“Death comes unexpectedly.” This is what I first think of when I think of Karl Malden. Reason being, as a little tyke with sisters, one ends up watching Pollyanna (with Hayley Mills) many times over. Malden stood out in that film as a timid pastor/priest whose support from the town matraiarchs gave him a boldness at the pulpit to proclaim lots of bad news to his congregants, such as the statement above. That character’s transformation into a less timid but “gladder” person, affected positively by Mills’ Pollyanna, felt inevitable in light of Malden’s always loveable persona. Incidentally, his role as a priest again in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront was subtly nuanced enough to keep the poor guy from being stereotyped. That, along with playing sexually frustrated characters in Kazan’s other films A Streetcar Named Desire and Baby Doll. Dying at the ripe old age of 97, Malden represents one of the last traces of old Hollywood, of the just-post-golden years of American cinema. He was sort of an antithesis to the like of Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford, and Kirk Douglas. A humble supporting actor who always forced the stars to work harder, his presence was assuring to the audience and instantly redeeming, no matter how Kazan-esque the film might be.
From the first time that I saw it (around the age of 9) until I-don’t-know-when (college sometime), if anyone asked me about my favorite movie, I answered confidantly and resoundingly, “The Sting!” The nose-tap became a gesture as common and natural as a head nod. In high school, I had few academic honors (very few), but my speech on The Sting was selected for the “Speech Meet,” at which I proudly orated praises of this film about two studly con men in front of the whole school. It bothered me not-at-all that these guys were basically “bad guys.” Loyalty mattered more than anything else, as they took the master gangster himself for all that he had. When Paul Newman, after feigning drunkenness for a couple hours, lays down four jacks to Robert Shaw’s four nines, proving himself the better cheater, the smirk on Newman’s face is just about as good as cinema ever gets. Newman, it turns out, was a truly good man, not only a loyal one. Nearly fifteen years ago at an IndyCar race at Laguna Seca, CA, I got to walk up to him, though I wasn’t able to obtain an autograph or a handshake. It struck me then how old and frail this guy was, but he hung on quite a bit longer. Now he’s gone, and it’s one of those rare occasions that one has to acknowledge and praise an actor who made cinema better than it would have been without him.
