Team Player Alan Arkin

Arkin, who passed away last week at the age of eighty-nine, was the son of left-leaning parents and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Germany. He spent his first eleven years in Brooklyn before his family moved to California, where he won scholarships to study acting in Los Angeles, and later, at Bennington College in Vermont. Arkin often told interviewers that he was drawn to acting as a way to escape from himself.

But he also sang and played guitar with the Tarriers, a folk group that scored a couple of hits in the mid-1950s. As an early member of the improvisational comedy troupe Second City, he discovered that making people laugh did not come to him naturally. He worked hard and deliberately at creating characters, one by one, and he let audiences teach him which bits flew or flopped. Second City led to Broadway, and eventually, to Luv, Murray Schisgal’s dark farce, directed by Mike Nichols and costarring Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

Norman Jewison caught the show and was impressed with Arkin’s “gift for accents,” as he tells Variety’s Brent Lang. Jewison cast him as Yuri Rozanov, an officer and emissary from a Soviet submarine run aground on a tiny Massachusetts island in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966). Among the panicking Americans are Walt and Elspeth Whittaker, played by Carl Reiner and Eva Marie Saint. “Because he had that training from his time at Second City,” says Jewison, Arkin “was such a gifted improviser. He and Carl would basically throw the script away. They were just brilliantly funny.” For his first substantial on-screen performance, Arkin was nominated for an Oscar.

In one of seven segments of Vittorio De Sica’s Woman Times Seven (1967), Arkin and Shirley MacLaine played suicidal lovers—for laughs—before Arkin veered toward drama, terrifying Audrey Hepburn and audiences alike as a ruthless criminal in Terence Young’s Wait Until Dark (1967). After taking on a role created by Peter Sellers in Bud Yorkin’s misfire, Inspector Clouseau (1968), Arkin delivered a moving performance as a deaf-mute engraver in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, an adaptation of Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel directed by Robert Ellis Miller—and scored a second Oscar nomination.

By this point, Arkin was working steadily, and two films stand out for their convoluted production histories. Mike Nichols and Buck Henry spent two years writing an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 1961 World War II novel Catch-22, a project that Orson Welles had tried and failed to piece together—he wound up playing a small but significant role as a brigadier general. For the role of Captain John Yossarian, the pilot who learns that his request to cease flying dangerous missions proves that he’s sane enough to keep on flying them, Nichols considered Walter Matthau and Al Pacino and actually cast Stacy Keach, who bowed out a month before filming began. Enter Alan Arkin.

Catch-22 was a top-ten box-office hit in 1970, but it didn’t earn enough to turn a profit. Critics were disappointed as well. Arkin is “a tremendously gifted actor who gives us Yossarian as a tense, paranoid victim on the edge of a crack-up,” wrote Roger Ebert. “This is no doubt Nichols’s doing, and it misses the point,” which is that Yossarian “isn’t nuts.”

Between film roles, Arkin was directing theater, and in 1969, he took on an off-Broadway production of Little Murders, Jules Feiffer’s play about a New Yorker who introduces her boyfriend to her severely dysfunctional family. Elliott Gould starred in the original Broadway production whose run lasted less than a week; Arkin’s staging ran for four hundred performances.

United Artists put its foot down, and Gould turned to Arkin. Little Murders (1971) is “perhaps the blackest comedy of American apocalypse ever put on film,” writes Ty Burr, who calls it “a profoundly disturbing nightmare of random shootings, garbage strikes, collapsing infrastructure, and family dysfunction. Is it much fun? Hardly. Is it still relevant? Toss the phenomenon of social media on top, and the movie could be taking place this afternoon.”

As Glenn Kenny points out at the Decider, in the 1970s, Arkin was half of “three absolutely immortal screen duos.” In Richard Rush’s Freebie and the Bean (1974), “he and James Caan were like Felix Unger and Oscar Madison, only as San Francisco cops. (Arkin was Bean, the fussy, tetchy one.) In 1976, he played Sigmund Freud, a real-life historical figure transposed to the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes, in which he is charged with curing a drug-addled Holmes of his ‘delusions.’” Herbert Ross’s The Seven-Percent Solution is “a still-astoundingly clever comedy-thriller,” and Arkin’s Freud is “confident, with only a light German accent, but with an absurdist undercurrent running underneath, the perfect serene counter to Nicol Williamson’s increasingly flustered Holmes.”

The most immortal of the duos Kenny writes about, though, has to be the pairing of Arkin with Peter Falk in The In-Laws, written by Andrew Bergman and directed by Arthur Hiller. Arkin is Sheldon Kornpett, a dentist asked for a small favor by the father of his daughter’s fiancé, Vince Ricardo (Falk), who may or may not be working for the CIA. “One of Arkin’s great gifts is the ability to convincingly play an average person,” writes Stephen Winer in the essay accompanying our release. “The comedy comes from his increasing terror as Vince drags him into greater and greater danger . . . As his character gets ever closer to the edge, there is a stillness to his face and body that is belied by the increasing mania in his voice. He is a usually rational man attempting to present himself as under complete control while hysteria leaks out of every pore.”

Arkin often said that The In-Laws was the first film he truly enjoyed working on. In his 2011 memoir, An Improvised Life, he wrote that he spent the first couple of weeks on the set trying “to jam myself into my old familiar work place. I tried to suffer, to constrict myself; I couldn’t make it happen.” In his memoir, Just One More Thing (2006), Falk recalled shooting the famous “Serpentine” scene, the one in which Sheldon and Vince run for cover while bullets rain down all around them. “Alan loved that scene so much,” wrote Falk. “Watching him, his total enjoyment, his funny run five steps left, then five steps right, all the while yelling ‘Serpentine’—he could have done that run a hundred times—he’d still be doing it today if the crew hadn’t gone home. It tickled him so much. And watching him tickled me.”

Arkin also seems to have enjoyed going full-on goofy as a brainwashed psychology professor in Marshall Brickman’s Simon (1980), and he reunited with Falk and screenwriter Andrew Bergman for Big Trouble (1986), a comedy John Cassavetes did not enjoy directing. After appearing in such crowd-pleasers as Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer (1991), Arkin landed a role in writer David Mamet and director James Foley’s throat-grabbing showcase of male American acting, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).

Costarring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, and Jonathan Pryce, Glengarry is a testosterone-charged, late-capitalist descendant of Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman. Having just been fired, four real estate salesmen are desperate to get their hands on good leads—the names and numbers of potential buyers—that might help them get their jobs back. Arkin’s “raw performance” as one of the salesmen is “the beating heart of what could have been a cold, bloodless movie,” writes Jason Bailey in the New York Times.

As a psychiatrist treating a professional assassin (John Cusack) in George Armitage’s Grosse Pointe Blank, Arkin delighted once again as a man struggling to maintain his composure while his insides are screaming. The late 1990s also saw Arkin’s return to the theater. As Frank Scheck writes in the Hollywood Reporter, the 1998 off-Broadway production Power Plays was “a trio of one-act plays that he directed, cowrote, and costarred in opposite Elaine May, with whom he once performed in Second City. I was lucky enough to see it, and even a quarter of a century later it lingers in my memory—not as a great evening of comic plays (they were sporadically funny at best), but as a master class in comedic acting by two of the best of all time.”

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) gave us Arkin as raunchier—and frankly, funnier—versions of that great comedic staple, the grumpy old man. Both supporting performances earned him Oscar nominations, and for Little Miss Sunshine, he finally won. “Acting for me has always been and always will be a team sport,” he said, accepting the award. “I cannot work at all unless I feel a spirit of unity around me. So my main sense of gratitude goes to the entire cast and crew and production team.”

Arkin was just as gracious when he sat down with his son and fellow actor, Adam Arkin, to talk about the movies he loved and learned from over the years for the Criterion Channel program Adventures in Moviegoing. When his son mentions that he once noted that film became “almost a religion” for him at one point, Arkin says, “Whether it was true or not—and it was true part of the time—there was a sense, a feeling of being part of a community.”