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.
peter boyle saying “holy crap” on everybody loves raymond, and the pitch-perfect interplay between him and doris roberts on the show, were among my absolute favorite things on american television. he was also the key to one of the best episodes of the x-files: “clyde bruckman’s final repose”. and he was great in monster’s ball as well.
My favorite Boyle performance is in The Candidate, not least because its understated, controlled precision contrasts so strongly with his tendency to play (with great gusto) the larger-than-life. Every time he’s on-screen he seems to disappear into the pretty blank openness of Redford’s face–like you’d imagine a political op would–yet every time he speaks the scene’s focus immediately re-frames around him. (Like you’d imagine a political op’s comments might…) Redford’s good, but Boyle *makes* that movie for me.
I have a copy of Joe at home I’ve been meaning to watch. Will do so now, sadder. But yeah, I love him in The Candidate – love the whole film. I always wished that Redford had made a follow-up to it, because I genuinely wanted to know what had become of Redford’s and Boyle’s characters.
And though he was largely relagated to TV over the past decade, what good TV it was. The horror on the faces of Doris Roberts and him when the “Fruit of the Month” club gets brought up is excellent.