ALLEN GARFIELD: THE TELEGRAPH OBITUARY

My obituary of the great character actor 
Allen Garfield  went up on the Daily Telegraph's website on 30 April. I missed it at the time, and because trips to the shops are limited, didn't see whether it was in the paper paper. What follows is basically my original piece, written short and succinct to give it a better chance of squeezing in to the paper in these sad times, though I have added a bit about the background to the filming of Chief Zabu. I re-watched The Conversation recently, and was again impressed with how brilliant he is playing Harry Caul's opposite, and how nicely John Cazale is pulled between them. What's interesting to note that Coppola always claimed Gene Hackman had trouble adjusting to the Caul character, as he personally was far closer to Garfield's personality. 

ALLEN GARFIELD, ACTOR

Allen Garfield, who has died aged 80, was one of the finest character actors of his generation, turning supporting parts into memorable roles. Denied leads because his appearance failed to match his talent, his made his characters, often villainous, venal or corrupt seem real because they always seemed to accept who they were. In his own favourite film, Francis Coppola's The Conversation, he played Bernie Moran, a wire-tapping rival to Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, but one without Caul's crippling conscience. He worked with Coppola again in One From The Heart and in Cotton Club as Abbadabba Berman, the mob accountant whose signature line “it's nothing personal, just business” was borrowed to become crucial in The Godfather.

Garfield was born Allen Goorwitz in Newark, New Jersey. In high school he began amateur boxing, while working as a copy boy on the Newark Star-Ledger. “I was going to be a journalist-boxer, the Jewish Hemingway,” he said. But he was drawn to acting, and adapted part of the film Tomorrow The World for his high school's theatre. He studied acting in New York under Anthony Mannino while working as a journalist and editor, but it was a play he wrote in the mid-Sixties that impressed William Devane, who though the same age as Garfield, had already played in Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Fesitival and Off-Broadway in the hit poliutical spoof MacBird. Devane was head of theatre writing at the Actors Studio, and admitted Goorwitz as a writer/director, telling him to "make some waves". He soon wound up in acting classes under Lee Strasburg and Harold Clurman, and took the stage name Garfield in tribute to Body And Soul star John Garfield. His own first film role came in 'Orgy Girl '69', a film in which, he was quick to point out, “there was no orgy!”

Three of Brian dePalma's early films showed his talent for quirky comedy and began his pattern of repeat performances for appreciative directors. His first lead came in John Avildsen's Cry Uncle, playing a short fat private detective who fancies himself a ladies man. “It was one of a kind,” he explained, when other leads did not materialise. He did much episodic television; later in his career he played in a Faustian episode of Tales From The Dark Side. When a young Bradley Whitfield refuses to believe he is the Devil, saying “you've been watching too much bad TV”, Garfield replies devilishly “I like bad TV'.

Robert Altman cast him in Nashville, as the emotionally fragile singer Ronee Blakely's husband/agent. “It was painful...Altman allowed me to take responsibility for my character: over-bearing, loving, bullying.” After his parents died, Garfield dropped his stage name in their honour; he was billed as Goorwitz in some of his best work, starting with William Fiedkin's The Brink's Job, alongside character actor stalwarts Peter Falk, Peter Boyle and Paul Sorvino. In Richard Rush's The Stunt Man he's the screenwriter foil to Peter O'Toole's ego-maniacal director, “like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza”. Five years later, in Wim Wenders' The State Of Things, he reclaimed his stage name, at the urging of Shelly Winters. “Make life easy for yourself,” she said. “Garfield really suits you”.

He was billed as Garfield in Cotton Club, the overlooked Desert Bloom, and his most familiar part today, the bombastic Chief Lutz in Beverly Hills Cop II. “I love making a ton of money doing big pictures, but if I believe in a film, as I did with Desert Bloom, which we did for hardly anything, I'll do it.”

Garfield suffered a stroke in 1998, just before filming The Ninth Gate, but Roman Polanski rewrote his part to include his part-frozen face. He ceased acting after a major stroke in 2004, and moved into the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills. But he had an unexpected final lead role, when Chief Zabu, a film he believed in and made for almost nothing in 1986, was finally shown in 2016. It was the brainchild of another New York character actor, Zach Norman, and was shot on a college campus, with students handling most of the technical duties and the cast bunking in the dorms. Norman was a successful real-estate magnate, and in the movie Garfield plays a brash upwardly-mobile real estate tycoon, caught up in a plot to take over a new Polynesian island nation. Killed by distribution and other problems when it was made, its satirical echoes of Donald Trump brought Chief Zabu back into the public eye, thirty years too late. Garfield died 7 April 2020, when coronavirus spread through his nursing home.

Allen Garfield, actor

born 22 November 1939, Newark, New Jersey

died 7 April 2020, Woodland Hills, California

survived by his sister, Lois 

REDO THE REDUX: THE LOST WALTER MURCH INTERVIEW

Back in 2001, at the London Film Festival, I interviewed Walter Murch in connection with the UK release of Apocalypse Now Redux, and wrote the following article for the FT, who paid for it and spiked it. It bounced around between sections and pages, but by the time the discussions had finished the LFF was over and Rudux made much less impact on its release than expected, which meant my piece passed its newspaper sell-by date.  At one point I was going to expand it for the weekend magazine, which would have been a pleasure because, as it happened, I would bump into Murch around Primrose Hill a couple of times, and have some more brief but fascinating conversations. It was easy to think of him as a kind of monk, keeping an art alive, except that his art is part of something that very much is alive; it's as if his is a sensibility which seems more and more out of step with his business. It's not hard to see echoes of his father, who was a painter, in that approach--like a painter he's amazingly deft at the technology of his art. I pitched something along those lines, but without a new hook, that idea eventually died as well. Oddly enough, more than a decade later, I think the interview holds up on its own, and Murch's career remains as crucial as ever. Somewhere, there's a piece I did on the Touch Of Evil restoration, which was published, and when I find that I'll try to post it here as well. And there's a bigger profile waiting to be written. In the meantime, read on...


Apocalypse Now begins with sound. The whirring chop-chop-chop of helicopter rotor-blades fades into the music of The Doors’ “The End”, then rises again as the blades dissolve into the ceiling fan, under which Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard lies grappling with inner demons. It is one of cinema’s most powerful openings, but, in a supposedly visual medium, its power arises from sound.
 

Walter Murch won an Oscar as ‘sound designer’ of Apocalypse Now (and was nominated for a second statuette as co-film editor). When director Francis Ford Coppola wanted quadraphonic sound, it was Murch who came up with the now-standard 5.1 format, using five speakers, with an additional one for sub-sonic noises. “We needed explosions to hit you in the gut as well as the ears,” he says. So when Coppola decided after two decades that the movie now seemed ‘tame’ and wanted to return to his vision and the original screenplay, he turned again to Murch. The result was Apocalypse Now Redux, and at its London Film Festival premiere the man who redid the Redux explained that revisiting the two million feet of negative film, stored in limestone caves for 20 years, was daunting.

“I came on to the original film after they’d finished shooting, and they’d shot roughly a 100:1 ratio between film exposed to film used. Even though I avoided the disasters of the shoot, which are well-known, the edit carried its own chaos.” 

The second time around, working from the original lined script, the result is a much different film, less episodic and more flowing. The restored scenes offer both gains and losses. For example, in the new version, just after Robert Duvall’s famous paean to napalm‘s odor, Willard and his boat crew steal Colonel Kilgore’s surfboard. Willard becomes more human, but Kilgore (Duvall) becomes a less daunting psychopath, more of a buffoon. “Kilgore tipped the balance of the film toward him, away from Kurtz,” says Murch. “The new scenes balance things in a structural sense.” The balance is achieved by the new scenes of Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, in daylight, breaking Willard down and re-educating him. These pull the final, mythic section of the film back unequivocally to Vietnam. 

Also new is Willard’s encounter with a French colonial rubber plantation, whose inhabitants project a ruined colonial grandeur in the face of chaos. A dinner-table debate provides an Oliver Stone-like historical sub-text, newly relevant in light of the Afghan war. “The film’s US run ended before the added burden of present history,” Murch says, “but there is a certain parallel between the Taliban and the Viet Minh, both being the results of America’s misguided efforts.” The scene ends with a beautiful dissolve from a woman behind mosquito netting to fog on the river which suggests it’s all a dream. “That was part of the intention. It becomes like Bunuel, a literally endless dinner conversation. You come out of the dream and arrive at Kurtz’s nightmare.”

The multi-tasking which marks Murch’s career arose from the relative freedom of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios, away from Hollywood’s restrictions. You can understand Coppola’s trust, because Murch projects a calm, the confidence of the master craftsman. But his book about film editing, In The Blink Of An Eye, reveals a fiercely intellectual approach, and his work reveals the sensitivity of an improvising artist. Author Michael Ondaatje watched Murch work on the film of his novel The English Patient, and concluded editing was “the stage of film closest to the art of writing”. Not surprisingly in that context, Murch saw Ondaatje’s novel as first of all a technical challenge.

“It’s extremely complex, with more time transitions than any film made until then,” he explains. “Sound can make those transitions, like when the sound of a whistle Hanna (Juliette Binoche) is throwing while playing hopscotch blends into Arab music in Almasy’s (Ralph Fiennes’) head, and makes the jump in space and time. But the story also attracted me from the human point of view; how you take someone who is objectively evil, and allow the audience to sympathise with him.” 

The English Patient won Murch an unprecedented double Oscar for editing and sound mixing. He’d completed the same double two decades earlier at the Baftas, on another Coppola picture The Conversation (1975). It’s a measure of the unique relationship between Coppola and Murch that the director left the footage, and the editing, of that film in Murch’s hands while he left to shoot Godfather II, which he’d agreed to direct in order to finance The Conversation.

“Except Francis still had two weeks of shooting to go when he stopped shooting,” Murch recalls. “They’d run out of time, money, and producers, so about 20 minutes of the script was literally missing, hadn‘t been filmed. I had to make it work, which we did needing only one extra shot, a hand pulling a tape off a reel.”

The Conversation appealed to Murch because it concerns a detective whose specialty is bugging people; he‘s basically a sound engineer. “I came to film from sound,” Murch says. “I developed a fascination with tape recorders in my youth, in the 50s, which was why I was also drawn to the restoration of Touch Of Evil, because the life of Orson Welles’ character dissolves, literally, because of a tape recorder. He’s being taped by Charlton Heston, and the echoes of the speaker give Heston away, then Welles’ reaction leads to his death.”

Universal Studios had re-edited and reshot the film after Welles turned in his first cut. Working from a 58 page memo Welles had sent the studio executives to express his dissatisfaction with their cut, and with what extra footage remained, Murch was able to reconstruct a version far closer to Welles’ intentions for the picture.

“The memo was astute on both the creative and political levels,” Murch recalls. “Welles was under no illusions as to who owned the film, but his approach was ‘I can help you make it better’. It’s interesting, because on-screen Welles always played moguls, yet he spent his career battling them.” 

Touch Of Evil brought Murch full circle, because in that film, Welles, who came out of radio, had used the naturally-occurring source music of the Mexican border town to provide atmosphere. Murch and George Lucas borrowed the idea to score American Graffiti. The result was the birth of the soundtrack hits album. “It was innovative artistically, and commercially,” Murch recalls. “Naturally the studio, Universal again, was completely resistant to the idea.”

Murch also co-wrote THX 1138 with Lucas, and has written two other films, one of which, Return To Oz, he directed. Does he want to direct more? “No, I’m happy doing what I do.” he says. Given all he does, and how well he does it, you believe him.