RIP Torn
We'll miss ya, geezer
shareHis real name was Elmore Torn, which was cool enough, but his nickname was Rip and so he stuck by it. As someone wrote this week, perhaps only Slim Pickens had a more descriptive name.
I have sometimes written around here about my high regard for 50s/60s/70s character star Richard Boone(well, its only in the 60s and 70's that he really got "fun" as an actor.) I've rather despaired in not finding a "Boone substitute" since he left us in 1981 (at 63, too young). Tommy Lee Jones came a bit close, but he's too quiet. Samuel L. Jackson is closer, but he is a bigger star than Boone was.
But one who came damn close -- if in a different way -- was Rip Torn. He'd been around since the 50's in movies and TV, usually in very serious roles. He was married (to her death?) to the Method Lady Geraldine Page(who seemed older than Torn; I dunno). He had a reputation in art films and serious roles.
And then, in the 80's, Rip Torn found a new career as a middle-aged character guy who good play good guys, bad guys, or somewhere in between, with a strong deep voice and a commanding manner. Like Richard Boone.
Except Rip Torn didn't really have Richard Boone's success. He didn't have a hit TV series to make him rich(Have Gun, Will Travel for Boone.) He didn't get above-the-title billing in movies, like Boone did -- usually second or third (The War Lord, Hombre, Big Jake, The Arrangement) sometimes first(Rio Conchos, some seventies foreign westerns -- and though he's second in the alphabet after Bibi Anderson, Boone is really the lead of The Kremlin Letter.)
No, Rip Torn didn't have THAT career. But he was memorable, nonetheless.
I clock Rip Torn as a crack character guy from 1987 (six years after we lost Boone.)
Two movies that year. In Extreme Prejudice, Torn wore a Stetson and went clean-shaven to play a Texas good guy -- Nick Nolte's Texas Ranger boss. In Nadine, Torn wore a Stetson and a goatee to play a Texas bad guy -- the adversary to stars Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger, a mob boss who gets a great memorable line near the end, spoken in Torn's great resonant voice: "You spend your whole life building up a business, and it takes two idiots ten minutes to bring it all down." Torn basically played the same Texas guy in both movies: one good, one bad, both delightfully charismatic and sonorous of voice. (In Extreme Prejudice, he says to Nolte: "Only thing lower than a state legislator is a child molester, in my opinion.")
In 1991, I saw Rip Torn in the role I like him in best. He's in Albert Brooks "Defending Your Life," a bit of self-help spirituality(with a selfish core) that says: when you die, before you can go to heaven, you go to a beautiful village with a courthouse. And in that court, you "defend your life" --- did you put your needs first? did you have proper self-esteem? did you do good for others? If you DID, off to Heaven you go. If you did NOT...back to earth you go. Earth...where humans usely only 10% of their brain power and where people sometimes go back five times..."but you wouldn't want to know any of them."
Those words are Rip Torn's who is the defense attorney assigned to neurotic nebbish Albert Brooks, dead too young in a car crash and on trial for having spent too timid a life on earth. (Meanwhile Brooks meets the Lovely Meryl Streep, whose trial is a formality because she did nothing on earth but help people, nuture her family and herself...and save puppies and children from a house fire. Both the lives of Brooks and Streep are broken down into film clips shown in court.)
Torn uses his commanding authority to TRY to win for Brooks at trial. But the ruthless prosecutor, Lee Grant, keeps showing film clips of Brooks being a timid nebbish.
Its all rather philosophical, if the message is ultimately: push for yourself more on this earth.
Torn is about the only "friend" Brooks has in the movie, though Streep unaccountably falls in love with him.
We realize how important Torn is to the tale when Brooks comes into the courtroom one day and finds a "substitute defense attorney for one day": mousy, quiet, bureaucratic Buck Henry, who doesn't fight nearly as hard for Brooks as Torn does. We hope: get Rip Torn back in this courtroom! He's Brooks' only chance.
Rip does figure in the finale of "Defending Your Life," and I think it his best mainstream role. The movie is my second favorite of 1991, after Silence of the Lambs.
And then came "Arthur" (as billed in the credits) aka "Artie," the manager to talk show host Larry Sanders(Garry Shandling) on the hit HBO series "The Larry Sanders Show." This inside showbiz fable made a great showcase for how fame works: Larry Sanders has the talent(comedy), but he NEEDS a manager/bodyguard/protector/bad cop/mean guy -- Artie -- to take care of him. The show had nuance -- Larry isn't a pushover, either, he can be tough, but he prefers Artie to take the heat, and Artie likes taking it. For his part, Artie isn't beneath sucking up to Larry -- after all, his only real boss.
And the two of them have -- as a sparring partner schmuck, Jeffrey Tambor's Ed McMahon type -- much worse than McMahan, an overly sensitive whiner totally in awe of his own celebrity( and he IS a good McMahon type on the air.) This threesome were the centerpiece to a show that had guest movie stars and TV stars playing versions of themselves -- some nice, some nasty -- but Rip Torn's Artie was really the fun character on the show, the tough guy we all WISH we could be. (And equality rule: they brought on a very tough TV woman who, as I recall, bested Larry -- not Artie -- in a fist fight.)
Somewhere in this period, I recall Rip Torn playing a Columbo killer in the new iteration of the series(90's) and he was perfect casting and new to the series, unlike repeaters from the 70's like Patrick McGoohan and William Shatner.
Rather as with Richard Boone -- who only did about six things I REALLY liked (and Have Gun Travel wasn't one of them), so too with Rip Torn. Lemme count 'em:
Defending Your Life(best of all)
Extreme Prejudice
Nadine
The Larry Sanders Show
Columbo
um...that's it? Well, I felt he was underused in "Men In Black" and a terrible, non-charming goonish gangster in the Eastwood/Reynolds flop City Heat. No I go with the five above. Larry Sanders was perhaps his longest running role.
That's "mainstream" Rip Torn. From my readings, I know he did a lot of independent work, across the 70's and into the 90's and beyond. Payday. That one where he almost bit Norman Mailer's ear off(an improvised mess called "Maidstone" I think.) Something where he was a frontier hermit finding romance. I've seen none of them. I should. I got too fixated on the sweetness of Defending Your Life and the showbiz bloodsport of Larry Sanders.
There's something famous about Rip Torn that led to a bit of a "twist ending":
He was cast as the picked-up-along-the-way lawyer friend of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider(happy 50th!) but lost the part(said Hopper) when he pulled a knife and threatened director Hopper. Torn sued Hopper for defamation and won, but no matter: the lawyer part went to a young guy named Nicholson, who got his first Oscar nom for it...and never looked back. "New stars are made when established stars drop out." (Like Robert Shaw getting The Sting when Boone dropped out; and getting Jaws from The Sting.)
The "twist ending" (to me at least) in his last decade working in films and TV, I thought that Old Rip Torn looked a lot like Old Jack Nicholson. A little thinner, maybe, but the same hair style, face shape, PRESENCE. And both men had sonorous voices that only got richer with age. When Nicholson wore HIS goatee in "The Departed," I felt the Rip Torn vibe immediately.
Some early 60's Rip Torn I only finally saw in the 00s:
The Man From UNCLE.(1965) He played a rich, murderous villain out to break all ten of the Commandments. I was this on DVD and wondered if some of this plot was cut from the TV broadcast in the 60's. He dishonors his father and mother(by kidnapping them to a cave to die), he sleeps with another man's wife(and we see him walk out of her bedroom with her in bed.) The best gag of this two parter is that this rich maniac who is out to break the commandments and take over the world, is dogged at every turn by : his ex-wife -- sweet Dorothy Provine(Its a Mad World) hellbent on alimony and unafraid to risk death to get it.
The Cincinnati Kid. (1965) This poker showdown(Young Steve McQueen versus Old Eddie G. Robinson) had an "all-star cast" and on the DVD menu, Rip Torn gets one of those all-star slots (along with the two male leads, Ann Margret, Tuesday Weld, and Karl Malden.) He wasn't all-star when he made the movie, he was by the DVD era.
In the movie, Torn is the villain: a rich Southern Gentleman out to destroy Old Eddie Robinson(who beat TORN at cards) in the poker showdown by forcing Karl Malden to deal McQueen winning cards.
Behind the scenes, Rip Torn is part of movie history on The Cincinnati Kid: the first director on the film, a man named Sam Peckinpah, was fired for filming a scene with Torn and his black mistress in bed(we meet Torn's sweet southern belle white wife.) The mistress was partially nude. That was all the producer needed to fire Peckinpah(whom he hated for other reasons) and Sam went into exile until saved by "The Wild Bunch." The replacement director, Norman Jewison, used Cincinnati Kid as a stepping stone from Doris Day movies to In the Heat of the Night and history of his own. By the way, the Torn/Mistress scene is in the movie, but she's not nude.
Young Rip Torn in The Cinncinati Kid has some of Old Rip Torn's charisma and vocal power,but not enough. You need to age into that kind of authority, Young Rip Torn is just mean and nasty. No fun to him.
But I'll add those 1965 items to my list:
Defending Your Life
Extreme Prejudice
Nadine
The Larry Sanders Show
Columbo
The Man From UNCLE two-parter("The Alexander the Greater Affair")
The Cincinatti Kid
...and I'll do two more things:
ONE: Look over Rip Torn's imdb filmography to see what I forgot and
TWO: Make a "bucket list retirement assignment" of tracking down some of Rip Torn's art film indies to watch. I'm sure he's good in them, too.
Yessir...RIP Rip. I was and will remain, a fan.