Lee Marvin: The Making of a Professional

Lee Marvin is best known for cynical, cold-blooded, tough guy, killer roles in war, crime, and western films. 

"It is a misconception, though," Andrew Mangravite wrote in a perceptive obituary, "that Marvin was a screen tough guy.  In fact, he was our pre-eminent punk--a natural-born predator who, in a film like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), is as eager to bully and humiliate James Stewart as he is careful to avoid John Wayne".  

This thesis was demonstrated most convincingly by Vince Stone in The Big Heat (1953) where Marvin displayed a spectrum of anti-social activity and developed his early screen persona.  Other roles in the 1950s picked up the thread from Vince Stone: Chino in The Wild One (1953); Dill in Violent Saturday (1955); and Hector David in Bad Day at Black Rock (1956). 

Could it have been otherwise?  Marvin's formidable stare, the rutted face, the ambivalent grin, the taut physical presence which contributed to his being called the "Merchant of Menace" was also, in the words of Donald Zec, Marvin's biographer, "as vital to his screen image as that boyish blue-eyed smile is to Paul Newman's."

The path from "punk" to leading man for Marvin was difficult.  The on-screen image was too good.  Vince Stone to Liberty Valance covered ten years of his life.  In movie after movie, Marvin's bad guy suffered some form of retribution, usually a violent death.  An average actor would not have escaped this persistent casting call. 

Those among Marvin's contemporaries who did escape -- Charles Bronson, Jack Palance, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Van Cleef, and Aldo Ray -- never attained Marvin's longevity at the top nor displayed as great a range of talent.  Nor did Marvin lack strong critical reviews during his apprenticeship before securing leading roles.  Vince Stone inherited the "best bad guy" mantle from Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo of 1947's Kiss of Death, but Marvin did not immediately receive prime roles, as did Widmark. 

It took an Academy Award for an oddball character in a mediocre film, Cat Ballou (1965) for people to take Marvin seriously.  This role allowed him to display a multiplicity of talent: the drunk but proud Kid Shelleen, the silver-nosed Strawn, an ability to parody these types, and a flair for comedy.  Although, the Academy Award freed Lee Marvin from the punk roles, traces of the anti-social Marvin appear in The Dirty Dozen (1967) , Point Blank (1967), The Iceman Cometh (1973), The Klansman (1974), and, especially, Gorky Park (1983). 

As a leading man, Marvin modified his tough guy image.  Starting with The Killers' Charlie Strom in 1964, his characters began to enlarge upon the other, with Marvin becoming, as his obituary noted, "the complete professional at large in a sloppy world".  Who better to lead The Professionals (1966) but Lee Marvin? 

These qualities of professionalism and dedication to his craft raised Lee Marvin above his contemporaries.  Few accomplished the leap from decade-long villain roles to sustained stardom.  The actor to whom he can be compared would be Humphrey Bogart.  Where they compare is in the versatility of roles once they became leading men while maintaining the hardness upon which their respective personae lay.

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Like future film actors Audie Murphy, Neville Brand, Jack Palance, Jeff Chandler, and Aldo Ray, Marvin saw plenty of action in World War II.  Serving in the Pacific, he participated in the invasions of Kwajalein and Eniwetok.   On June 15, 1944, 20,000 Marines had landed on this second largest island of the Marianas group, Saipan.  During the campaign Marvin was wounded in the spine. It took 13 months for Marvin to recover from his wound for which he received a Purple Heart. 

Barely escaping paralysis, Marvin was discharged in 1945 when the war was virtually over.  Psychologically, Marvin war scars lasted and may explain if not pardon Marvin's lasting struggle with the bottle.  Not that the war destroyed a model citizen -- neither did it help return him to a normal civilian life.  Indeed, his first instinct was to re-enlist.   Many of his personal demons may have been exorcised twenty-three years later by his participation in John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968).

Marvin had a small stage career from 1948-1951, finally landing the part of Taggart in a production of Billy Budd.  Immediately prior to this, Marvin was hired as an extra for a Gary Cooper vehicle You're in the Navy Now (1951).  He impressed director Henry Hathaway enough to get additional scenes, extra dialogue, and a small part in the next Hathaway project, Diplomatic Courier (1951). 

These films are curiosity pieces if only for the fact that they introduced not only Lee Marvin but also Charles Bronson, known then as Charles Buchinski.  They were hardly blips on the silver screen; later, their careers dramatically intertwined in The Dirty Dozen and Death Hunt (1980). Bronson waited longer for stardom than Marvin did, but Bronson before Death Wish and Chato's Land, made significant marks in the all-male macho classics: The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). 

Marvin's apprentice years can be divided into three categories, based on the roles he was given: military men (from a wide range of wars), villains (occasionally overlapping the military roles), and miscellaneous parts.  In Diplomatic Courier he played an M.P. and for his third film, We're Not Married, Marvin was cast as Eddie Bracken's army buddy on the train who tries to assist Bracken get legally married to Mitzi Gaynor. 

Then came a significant role as a sergeant trying to rescue one of his squad trapped in a shell hole in Eight Iron Men (1952). This film was Marvin's first of eight for Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn.  Marvin was hired by Stanley Kramer, for whom he would work in The Wild One, The Caine Mutiny (1954), and Ship of Fools (1965), and was directed by Edward Dmytryk in Caine Mutiny and Raintree County (1956).  

Despite strong performances and favorable notices, Marvin did not land many substantial parts.  Exuding competence as a military man, he would also be typecast as a villain, which didn't bother him:  "They paid me on Thursday, and they didn't lock me up.  I got to do things on film that, if you did on the street, they'd send you away".  This reminds one of Neville Brand's assertion that if he hadn't gone into acting after World War II he might have killed someone. 

Marvin's quintessential gangster punk was Vince Stone in The Big Heat, the classic film noir from master director Fritz Lang.  Think of famous scenes not only in Marvin's career but all movie history, you have Marvin's Vince Stone throwing scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame's face, a favor she returned later in the film.  The scene's brutality equaled Kiss of Death's sequence when Richard Widmark's Tommy Udo pushed a woman in a wheelchair down a flight of steps. 

What we remember in these gruesome episodes on the screen is the perpetrator's reaction to the act: a hideous laugh or dumb indigence.  Moreover, we cringe to think how easily Udo and Stone explode into violence (the one comparable character to these would be Joe Pesci's in Goodfellas).  Of course, a heavy in the 1950s had nowhere to turn but sadistic to gain notice.  For an indication of how our times have changed, one only need look at Marvin's roles in The Killers, Point Blank, and Prime Cut where similar heavies have the leading roles and/or become the respective film's hero. 

A smaller but well-noticed part is Marvin playing, Hector David, the intimidating cohort of Ernest Borgnine, in Bad Day at Black Rock with Spencer Tracy.  Although Borgnine got physical with Tracy (Borgnine living up to the high quality of sadism he exhibited unforgettably in From Here to Eternity), Marvin's menace was equally intimidating, as in the scene when Tracy walks into his own room and finds Marvin stretched out in the bed.  Black Rock differed from The Big Heat in that Marvin's character in the former didn't have to act violently to prove that he was violent and deadly.  His biographer called him "a villain with a demon's ontology, a wolf in wolf's clothing".

Bad Day at Black Rock was Marvin and Borgnine's second film together.  They would appear together four more times: 1955's Violent Saturday, then more than a decade later in The Dirty Dozen, 1973's Emperor of the North, and the television sequel to The Dirty Dozen in 1986.  The gap between Violent Saturday and Dirty Dozen can go far in explaining the respective paths of their careers. While Marvin appeared in hundreds of television episodes and in typecast roles in the movies, Borgnine struck gold by getting an Academy Award for the lead in Marty (1955) and by staying close to the top (billing) in the late fifties and early sixties. 

Marvin played a variety of anti-social types and one of the best known was Chino in The Wild One. Marvin got the role through Keenan Wynn, a fellow biking enthusiast.  In one scene, his drunken fall from the motorcycle in The Wild One prefigured the image of Kid Shelleen on his horse at the end of Cat Ballou. The film starred Marlon Brando, and Marvin had trouble occasionally with Brando's Method acting -- Marvin himself never espoused any particular acting method. 

In A Life in the Balance, Marvin received good notices as the killer who held Anne Bancroft hostage in Mexico City.  Then there was the forgettable remake of Bogart's High Sierra -- I Died a Thousand Times with Jack Palance in the Bogey role.  Marvin would back up Palance again in Attack! (1956), but a decade later Marvin would overshadow Palance in The Professionals and Monte Walsh (1970).  In 1955's Shack Out on 101, Marvin played the short-order cook, Slob, who doubled as a Communist agent.  His villain in the Randolph Scott vehicle Seven Men from Now (1958) would be the last of this kind of role until 1961's The Comancheros.
    Of the remaining films in the apprentice years -- the 3-D Gun Fury and Gorilla at Large, Pete Kelly's Blues, Pillars of the Sky, and Raintree County -- only Raintree County was noteworthy, lavishly produced by MGM and starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Eva Marie Saint.  Marvin played a braggart (but in no way a punk) who has a footrace with Clift.  Marvin also won praise for a long soliloquy after he had been shot in the back during a Civil War battle.

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While making his theatrical films, Marvin was a familiar face on television, including episodes of Dragnet, Medic and G.E. Theatre.   But it was playing the lead in the successful 1957-59 NBC police series M Squad which made Marvin a household name in the United States as the show reached number three in the Nielsen ratings behind Perry Mason and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.  He would achieve international recognition with the show's eventual worldwide syndication.

He played Lt. Ballinger, member of an elite part of the Chicago Police Department.  The show called for a tough, if not tough-looking, cop who had some compassion--the network limited the compassion part of his character.  According to Marvin,   "I wanted Ballinger to show some weakness occasionally....It makes you human!  So I told them at the studio.  But they said, 'Well, yah, maybe, but nobody's ever done it,' so we didn't."

We must remember that M Squad was a half-hour show, barely time to solve the crime.  This was an era in television which featured hardboiled police and detective shows: Johnny Staccato (with future Marvin co-star John Cassavetes playing a Greenwich Village jazz pianist who doubles as a private eye), Richard Diamond, Peter Gunn, Checkmate, and others -- black-and-white programs featuring film noir heroes.  M Squad's realism stemmed, first, from the use of Chicago locales while filming and, second, Marvin's presence.  And some commentators felt that he more than any other television cop looked like the real thing.

Marvin earned recognition and financial independence from the series, but he was unhappy with the 39-week grind.   Nor did he envision a bright future in television.  After the one hundred and seventeenth episode, Marvin walked.  Nevertheless, he didn't really turn his back on television.  During the making of M Squad and afterward, Marvin guest-starred on Desilu Playhouse, Route 66, Schlitz Playhouse, The Twilight Zone, and an Alcoa Premiere in which he earned an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a psychotic veteran.  

In 1963 he made Sergeant Ryker, about a man accused of treason during the Korean War, which was released five years later theatrically to capitalize on Marvin's newfound superstar status.  Another prominent television production for him was "The Losers," an episode of the Dick Powell Show with Keenan Wynn and directed by Sam Peckinpah, who would be Marvin's off-screen alter ego throughout the sixties and seventies.  There would also be one film, The Missouri Traveler, during these television years for Marvin, a film that was forgotten soon enough in the fifties.

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M Squad's success enabled Marvin to choose his films.  He signed a two-picture deal with 20th Century-Fox, where he made The Comancheros (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, then battled John Wayne again in Donovan's Reef (1963).  These films found Marvin in the company of two elder master directors, Michael Curtiz and John Ford, and he would be Duke Wayne's number one adversary. In Comancheros and Valance, the Duke took care of the mean, seemingly undisciplined Lee Marvin characters.  A few years later in Donovan's Reef, the non-stop brawling only seemed to underscore the vanity of any kind of career rivalries.  At best, these respective associations with the Duke gave Marvin his last lessons in professionalism.

You can also view these early sixties roles as Marvin's aching desire to achieve stardom.  As if Lee was saying through his characters:  "Enough of the bad men and final retributions."  Or, at least, if he should die in the end, let him play the lead role.  He finally would, in The Killers (1964) but first came Liberty Valance.  He bullied and whipped Jimmy Stewart.  But, in the end, the Duke got the better of him.  If Marvin came away from the film with a clear lesson, it was that he had to be more than bad.  The Valence/Vince Stone/Hector David personae could not be parlayed any further, at least not as subordinate characters.

Hence, Marvin's sinisterly thrilling achievement in The Killers. Don Siegel's film remade the 1946 classic, which had starred Burt Lancaster, Edmond O'Brien, and Ava Gardner, taken from Hemingway's short story.  While both films used flashbacks and pivoted on the search for reasons why a man has been killed by hired guns, Siegel's plot was unraveled by the hitmen themselves, Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager (played in the original by William Conrad and Charles McGraw).  It became a modern morality tale in which we could find few good men and women.  The audience inevitably sided with the hitmen because they weren't as bad as the people who had hired them.

Marvin's character Charlie Strom might have been a cold-blooded and calculating bastard, not unlike previous Marvin villains, but Marvin was allowed to play him broadly, especially in his scenes with Clu Gulager, which have an amusing student-teacher relationship.  Marvin's death scene, also, was one of the best of all time.  Mortally wounded, he shot Ronald Reagan (his last movie performance) and Angie Dickinson, then staggered across the front lawn of a suburban home and expired beside his car, the case of money which he carried opening and spilling its contents.  About his performance, one writer called it the best of Marvin's career.
The Killers was to have been one of the first television movies.  However, its violence convinced executives that it had best be shown in theaters.

Ship of Fools, not The Killers or Cat Ballou, seemed the most likely candidate to propel Marvin to stardom.  Taken from Katherine Anne Porter's novel concerning the many characters on a pre-World War II ship headed to Europe, it was directed by Stanley Kramer and starred Leigh, Werner, Marvin, as well as Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer, and George Segal.  Marvin's choicest scenes were with Vivien Leigh and Michael Dunn.  With the former he endured on-the-set invectives and still managed to perform well with her. 

In the background of the making of Ship of Fools entered a woman who would affect dramatically not only Marvin's career but the social history of the United States.  Screenwriter Abby Mann gave a small part in the film to Michelle Triola, who met a persistent Lee Marvin on the set.  Marvin's marriage was nearly over except for the paperwork and, six months after he met Michelle, they moved in together.  The relationship would last nearly six years; legally, the palimony suit filed by Michelle would not be resolved until 1979.