I had a few moments in between final exams to check out the headlines, and there is more sad news for fans of the films of the seventies. I knew Altman was ill, but I did not know that Boyle was ill as well. I don’t have much to say but I do think that Boyle (like Hackman, Nicholson, Duvall, et al.) belonged to a unique generation of American actors. I’m struck, now thinking about it, how many of the great leading male actors were just plain, well…plain. Not terribly ugly, but certainly not dashingly handsome. More important, though, is that Boyle was a gifted character actor. And he raised (for me, anyway) the status of the character actor. Or maybe he was a product of his time. Perhaps, during the late sixties and early seventies, the art of acting was changing anyway, and that actors were encouraged to seek out and play characters (like “The Wizard” in Taxi Driver), rather than become a movie star. In a lot of the films from the seventies, even the leading roles (like Joe) seem like characters, real characters. Anyway, I don’t have much more to say beyond this. Everybody loves Peter.