Marvin Lee - Lee Marvin: point blank

Copyright 2013, Dwayne Epstein

Afterword copyright 2013 Christopher Marvin

Published in the United States

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the publisher, Schaffner Press.

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Schaffner Press, Inc., POB 41567, Tucson, AZ 85717

ISBN:978-1-9361824-0-4

For Cataloguing-in-Publication Information contact the publisher:

Schaffner Press, Inc: POB 41567, Tucson, Az 85717

Appendix:

You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.

from Johnny Got His Gun
by Dalton Trumbo

Lee Marvin as he is best remembered, in the World War II classic, The Dirty Dozen. Of his own time in the war, he said, I concluded its every man for himself The most useless word in the world is h-e-l-p.

A PRIL 5, 1950, on a windy New York night, twenty-six-year-old Lee Marvin did the unthinkable. For young actors in the 1950s hoping to be the next Marlon Brando or Marilyn Monroe, their Mecca was the Actors Studio in Manhattan, which taught the so-called Stanislavsky Method, pioneered by the renowned acting coach Lee Strasberg and the equally venerated director Elia Kazan. It was fated on that Thursday night that Lee Marvin, who was auditing the class, would do a scene to be critiqued by Strasberg. Marvin had prepared a monologue based on the Hemingway short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, in which a man dying of a gangrenous leg wound looks back on the disappointments in his life.

When Marvin had finished his piece, Strasberg led the students in deconstructing all that he decreed was wrong with Marvins performance. He stated coldly that the scene failed since the actor never conveyed the pain of gangrene to the audience. But Lee Marvin, a former combat Marine, informed Strasberg that it was he, the teacher, who was mistaken. Marvin, having seen the effects of gangrene up close while fighting in the jungles of the Pacific, explained to Strasberg in the presence of his disciples that in the terminal stage of this condition there is no pain. The small theater fell into stony silence, which was suddenly shattered when Strasberg, furious at being corrected by a student, told the young actor to get out and never come back. Marvin had no problem with that, bellowing fuck you! as he turned on his heels, never to return.

Whereas young non-conforming actors were begging just to get into The Actors Studio, Lee Marvin walked out. Although Marvin had shown Strasberg to be the Emperor with no clothes, this school of modern acting still remained Strasbergs empire. Banished from the realm, and unwilling to conform to Strasbergs idea of a naturalisticyet basically still Europeanmethod, Lee Marvin continued to toil in the Hollywood dream factories for over a decade before he was finally able to make his mark as a film star. He accomplished this by believing steadfastly that his time would come via a less refined but even more realistic concept based on this incontrovertible truth: Man is a violent animal, and the American male the most brutal of them all.

As noble as America had always tried to be in attempting to rise above this tendency, the fact is that this trait towards aggression had existed since the nations inception. Benjamin Franklin had said as much in defending the colonies right to exist autonomously. Englands legal concept of a duty to retreat to the wall when confronted by violence was changed in America to standing ones ground in similar circumstances.

It is a peculiarly American point of view that has affected the nations collective consciousness and culture. Author Richard Maxwell Brown stated succinctly in his book, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History, the metaphorical and symbolic impact of the transition from duty to retreat to standing ones ground is obvious and is crucial to the American identity. In the realms of both peace and war, it is not in the nature of America to approve retreat. Standing ones ground is an attitude that has deeply permeated our foreign relations and our military habits as well as the peaceful pursuits of daily life.

American films rarely reflected this violent nature as it truly existed, choosing instead to justify it with nobility and bravado. Lee Marvin, a veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of WWII, knew this better than most, stating some years later in a Playboy interview (January,1969), In a typical John Wayne fight in a barroom tables and bottles go along with mirrors and bartenders, and you end up with that little trickle of blood down your cheek and youre both pals and wasnt it a hell of a wonderful fight. Thats fooling around with violence. Its phony; its almost a character

The curtain had slipped from this facade following World War II, when war-weary audiences no longer accepted the hero in the white hat mythology. The true American character had peeked through on occasion in such action-oriented film genres as westerns, gangster films and war films, despite the puritanical restrictions set forth by production codes and societal standards of decency. While there was still an abundance of vacuous entertainment during the 1950s, a much darker tone was creeping like an uninvited guest into American popular culture, and staying long after the party was over.

A new breed of postwar male screen icons, beginning with Marlon Brando and rippling out to include the likes of exhibitionist Burt Lancaster, overly-sensitive Montgomery Clift, and apathetic Robert Mitchum, forced the stalwarts of the old guard to give their performances a previously unknown edge. Consider Tyrone Power in Nightmare Alley or James Stewarts later westerns and Hitchcock films. Even John Wayne, the champion of American virtue, portrayed such sadistic and psychotic characters as Tom Dunson in Red River and Ethan Edwards in The Searchers. Now, it seemed, movie villains of the era were required to be even more loathsome than ever.

Enter Lee Marvin. Middle-aged and not movie-star handsome, the most unlikely of film superstars, he would go on to forge a unique screen persona. He had his own method based purely on instinct and personal experience. Serving his apprenticeship by portraying countless villainous demons, he once told fellow grotesque character actor Strother Martin, You know, as character actors we play all kinds of sex psychos, nuts, creeps, perverts and weirdoes. And we laugh it off saying what the hell its just a character. But deep down inside, its you, baby.

By the mid-1960s, the studio fiefdoms had crumbled and the production code eventually morphed into a controversial rating system. By then, Lee Marvin had become an iconic figure with silver hair, granite features, and a voice to match, and his films were revered by audiences half his age. The year 1968 proved to be a turbulent time in the country and, by extension, the world. Assassinations, the Vietnam War, rioting in the streets and violence in general permeated the nations consciousness. Popular film, which had once been a haven from such ills, was suddenly being perceived as part of the problem. As a progenitor of this distressing phenomenon, Marvin, when asked by Richard Lewis in the aforementioned