Bye Bye Life

Aw, damn, Roy Scheider passed away.

He was a wonderful actor, without perhaps the widest range, but with a certain set of specific skills that very few can master, and which he used effortlessly. He was one of those "anchor" actors, who could hold a movie together by sheer presence, and allow the other actors to go way out on risky limbs while he did so -- I've often thought of actors like this (Kurt Russell and especially Jeff Bridges are others) as a really tight rhythm section in a jazz combo, keeping everything together while other people get to do showy solos. My favorite kinds of actors.

A few obits are comparing his work as Martin Brody in Jaws with that of his costars Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss - some are knocking Dreyfuss and Shaw's bigger, showier parts to praise Scheider. They're missing the point. The strength of that movie - why it works - is in the dynamic between the three men, the three actors, and their individual styles. They couldn't get the damn mechanical shark to work right, so they spent the time working on character, and writing and shooting new scenes with these characters they had got down, and it shows.

But besides the big ones like Shaw's speech about the USS Indianapolis, the moments I treasure from that film are the little ones with Scheider - the laugh in his voice when he responds "In this town?" to his wife's directive to stay safe as he rushes to work; the knocking over of the paint brushes in the general store; the guilt and sadness in his face and voice when he explains to Hooper why he didn't call the Coast Guard after the first attack; the pouring of an IMMENSE glass of red wine when he really, really needs it, and the way he says, "Now why did you have to say that," a moment later when Dreyfuss tells his wife there's still a shark in Amity; and, at the very end, the flicker across his eyes and face for just a moment before he tells Hooper that Quint didn't make it.

He has only one brief false note in his performance as Brody, and it's because he's been given some horribly trite lines, out of tone with the rest of the film: The scene on Hooper's boat where he drunkenly explains why he left New York City for Amity Island, one of those bad "character explains themselves" speeches that nobody can do well (Mamet calls them "kitten" speeches, as in "When I was a child, I had a kitten . . .") -- this scene was a reshoot done in Hollywood after the main shoot in Martha's Vineyard was over, so there was probably some second-guessing going on.

There's been an amazing outpouring of love for Scheider in blogs and pages all over the net this morning - he seems to have been much beloved by people who didn't even realize it until he was gone. Two of the better, short appreciations are from Glenn Kenny - who wonderfully pins down and gives a visual example of a classic Scheider look, the one that says, "Are you shitting me?" - and from Sheila O'Malley.

The Times obit is HERE, his IMDb bio HERE and credits HERE.

I saw him once in person - actually brushed by him in a crowd on opening night of Dances with Wolves at a movie theatre in Columbus Circle (now gone) - he was leaving a show with his wife, Brenda King, while I was going in to the next one. He was deeply tanned and looked exactly like he did onscreen. Maybe better. And nobody was bugging him, but everyone was staring at him as if they were thinking (as I was), "Hey, wow, that's Roy Scheider, man!"

Besides the big famous roles he was known for (Klute, Jaws, Marathon Man, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups), there were some other great performances of his in films that ranged from "great and underrated" to "deeply flawed, but not without interest," including William Friedkin's Sorcerer - dear GOD he's amazing in that; John Frankenheimer's Elmore Leonard adaptation 52 Pick-Up, a really (appropriately) sleazy film where Scheider gets to hold down the rhythm for crazy soloists John Glover and Clarence Williams III; the beautifully structured thriller The Russia House, script by Tom Stoppard, as scatologically-mouthed CIA agent Russell; as studio head George Schaefer in RKO 281, trying to protect Orson Welles and Citizen Kane while putting up stoically with Welles' hideous ego and temper; as Heywood Floyd in 2010; as a Mafia don in Romeo Is Bleeding; and opposite Meryl Streep in the thriller Still of the Night - where director of photography Nestor Almendros does everything he can to balance the light between the very tan Mr. Scheider and the ghostly pale Ms. Streep (at her most beautiful ever). Oh, and he did a beautiful job reading the words of the author as narration in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (though some video versions now no longer have the Scheider narration, unfortunately).

And especially as Dr. Benway in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. He's in just two scenes, two! But after his first scene early on he's made such an impression that his spirit hangs over the film, as everyone keeps talking about Benway, that you feel he's been there all along when he suddenly reappears in the penultimate scene. He completely captures the stage direction from Cronenberg's shooting script . . .

DR. BENWAY seems to be the archetypal American doctor, mid-fifties, silvery gray hair, paternal and condescending, and underneath it all, a hustler.

. . . within about three words and two seconds of screen time.

(also, for those of us late-blooming character actors out here, he's a shining beacon of someone who kept at it and started really working at an older age - he was 39 when he got his first film roles of note)

He was also someone very special to me in a very special film, so ladies and gentlemen, let me lay on you, a so-so entertainer, not much of a humanitarian, and this cat was never nobody's friend, in his final appearance on the great stage of life (uh, you can applaud if you wanna), Mr. Joe Gideon:

When I think of Scheider's filmography, I sometimes actually leave this one out, because I don't think of him at all as Roy Scheider here, in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, but as director/choreographer Joe Gideon - even though his performance is so much his, with all of his wonderful personal mannerisms. But Gideon is something more and different than Scheider had the opportunity to do elsewhere.

They had been shooting for two weeks with Richard Dreyfuss in the role of Gideon, when Dreyfuss was fired and Scheider brought in - Fosse said that while some choreographers sit back and aren't very physical when they work (as Dreyfuss could only play the character), Gideon had to be up and active and physical. Scheider wasn't a dancer, not at all, but the man could move, and had real grace, and in this film, he really got to show it. Maybe for the only time.

This is, of course, also a special film/role for me because seeing it was one of those "I really want to be a DIRECTOR," inspirational moments for me. Which really is kind of odd, considering the rather nasty, badly-ending life of Joe Gideon. But whatever, Joe Gideon was also one of those men I wanted to grow up to be. So was Boris Lermontov, which is just as wrong, if not more.

(and yes, mom, I know very VERY well how much you hate this film -- thanks again for putting up with it so I could enjoy it, at the age of 11, when it first came out)

Oh, also, many of the obits are saying that Scheider's first feature film was Curse of the Living Corpse, a silly little thriller (with, as I recall - it's been 30 years since I've seen it - some effective little creepy moments) made by Stamford, Connecticut's own B-picture maker Del Tenney. However, earlier that year he had actually shown up in Tenney's previous film, the wonderfully awful The Horror of Party Beach.

Yup, he's in there. Here's the excerpt from the film as it played on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (one of my favorite episodes of the show) - Scheider appears at around 1:37 in:

( Now Behind Cut for Easier Loading )

So today, I'll pull out Jaws and All That Jazz and The Russia House and even Mishima (if I have the version with his narration) to watch. Maybe I have Naked Lunch, Sorcerer, and Romeo Is Bleeding somewhere on tape. Won't get through all of those, but maybe a few. If you get a chance, watch and appreciate yourself some Roy.