A. O. SCOTT
It’s a face that you can’t help noticing. Not handsome in the usual movie-star way, by any means, but — befitting a man who defined what it meant to be a character actor — full of character. The jutting chin and oft-broken nose curve toward each other as though affixed to a Punch-and-Judy puppet, but Karl Malden’s face was not made for comedy. Like his voice, pitched between a honk and a growl, it was an instrument full of gravity and dignity, capable of showing strong measures of menace, passion and hurt.
Like most people who came of age after Mr. Malden’s big-screen heyday, I first saw that face on television, in a series of terrifying dramas about vacations gone awry that doubled as advertisements for American Express traveler’s checks. In the wake of a mishap involving American tourists menaced by brazen thieves, surly waiters, incompetent gendarmes or other nasty foreigners, Mr. Malden would stride into the frame in a trim suit and a sharp fedora, a figure at once reassuring and slightly threatening, an embodiment of probity, seriousness and practical no-nonsense Americanism. If you had to leave home — maybe not the best idea, all things considered — you’d better have a brusque, fatherly guy like this to back you up and bail you out.
This patriarchal capitalist pitchman persona was a variation on Mike Stone, the detective Mr. Malden played in the 1970s on “The Streets of San Francisco.” That show’s clean, mean sensibility holds up well against the arty forensics of the current “CSI”-dominated network crime-drama landscape. For most of the program’s run, Mr. Malden’s foil and partner was Michael Douglas, and the generational and stylistic contrast between them — counterculture versus old school, slick against gruff, pretty-boy next to plug-ugly — is no less satisfying for being a little too easy.
But Mr. Malden, who died Wednesday at 97, specialized in being uneasy, playing men who are variously worried, angry, disappointed and defeated. Like many other actors who distinguish themselves in supporting roles and whose charisma consists of a kind of intensified ordinariness, he has often been referred to as an everyman. That doesn’t seem quite right, though. In his best movie roles, mainly in films directed by Elia Kazan, Mr. Malden is specifically the other man, the guy defined partly by his lack of certain attributes abundantly present in the protagonist. The other man is never ruthless, or dangerous, or dashing, or cool. His regret may be that he could never have been a contender, but he makes up for it with a stoical sincerity that is all the more affecting for being so easy to discount.
Twice, in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront,” the magnetic protagonist was Marlon Brando, and in embodying Brando’s antithesis Mr. Malden achieved an unusual kind of heroism. In “Streetcar” he was Mitch, fumbling suitor for the favors of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois, his awkward gentleness a quiet rebuke to Stanley Kowalski’s brutish self-confidence. And in “Waterfront” his Father Barry, full of righteous rage and social concern, serves as the angel on Terry Malloy’s shoulder, a figure of conviction and moral clarity in a world lousy with corruption and double-dealing.
Mr. Malden’s blunt features, combined with the subtlety of his craft, helped provide a crucial ballast of realism in Kazan’s feverish fables of American life. His finest, strangest and most heartbreaking performance came in “Baby Doll,” in which he plays Archie Lee Meighan, the dull-witted, sexually frustrated (to put it mildly) proprietor of a decaying cotton plantation who is driven around the bend by the caprices of his child bride (Carroll Baker) and the machinations of a wily business rival (Eli Wallach). The film, like “Streetcar” a collaboration between Kazan and Tennessee Williams, is a pungent hothouse, ripe with free-floating eroticism and Southern Gothic motifs. That Mr. Malden seems so manifestly out of place in this environment — baffled, earnest and sweaty, a can of tomatoes dropped into a flower garden — is exactly what makes him so perfect in the film, which depends on his anxious, uncomprehending discomfort.
Mr. Malden’s achievement as an actor was both substantial and modest. The paradox of great character actors is that they are at once adaptable and unmistakable, irreducibly individual yet able to be typecast. And Karl Malden, especially in the 1950s, was one of the best. No other guy could ever be the other guy the way he could.
Da The New York Times, 3 luglio 2009
