Lee Marvin
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Best films:
Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North Pole (1973) John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Don Siegel's The Killers (1964) Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967) Richard Brooks' The Professionals (1966) Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965) John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968) | Links: |
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Lee Marvin (USA, 1924) was a decorated soldier during World War II. Returning to New York after the war, he studied acting and began performing in theaters.
As a veteran of a real war, he got a minor part in
Henry Hathaway's
You're in the Navy Now (1951) and decided to move to Hollywood, where
he had minor parts in
Fred Zinnemann's
Teresa (1951) and
Don Siegel's
The Duel at Silver Creek (1952).
War movies remained his specialty,
Edward Dmytryk's
Eight Iron Men (1952), and he could as well perform
in westerns like
Budd Boetticher's
Seminole (1953) and
Raoul Walsh's
Gun Fury (1953),
but he was not used as the
main protagonist.
Nonetheless his performances as the evil soul in
Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), his most sadistic part,
Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1953),
Richard Fleischer's Violent Saturday (1955)
and
Budd Boetticher's Seven Men from Now (1956)
stole the show.
He impersonated a tough cop in television series "M Squad" (19571960) and then returned to western movies in roles of amoral characters contrasting with John Wayne as the good guy: Michael Curtiz's The Comancheros (1961) and John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). As he was starred in more prominent roles, he gave memorable performances as the hitman of Don Siegel's The Killers (1964), the gunslinger of Elliot Silverstein's Cat Ballou (1965), the mercenary of Richard Brooks' The Professionals (1966), the suicidal major of Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967), and especially the intelligent gangster of John Boorman's Point Blank (1967). Only in the 1970s he began to be viewed as suitable for roles of nice guys. His next great performances came with the John Boorman's unorthodox war movie Hell in the Pacific (1968) and Robert Aldrich's Emperor of the North Pole (1973). He was the quintessence of "cool". Marvin's characters always seem to come from nowhere and at the end they go nowhere, grumpy, sinister, impenetrable. They don't love anybody and nobody loves him. He represents the nihilistic alter-ego of the solitary knight. He still had decent parts in Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut (1972), John Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh (1973), Richard Fleischer's The Spikes Gang (1974), and Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One (1980), but his career was rapidly declining. He died in 1987 at 63.
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