Watching your heroes grow old is rarely pretty. In action that’s doubly true. We attach ourselves to these muscled up, impossibly cool stars and for a good decade, or two if we’re lucky, these people throw their gorgeous bodies around until they’re a broken heap. Outliers like Tom Cruise are the exception. For the most part we have to be content with watching stars of yesteryear embarrass himself in twenty DTV films a year, pining for the days when he gave a shit. Very rarely do these stars get a film that actively feels like they’re saying goodbye. Sure, you have Dolph or JCVD putting in career best work in their late period, sometimes reckoning with their place in all of this, but it’s not often a final lead performance functions as a walk into the sunset.
Lee Marvin was dead well before I was a thought in anybody’s mind. When I was around fifteen, we screened The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a high school film studies/humanities class. I’d of course known who John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart were but my attention was immediately ripped away by this face cut from stone who had a voice so deep, it couldn’t possibly be real. I was obsessed, I’d never seen anyone like him. I’d never heard anyone like him. As my taste in film solidified, I spent the better part of the next fifteen years tracking down anything starring this man.
Digging through the classics, I often found myself trying to process how this guy was real. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. Hysterical in Cat Baillou, terrifying in The Killers, ice cold in Prime Cut or wrenching in Hell in the Pacific, Marvin was more than your average tough guy. He found pathos in every role he took, a soulful beauty behind those piercing blue eyes. Even in a dud like Paint Your Wagon, he made sure he was the thing you remembered. It was never enough to be imposing. That wry smile would slink its way across his granite face, always giving more than you’d ever expect.
Rightfully, history judges Point Blank as his masterpiece. Even if the rest of the movie were forgettable, that walk would be etched into the annals of cinema forever. Marvin’s Walker gliding down an impossibly long hallway, intercut with his prey. As Walker moves into a car, his footsteps ring out over the film like a ticking clock. In that moment, John Boorman sealed Marvin as the baddest man to ever grace the silver screen. Boorman understood better than anyone that Lee Marvin filled a frame like no other. He didn’t need to speak. He didn’t need to throw a punch. He didn’t even need to look at you. If Lee Marvin’s coming for you, you better run for your goddamn life.
Point Blank is, of course, a crime classic beyond that walk. It’s the template for countless revenge films and we’ve spent an eternity chasing its effortless cool. It also cemented Marvin as a legend. Not an action star in the traditional sense, he was never going to throw himself off of buildings or have a technically proficient fight scene. He could, however, throw fists with the best of them and nobody looked better holding a gun. His chilly demeanor and imposing figure fits right in with the kind of star that became the staple of the genre.
By 1984, after a career’s worth of shoot ‘em ups in the old west, back alleys and everywhere in between, a sixty year old Marvin found himself in Yves Boisset’s Dog Day. Boisset, a French journeyman, was an efficient hand whose films always looked a hell of a lot better than they had any right to. Shot in France, starring a cast of French actors who were then dubbed, Marvin was there to lend a star power, his name perhaps having a bit more meaning there than in US productions. Think Rick Dalton traveling to Italy when his career fizzled out.
Look, Dog Day doesn’t seem special and truth be told it isn’t. In fact, it’s pretty bad. All over the place, full of rancid jokes, some wildly racist depictions and a Marvin who’s clearly too old to be doing this, it’s a drag. It’s that last part, though, that circles back around into something melancholic and moving. Opening on a haggard Marvin fleeing through a field, a bag of stolen money at his side, you’re overcome by the prevailing thought of “Christ, Lee, you look old.” It’s a jarring image, not least because Marvin looked old his entire career. Thirties, fifties, didn’t matter, the guy was born with the face of a grown man. Here, though, he looks broken down, exhausted and frankly, finished.
Playing renowned gangster, Jimmy Cobb, Marvin’s on the run after a robbery goes south. Finding refuge in a farmhouse, Marvin’s Cobb spends the majority of the film gingerly stepping in and out of various houses, hiding behind walls and stacks of hay. Around him is an insane cast of characters from a horribly racist caricature of an African man named DooDoo, a woman who chases DooDoo around begging him to “play with her pussy”, a repugnant farmer who gropes everyone he sees and a pair of horny Swiss women camping in the outskirts of town. It’s a lot to take in and only legendary French actress Miou-Miou, as the farmer’s abused wife Jessica, is given even a shred of humanity.
You don’t go into exploitation expecting anything less but as wild as that sounds, Dog Day spends far too long spinning its wheels. That gives you time to examine Marvin’s Cobb as he takes in his surroundings. As he lazily drifts from one room to another trying to stay out of sight, there’s a look of “what am I doing here?” that creeps across his face. Sure, Jimmy seeing the madness around him would undoubtedly wonder what he’s gotten himself into but there’s something else there. This is a man who starred alongside titans like John’s Wayne and Cassavetes. A man who duked it out with Toshirō Mifune. A man who wooed Angie Dickinson. It’s not just you asking yourself what’s become of him. Through withering glances and monosyllabic grunts, Lee seems to be too.
Accepting that you’re cooked isn’t an easy thing to accept. Watching one of cinema’s finest leading men realize it in real time is heartbreaking. Perhaps a viewer’s projection, as the cops close in around Cobb at the end of the film, Dog Day becomes more than a late period clunker. He knows his time is up and he’s got nowhere else to go. He had a great run, the legend’s been printed a thousand times over. Cobb, Lee, doesn’t matter. Here, in this farmhouse, it’s all the same. Marvin mutters something about keeping that legend for himself, places the gun under his chin, wide shot of the farmhouse…
*BANG*
Just like that, he’s gone.
Marvin, of course, wouldn’t pass until 1987, three years later. He’d pop up in one more film, playing second fiddle and ostensible torch passer to Chuck Norris in Delta Force. But for all intents and purposes, Dog Day is Marvin’s final turn as a leading man. Knowing that, a minor footnote takes on a weight it couldn’t possibly deserve. It becomes a goodbye to a screen presence that never existed before and hasn’t been replicated since. Running through those fields of wheat, breathing those labored breaths, Lee Marvin is racing against the clock of a life closing in around him. Lying low in that dingy farmhouse, he’s given time to ruminate on that life. And boy, what a life it was. Gun under his chin, he finally accepts that a man like Lee Marven doesn’t let some run of the mill slob take him out.
Only a man as ineffably cool as Lee Marvin gets to take Lee Marvin out.
-Brandon Streussnig
There is that category of on-screen deaths that are afforded unexpected poignancy due to the actor's circumstances. Pete Postlethwaite dying in 'Solomon Kane' springs to mind. Not a film that was made to bear much in the way of gravitas, but his brilliant performance, coupled with the knowledge that it was his last, really kicks you in the heart.