They’ve All Got Clunkers

When Jason Robards died Dec. 26, the appreciations that poured in highlighted his back-to-back Oscar victories (for “All the President’s Men” and “Julia”), his legendary stage performances in several O’Neill masterpieces, and his credits in many respected movies from “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” and “Melvin and Howard” to “Philadelphia” and “Magnolia.”

But no one mentioned his appearance in 1981’s monumental flop “The Legend of the Lone Ranger”--fortunately for Robards, that stillborn western had been forgotten long ago. Other actors should be so lucky.

Almost every giant of cinema has at least one embarrassment in his oeuvre. Just recall a few of the disasters of 2000: John Travolta’s “Battlefield Earth” may be in a class by itself, but Robert De Niro would probably like to send “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” straight into oblivion. Robert Duvall was marooned in two duds, “Gone in 60 Seconds” and “The 6th Day,” and Jeremy Irons rang out the century with the instantly forgettable “Dungeons & Dragons.”

Of course Irons, De Niro and Duvall are in good company. Laurence Olivier made such hopeless opuses as “The Betsy,” “The Boys From Brazil” and “The Jazz Singer” late in his career. John Gielgud had to endure the musical version of “Lost Horizon” and the hard-core porn epic “Caligula.” Audrey Hepburn gave a series of entrancing performances over two decades, but one of her last leading roles came in “Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline” in 1979.

And they are hardly the only superb thespians who collected nice paychecks in movies that reeked. We’re not talking here about ambitious misfires like “The House of the Spirits,” which stranded several Oscar winners and nominees, including Irons, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Vanessa Redgrave, or even “Pay It Forward,” which Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt may have deluded themselves into seeing as a noble effort.

Rather, this is the type of movie that the actors had to know going in would be a lively potboiler at best and a mind-boggling piece of idiocy at worst; no one expected prizes for “The Concorde--Airport ‘79,” which starred Ingmar Bergman veteran Bibi Andersson and Emmy winner Cicely Tyson, or “Jaws the Revenge,” which employed Michael Caine in a career low for an actor who by his own admission worked in any number of bombs (unless you’d prefer to nominate “Peeper,” “The Swarm” or “The Island”).

Why, then, do great actors appear in movies that they know will do little to enhance their resume? Some might laugh and say it’s the money, stupid. With a few weeks’ work on an inane sequel, they can finance a Mediterranean villa and open a Swiss bank account. To be fair, it isn’t just personal gain that motivates them. Olivier was providing a nest egg for his family by taking high-paying parts in a series of stupefying stinkers during his last years. Older actors don’t always get offered a wide range of parts, and if they want to keep working--not just for the bucks but for the love of their craft--they have to lower their standards and settle for the junky pictures offered them.

This problem is particularly acute for aging actresses. When “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” turned into a surprise hit in 1962, it opened up a new genre of Grand Guignol for unemployed legends of the cinema. Bette Davis returned in “The Nanny,” Joan Crawford went “Berserk,” and Tallulah Bankhead leaped into “Die! Die! My Darling.” These female-oriented horror movies have run their course, but the pickings still are slim for actresses over 50 and that’s why Faye Dunaway has to make do with “The Temp” and “Dunston Checks In.”

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Since it probably isn’t realistic to expect actors to just say no, how should they comport themselves in a movie clearly destined for the dustbin? One strategy is to sleepwalk through the movie and hope that they won’t be noticed.

This is the tactic that Duvall employed in “The 6th Day.” He played the role of a tormented scientist desperate to clone his dying wife, and he seemed embarrassed by the earnest scenes he was asked to play. In most movies, even bad ones like “Gone in 60 Seconds,” Duvall can be counted on for some raucous energy. In “The 6th Day” he gives one of his rare recessive performances, almost as if he were praying that you wouldn’t remember him.

This shamefaced approach to performing in big-budget turkeys is understandable but also a little gutless. Hey, if you’re going to take the money and run, don’t expect us to ignore your presence.

A more daring approach for an actor stuck in a bomb is to tear into the role with panache, in an effort to give the audience a good time. This is what Irons does with the unspeakably awful “Dungeons & Dragons,” camping it up like the Wicked Witch of the West. Irons cackles and spits out his villainous lines, and while his performance is certainly overripe, you miss him when he’s off screen, especially when you’re squirming through the tone-deaf readings of his amateurish young co-stars, who sound like mallrats in the Middle Ages.

At least Irons enunciates; he provides a few moments of guilty pleasure. This same juicy, no-holds-barred approach to junk was taken by James Mason in “Mandingo,” Marlon Brando in “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Jessica Lange in “Hush” and Geoffrey Rush in “The House on Haunted Hill,” to name a few.

One of my favorite florid performances of recent years was Jon Voight’s portrayal of the deranged snake hunter in “Anaconda.” Voight knew he was a long way from “Midnight Cowboy” and “Coming Home” when he signed on for the villain’s role in this cheesy jungle melodrama. So he adopted a phony Latin accent and kept winking at the audience--even when he was swallowed whole by the giant reptile. His performance was a memorable howler, and it almost redeemed the movie.

The all-time camp classic performance is Dunaway’s in “Mommie Dearest.” Perhaps basing her performance on some of Joan Crawford’s own terrible turns, Dunaway tore into the oversized caricature with gusto, delivering her “No wire hangers” tirade with gleeful abandon. She was so bad that she was absolutely mesmerizing.

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These are the most logical ways to survive a terrible movie--either try to disappear or turn it into parody. But there is a third possibility, and that is to play a dreadful role with such intense conviction that you make audiences forget they are watching a debacle. Maybe the best example I can think of is Gene Hackman’s performance in “The Poseidon Adventure.”

Hackman is a rare actor who’s just about incapable of an unconvincing performance. And he has been put to the test with a heap of rotten movies, including “Superman IV,” “Loose Cannons,” “Narrow Margin,” “Wyatt Earp,” “The Quick and the Dead” and “The Chamber.”

“The Poseidon Adventure” had a cast full of Oscar winners--Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine and Jack Albertson among them--giving horribly hammy performances. They had to contend with ludicrous dialogue and pitifully stock roles. All of them were a bit past their prime, so it was easy to understand why they agreed to participate. Hackman was in a different category altogether. He was fresh off prestige pictures like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Downhill Racer” and “I Never Sang for My Father,” and he had just won an Oscar for his superb performance as the brutish cop in “The French Connection.”

At first it was disconcerting to see him in “The Poseidon Adventure” as an impassioned pastor who was also a macho fighting man. The role was stupefying, but Hackman played it as if it were every bit as substantial as his earlier parts. His conviction made the whole enterprise more gripping than a schlocky disaster movie had any right to be.

The downside of this is that Hackman’s extraordinary skill legitimized a dubious genre, and the result was that legions of good actors were trapped in some of the worst movies of their careers. Producer Irwin Allen followed “The Poseidon Adventure” with “The Towering Inferno,” perhaps the dumbest movie ever to be nominated for a best picture Oscar, which featured Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway and Fred Astaire flailing helplessly. But Allen hit his nadir when he hatched “The Swarm,” which pitted an august cast (Caine, Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, Richard Widmark, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant and Jose Ferrer) against an army of killer bees.

Maybe all the actors who embarrassed themselves in these movies (and in a later generation’s disaster epics like “Twister” and “Dante’s Peak”) should bring a class-action lawsuit against Hackman. He did something that a gazillion of his peers tried and failed to do. Hackman turned dross into gold, and maybe that’s what secretly motivates all of these other Oscar-winning actors. They hope that they too can rise above tacky material and transform it. That’s a tantalizing challenge, but Hackman’s miraculous achievement isn’t likely to be repeated any time soon.