witness as acute (but compassionate) a critique of machismo as Hollywood could muster at the time. By the same token, his work in later pictures such as Murphy’s Romance provided little object lessons that “masculine” and “gentle” need not be mutually exclusive terms.
He worked an awful lot, and whatever he was in, good or bad, you were always glad to see him in it. If that doesn’t constitute a laudable performing career, I don’t know what does.
Another performance where he “swung a little”, as you put it, was the made-for-HBO movie “Barbarians at the Gate”. F. Ross Johnson, the chairman of RJR Nabisco, was apparently the type of guy who could sell a dying man a glass of water, and that was definitely in Garner’s wheelhouse, but he also showed the dark side that existed underneath that charm; when a character late in the movie says at one point, “Now I know what the ‘F’ in F. Ross Johnson stands for,” it’s thanks to Garner’s performance that you believe that line.
What lipranzer said.
The opening of ‘The Rockford Files’, with its quintessentially 70s theme and stuttering, semi-dissolve freeze frames, remains one of my earliest televisual memories. R.I.P.
One of my favorite Garner vehicles was the short-lived TV series “Nichols”(1971–72). Like its leading lady, the incredibly sexy young Margot Kidder, it may have been too quirky and offbeat for TV at the time. The last episode was a real shocker.
The single season of “Nichols” is available from Warner Archive, and last time I checked, all the episodes could be viewed online.
George -
The NYT Obit says that when the network canceled “Nichols,” Garner was so angry he had his character killed in the last episode.
I watched a Rockford Files re-run a couple weeks ago (S02E07), and that experience crystallized Garner for me. He was a more easy-going Jimmy Stewart: genial but not particularly friendly, somewhat indifferent, smarter than he let on. Reading that NYT obit, it sounds as if Garner’s attitude towards acting was somewhat similar.
Yep, that was the last-episode shocker in “Nichols,” and it happens at the beginning of the episode. (Then Garner shows up as Nichols’ twin brother to avenge the murder, IIRC). Garner described the show as his favorite TV experience.
Looks like the “Nichols” episodes have been removed from YouTube. But you can order it here:
http://shop.warnerarchive.com/product/nichols-+the+complete+series+1000426304.do?sortby=ourPicks&refType=&from=fn
Mister Buddwing. similar to Mirage and Seconds.
His Wyatt Earp in Sturges’ HOUR OF THE GUN is one of the nastiest, and that’s saying something considering Garner’s easygoing persona, Sturges’ previous stab at the Earp legend, and some of the darker, revisionist takes on Earp in more recent years.
See Robert Benton’s TWILIGHT (1998) for the darkest Garner character I can recall.
A great performer he was, we all always remember his contribution to the entertainment world.…