Joe Maloney is Gone: The Passing of Ed Lauter

Well, after Karen Black earlier this year, we have lost another star from "Family Plot" in 2013.

Ed Lauter was the villainous henchman "Joe Maloney" in Hitchcock's final film. One obit I read on him today listed his more famous role in "The Longest Yard"(1974) first...but "Family Plot" ("Alfred Hitchcock's final film") second.

So working for Hitchcock STILL gets you some ink.

Hitchcock saw Ed Lauter IN "The Longest Yard" -- which Hitch loved, he saw it many times -- and cast Lauter and two other actors from "The Longest Yard" in "
"Family Plot."(Hitch tried for a forth -- "Longest Yard" star Burt Reynolds as Arthur Adamson, which would have put Reynolds and Lauter together again, but on the same villainous side.)

I saw Ed Lauter on "The Merv Griffin Show" the 1975 week he was cast in "Family Plot" and he said that Universal put a big banner up on the street into the studio: "Universal Welcomes Ed Lauter to the cast of Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot."

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Lauter worked a lot in the decades after Family Plot, to be sure. His bald, lean, mean features were ready made for brutal villains...but he played a good guy or two(like an FBI man in the delightful LA period adventure "The Rocketeer") and I last saw him a year ago with Clint Eastwood in " Trouble With the Curve." Ed Lauter worked and worked. Died at 74, has a few more in the can yet.

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In an interview referenced in his obit, Ed Lauter said that he often plays "turn" characters: his character enters and the plot turns. Hmmm...that happens in "The Longest Yard"(he becomes celebrity NFL convict Burt Reynolds immediate foe in prison football); and it happens in "Family Plot": the two stories first come together when rough-hewn Joe Maloney suddenly appears in Arthur Adamson's jewelry store(in a TERRIBLE in-the-lab process shot that acutally works for underlining the two stories coming together.)

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I went to a seminar Q and A with Ernest Lehman the writer of North by Northwest and Family Plot. He showed North by Northwest, but he also discussed Family Plot, and he said of Joe Maloney: "I wanted a Hitchocck movie to finally have a rough, thug-like villain." Of course, Valerian the knife man in "NBNW" was pretty thuggish, but Joe Maloney was more of an All-American small town variety.

The funny thing was, I kinda LIKED Joe Maloney. When Bruce Dern as George Maloney(with a silly Sherlock Holmes pipe), bumbles his way through an interrogation of Maloney at his gas station, Maloney seems all realistic and wary and tough. I sometimes found myself on Maloney's side against these interlopers.