CLASSIC FILMS

KEITH UHLICH

Married to the Mob (1988, Jonathan Demme, United States) Stockwell’s only Academy Award nomination was for his brilliantly menacing and piteous performance as mob boss Tony "The Tiger" Russo in Jonathan Demme’s breezy gangster comedy. Michelle Pfeiffer plays Angela, a former mob wife trying to start a new life after her husband is, unbeknownst to her, gunned down by Tony. But the Tiger isn’t going to let her off that easy, just as he isn’t going to avoid the deranged jealousy of his own wife Connie (Mercedes Ruehl), who thinks Angela has her lustful sights on Tony when it’s really the other way around. The reason Stockwell makes as much of an impression as he does in this classic carnivalesque farce is because he treats the escalating absurdities with the same seriousness, and quicksilver ability to react to his scene partners, as in his more dramatic work. Married to the Mob opened up a whole new path for him and from here his inimitable career took, you might say, a quantum leap. (Streaming on HBOMax.) Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962, Sidney Lumet, United States) In honor of the great Dean Stockwell, who recently passed away at age 85, this month’s classics column is dedicated to several of his finest films, in which he frequently— even in what were typically supporting performances —stole the show. His work as tubercular youngest child Edmund Tyrone in Sidney Lumet’s towering film adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play is a jewel of his middle period. Against the astonishing theatrics of Ralph Richardson, Katharine Hepburn and Jason Robards, he is the often quiet observer, a necessary balance to the familial bluster. It’s a contrast with the more animated performances of his child-acting youth, in movies like Anchors Aweigh and The Boy with Green Hair. But clearly that youthful busyness (in all senses of the term) laid some necessary groundwork so that he could later explore stillness with equal adeptness. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.) Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch, United States) Surely viewers thought things couldn’t get much crazier than a BDSM-obsessed Dennis Hopper huffing gas while cursing at and beating up Isabella Rossellini. But David Lynch’s singular, surrealistic look at the horrors underlying picket fence American suburbia peaks in insanity when Dean Stockwell shows up. He plays Ben, a lisping dandy rocking a cigarette holder and shooting Hopper’s psychotic Frank Booth some chillingly funny wide-eyed glares that Stockwell has since admitted he stole from Carol Burnett. He manages to out-lunatic Hopper in this scene, no more so than when he picks up an incandescent worker’s light and lipsyncs Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” to the captive small audience. “Damn, Ben, you are so fucking suave!” says Booth, and he might as well also be describing the fearless performer playing him. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)

Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders, West GermanyFrance-United Kingdom) Wim Wenders’s Cannes prize-winner is often thought of as Harry Dean Stanton’s show, a rare vehicle for a supporting-actor stalwart. But Stanton’s character, drifter Travis Henderson, who begins the film in a state of transcendent stupefaction, would be nothing without the grounding force of Stockwell as his brother Walt. Walt hasn’t seen Travis for four years, and he and his wife have adopted Travis’s young son in the interim. It’s this comparatively stable life that stirs something in Travis and sets him on a path to find his lost love, and his son’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski). Consider Stockwell’s subdued work here as a kind of guiding light that brings Travis a little closer to earth and couches this sublime movie in an achingly emotional reality—one that eventually comes to a tearjerking head. (Streaming on HBOMax.) n