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OT: George Segal and Jessica Walter, RIP

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
10 replies | jump to latest

Segal, first.

George Segal spent from the 90s on as a TV star, and not even as the lead. But back in the 60's and 70s, he WAS a movie star. A rather big one. A New York urban Cary Grant derivative...and one of my favorites at the time.

In the early 70's, George would go "moustache on, moustache off." Moustache on: the beleaguered NYC lawyer whose hangdog face made you laugh when he had to remove nails in the wall to "release" his Mother(Ruth Gordon) to see a date in Where's Poppa? (And Gordon kissed her grown son's tush in the famous "tush scene" from that black comedy laugher.)

In 1970, moustache on, Segal went snarl to snarl, yell to yell and -- body to body -- with Streisand all dolled up like a hooker in The Owl and the Pussycat. (Segal's trip to a porn theater playing a Streisand movie is deadpan comedy gross deluxe --he is OFFERED an overcoat to rent, and must sit near a heavy breather.)

In 1972...moustache OFF....Segal played buddy to Robert Redford in The Hot Rock(from a script by William Goldman of Butch Cassidy fame) and...the movie is hilarious, as a group of thieves keep having to steal, re-steal, and steal again, the titular jewel. (This came out around the same time as Hitchcock's comeback with Frenzy...which did better with more savage material.)

While Segal romanced Glenda Jackson and Goldie Hawn and Jane Fonda in so-so movies, he was on TV a lot as a banjo-playing hilarious handsome guy talk show guest(He said, "I'm playing a role there."). He was FUN. I saw him play that banjo live a time or two and he didn't act like a movie star, he just kept playing all ni ght.

In 1977, George Segal got a million dollar payday(moustache off) to appear in a so-so thriller called "Roller Coaster." He told the press: "This is better than the last three Hitchcocks." It was not. It proved that the Columbo TV producers were not ready to make a real movie, even with George Segal getting a million.

As a George Segal fan, I watched as he slowly detached from his stardom. He quit a movie called Lucky Lady(Gene Hackman replaced him for a million.) He quit "10." (Dudley Moore became a star.) By the 80s...drugs were rumored...his movie stardom was over. But decades of survival as a funny old guy on TV (The Goldbergs) were on tap. Fair enough.

Jessica Walter. Arrested Development. Archer. Some movies in the 60s and. (ON TOPIC):

One of the RIPs noted how she played that terrifying "one night stand from hell" in Eastwood's self-directed "Play Misty for Me," which I recall coming out just a month before Dirty Harry in 1971 and thus cementing Clint as "not just another Western star."

The RIP article noted the truly terrifying moment in Play Misty for Me, when Walter is no longer just an annoyance, but a psycho killer: she kills a snooping police detective(scissors to the chest) ala...Arbogast. Mouth open, eyes bugged out. (John Larch, who one month later in Dirty Harry would be the police chief.)

As Time magazine wrote at the time: "Eastwood has seen Psycho, and he has learned his lesson passing well."

PS. I always sort of hoped that George Segal would have worked with Hitchcock. Maybe the Bruce Dern role in Family Plot?

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Side-bar:

A movie everybody hates but me: George Segal as "Sam Spade Junior" in The Black Bird (1975.) A great look at the kind of exasperation comedy Segal did at his best -- and both Lee Patrick and Elisha Cook Jr. are there from the original to make fun of the 'worthless Spade son who can't hold a candle to Bogie."

Recommended.

[–] christomacin (4656) 4 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

He was also in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), notably mostly for Max von Sydow and Alec Guinness in the supporting cast and a fine John Barry score. I think this movie was a bit of a throw back to a Hitchcock movies like Notorious. Not a whole lot happens by modern standards and the emphasis is more on character and dialog than Bond style action.

--

Yes. Hitchcock got some flak for his two "flat" Cold War thrillers, Torn Curtain and Topaz, but actually these rather bookish and boring Cold War films were a big part of the late 60's "at the movies." The Deadly Affair was another; and Funeral in Berlin. There were quite a few movies like this. (At least Hitchcock's two had his requisite set-pieces and style, "fighting the boredom.")

Quiller Memorandum was a "good one." Segal -- with an Oscar nom(Supporting) for Virginia Woolf and with Ship of Fools, King Rat, and other major films around him...DID get a star launch in the 60s (which weirdly included a Roger Corman gangster movie for Fox called The St. Valentine's Day Massacre...with small roles for Nicholson and Dern).

Came the 70's, Siegel really was the right guy at the right time. Urban, exasperated...put upon.

In 1968, BTW, Siegel played a "deadpan hero NYC cop" opposite Rod Steiger as a psycho strangler in "No Way to Treat a Lady." Its not quite good enough as a thriller -- its no Wait Until Dark -- but Segal battles it out well with Steiger's theatrical master of disguise and strangling . It's like Frenzy but with actual movie stars in it. (Lee Remick is the damsel in distress at the climax, Steiger trying to kill her, Segal trying to save her.)

--

P.S. Sydow would have made a fine Hitchcock villain, don't you think?

--

Oh, yes. His assassin in Three Days of the Condor is an exercise in Hitchcockian deadpan cynical charm. "Whatever side pays."

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Two more for Segal:

Robert Altman's California Split(1974), about a couple of men -- strangers to each other at the beginning -- bonded by gambling. In LA dives and Reno casinos, at the track. Elliott Gould played the "bigger than life brawler," but Segal elected to keep his personality tamped down, on hold, withdrawn. They are an interesting team.

See...George Segal was everywhere in the 70's. Blume In Love was a tricky one....Paul Mazursky as writer-director, divorce and infidelity as a topic....Segal does something a hero just doesn't do.

And yet I knew a woman in the 70's who just loved that movie.

[–] christomacin (4656) 4 years ago

He also starred in the 1981 film "Carbon Copy" which was Denzel Washington's first feature film role.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

That's right....as Denzel's FATHER, I believe.

Segal was a survivor. I recall that both he and John Travolta managed to get leads in "Look Who's Talking" in the 90s. Segal reportedly said to Travolta on set, "What happened to us?" Travolta survived all the way to big stardom again...he was younger than Segal and got Pulp Fiction.

But Segal got Just Shoot Me and The Goldbergs...he was liked.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

In the early 70's, George would go "moustache on, moustache off." Moustache on: the beleaguered NYC lawyer whose hangdog face made you laugh when he had to remove nails in the wall to "release" his Mother(Ruth Gordon) to see a date in Where's Poppa? (And Gordon kissed her grown son's tush in the famous "tush scene" from that black comedy laugher.)

Where's Poppa? is a bit uneven but its key scenes that are among the funniest and most outrageous things I've ever seen. Segal was really great as an ordinary, trying-to-be-decent man who loses it as he finally gets pushed too far. Stephen Colbert *could* I think have been a modern Segal in the movies but that window's almost certainly closed now (too old, too perceived as a partisan figure).

Jessica Walter aged into an *incredibly* elegant older woman and lucked into the role of a lifetime that fit her to a T on a great show, Arrested Development. And she was a scary babe in Play Misty for Me for sure. Looking at her IMDb page she didn't get any movie traction after Play Misty (maybe she had seemed *too* believably scary for Hollywood execs) but worked very steadily in so-so TV, hundreds of roles before hitting biggish with AD. Maybe I'll check out this Archer show people also seem to love her in.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

Where's Poppa? is a bit uneven but its key scenes that are among the funniest and most outrageous things I've ever seen. Segal was really great as an ordinary, trying-to-be-decent man who loses it as he finally gets pushed too far.

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They were "easy" scenes, but scenes of an exhausted and zoned-out Segal sorting through the piled-up spillage of legal documents at his lawyer's table in the courtroom, and, over the course of the movie ,having to deal with one, two three totally nutcase defendants -- this was the stuff of teenage legend in my group; we would re-stage the scenes verbally just to make ourselves laugh. (As when a general talked about two severed legs cut down by machine-gun fire "looking like they could just start marching away.")

The business with Ruth Gordon, in 1970, certainly carried at least comic echoes of Psycho -- though in this case, the son wanted nothing to do with the crazy mother.

Streisand is loud (albeit fleshy) in The Owl and the Pussycat, but Segal is her "Jewish intellectual" opposite number.

I dunno. As noted around these parts, the 70's is when I "came of age" at the movies and developed perhaps my greatest regard for movie stars -- some peaking(Newman, McQueen), some arriving(Redford, Nicholson, Pacino) and some "only there for a little while"(Segal, Gould, Caan.) In the 70's, I recall choosing Redford, Eastwood, and Nicholson as my three favorite stars -- different as they were. And yet -- Steve McQueen in The Towering Inferno to me was the ultimate in a movie star making a movie matter.

I'm also serious that "The Black Bird" captured George Segal just about at his best -- exasperated, handsome, funny. He mattered for awhile.

[–] liscarkat (18429) 4 years ago

Segal and Walter were both great in "Psycho".

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

I see that "OT patrol" has shown up. Weeks I was away from this board. Then I dipped my toe in with a coupla OTs and..here you are.

liscarkat, I've read some of your comments elsewhere, and they are good ones, and it would be fun to interact with you(I think) with an opinion or two sometime but you seem hellbent for leather to ONLY check in when you have determined that an OT comment has been posted here and that this is "wrong" in some way. It doesn't make you look very considerate or intelligent.

Even now, you have not figured out WHY we post OT at this board? Even NOW?

I'd explain it...but what's the point.

So keep up with the "hall monitor horseshit." Maybe I will be sent away, if that's what you want.

But we could have communicated. We could have TALKED.

PS. Jessica Walter appeared in Play Misty for Me, which Clint Eastwood himself said was based on the structure of Psycho. Eastwood took a meeting with Hitchcock (to discuss a role in the unmade "Short Night") and did try to fill Hitchcock in on how/why Play Misty for Me had Psycho influences. Moreover, Play Misty for Me went out on a double bill in 1972 with Frenzy. So...not so OT.