Robert Duvall, who died this week at the age of 95, was one of the small number of famous actors from the New Hollywood of the 1960s who endured long enough to become, as we used to say, iconic. More than that, Duvall was not just one of the actors defining manliness in his heyday, but a very adventurous man himself, in ways more typical of his time than ours. There’s much to admire in his work and no better way to remember him than at his peak.
Duvall had such a long career that he even has a connection to Old Hollywood. He made his debut in To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), playing Boo Radley, the bogeyman recluse who helps save the kids in the concluding sequence, becoming an unexpected, indeed unconventional hero.
There is a serendipitous connection between that small debut role and the major ‘70s roles that would define Duvall for the great American audience: The Godfather (1972), Apocalypse Now (1979), and The Great Santini (1979). These movies won him his first three Oscar nominations and launched a career in which he’d eventually get four more, including a win.
In The Godfather, Duvall had the double challenge of acting alongside Brando, Al Pacino, and James Caan, who were all showier actors, while at the same time conveying a level of restraint that was almost guaranteed to make him fade into the background. That contrast between acting styles, parallels a contrast in the plot: they play the Corleone family, whereas he’s just Tom Hagen, the adoptive brother and temporary consigliere—and not even a wartime consigliere at that. Yet Duvall got an Oscar nomination and a role in the sequel.
Stranger still, Duvall manages to win the audience over to liking a lawyer. That’s because his characterization is focused on the least controversial aspect of justice, though the one nowadays most forgotten, loyalty. He’s an ambassador for the Corleones and a voice for peace, nor does he really get his hands dirty, which helps. But his remarkable achievement is to build his characterization on a subdued contrast to the more violent and prouder men who run away with the major scenes.
The result is that Duvall is the Corleone who is closest to a respectable citizen or an ordinary American. He’s what we call the audience substitute and his willingness to help a crime family gives it a strange dignity. So much so that his failure to stop the violence ends up excusing it. If a man like Hagen fails, it seems that only someone like Michael Corleone can succeed. Hagen’s failure to find a more restrained, if not exactly civilized, way of doing business leads to his corruption in the sequel, when he does get his hands dirty and is humiliated by Michael, which completes the work of tragedy. If anyone could have remained decent, it would have been Hagen.
Duvall had a major supporting role in the last great success of Coppola’s career as well, Apocalypse Now. He again got an Oscar nomination, but by entirely reversing his characterization. Instead of a subordinate, he plays a leader, instead of subdued, he’s larger than life, instead of a son, he’s paternal. Yet he again humanizes his role by focusing on loyalty as the decisive bond between men, the thing that endures when principles and institutions collapse.
Everyone remembers the best line in a Vietnam War movie: Col. Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” which fits the name. But he also says “Charlie don’t surf,” which only fits in the sense that a man with a mad name should be somewhat unpredictable. The confusion of freedom, the sense of being out of control, mixed well with the nostalgia for a manlier America in which war counts, as suggested by an air cavalry commander wearing a Civil War officer’s hat and an ascot.
His men love him, and why shouldn’t they, since he seems to embody American history, not just American power! Yet he fears that one day the war will be over, as though victory were inevitable. There would then be no more real men. He has to keep endangering his men to restore endlessly the experience of trust and confidence in face of danger.
Duvall took the characteristic New Hollywood idea of the dominance of character over plot, hence the preference for character actors over stars, into his most famous leading role, too. In The Great Santini he again plays a colonel, but now in the peacetime army of 1962 rather than in Vietnam. Therefore family takes the place of brotherhood in arms as the testing ground of his manliness.
The Great Santini is a coming-of-age story, focused on the conflict between the amusing martinet Bull Meechum and his son Ben, as the family move to a new military base, a new house, and a new high school. Bull regulates every aspect of life as though it were a campaign, even though it’s been years since he saw combat. Meanwhile, his son wants to come into his own in a world where there is no danger, hence no need to be prepared. Duvall shines in showing the contrast between military and civilian life in Bull’s increasing remove from his family, but also the hopelessness of wanting honors in a regime dedicated to freedom, where disobedience and indifference mix.
Duvall also gets across the difficulty of educating for character, the danger of love replacing virtue as the goal. Bull’s greatest fear is that his son will turn out soft. Yet The Great Santini affirms the old-fashioned teaching, as both father and son prove themselves in moments of danger. But the boy has no war to prove himself a man, unlike his father. The only two options are known to everyone, sports, where the stakes aren’t really mortal, and civil rights. Fighting the last enemy at home, racism, is the refuge of Americans who need a cause. One wonders whether we could have such stories again.
We cannot have actors like Duvall again, that’s for sure. He was idiosyncratic in his studies of manly characters who don’t fit their communities or families. Now there seems little interest in something extraordinary in characterization and little tolerance for idiosyncratic yet self-confident men. And, too, we’ve lost faith that the spectacle of men could be what we need as a community. We have much to learn from Duvall the artist, perhaps even a lesson for what it would take to have artists again—men who try to convey a unique experience of beauty while addressing their fellow Americans. Thankfully, he left us wonderful movies.
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