Just a couple of days ago I wrote a piece here on last movies that seemed almost intentionally created to be the last work of certain actors. The Shootist, for instance, doesn’t just seem like the best possible way for John Wayne to go out but the only way for him to go out. Well, today, I was looking down the schedule for Sunday and saw Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte and thought to myself how much I liked it and then thought, why not expand the earlier post to cover a more generalized area: The last ten or fifteen years of a star’s career, theatrical releases, I mean. No hard and fast rules, since an actor’s career can vary in length by such a great number of years, but generally speaking, a movie considered to be a part of their waning career, not their waxing career. Olivia de Havilland would make several more movies after 1964 but her heyday was in the thirties and forties and by 1964 she was headed out the door, so to speak. And, as it turns out, many of my favorite movies in an actor’s career will come near the end of said career. Maybe not my absolute favorite, but definitely some high ranking ones.
One of the actors and movies mentioned in the comment section of the last post was The Misfits and Clark Gable. It’s not a big favorite of mine for Gable, though I like it a lot, but I did immediately think of Run Silent, Run Deep, from 1958 which absolutely is a personal favorite. It was the kind of role that seemed suited for older Gable, the Gable that had a hard time finding his niche after World War II. For many people, Gable is an actor of the thirties first and foremost and, I suppose, he is for me, too, but he occasionally found a movie later on, like this one and The Misfits, that fit him to a tee. It was still early in the career of Burt Lancaster who in 1958 was in his prime. He was the biggest star of the moment in 1958 and it was his name on the credits that probably pulled a lot more ticket buyers in at that point than Gable but it’s Gable’s movie for me all the way.
Speaking of Burt Lancaster, there is no late career movie of his that will ever beat Atlantic City for me. It’s a beautiful film of loss, loneliness, and desperation but with redemption and second chances and personal reinvention all mixed in. The parts are all wonderfully acted and Susan Sarandon and Kate Reid do a great job but it’s Burt Lancaster that delivers, to my eyes, the best performance of both the film and his career.
Barbara Stanwyck, I mentioned in the other piece, didn’t have a great or fitting last film, but she had many later career films that I absolutely loved. Starting her career in the early thirties, her career hit its peak in the mid to late thirties through the mid to late forties. She was a box office winner by the early thirties but from Stella Dallas through Sorry, Wrong Number, she was royalty. By the fifties, she was taking smaller parts, like the role in Executive Suite. It reunites her with William Holden, and as in Golden Boy, he needs her more than he can know.
William Holden has plenty of late career favorites for me. I love him in The Towering Inferno (and I like the movie quite a bit – yes, I did just write that), Network, and S.O.B. Now, for most people, Network is the late career Holden they will probably go with and I can’t fault anyone for that but, really, S.O.B. features a Bill Holden I can absolutely relate to and understand if only for his expert, Holdenesque delivery of this great line: “It’s been my experience that every time I think I know where it’s at, it’s usually someplace else.” I wrote a whole piece here once on how if I had to choose an actor to be, it would be Holden. Much of that comes from S.O.B.
Another actor in S.O.B. was Julie Andrews, famously baring her breasts for the first time onscreen. Andrews has done some classic work in her time, and in her heyday of the sixties, but my favorite Andrews movie of all time remains her late career entry, Victor/Victoria. It also stars James Garner, reunited with Andrews almost twenty years after The Americanization of Emily. And it’s a later career favorite for him, too. And Robert Preston, as well as in S.O.B. Both movies were directed by Blake Edwards. Maybe Edwards just knew how to get the most out of seasoned actors or maybe because they were seasoned actors, the movies were better.
Of course, this is not meant to be, nor are any of my posts meant to be, a list but merely a conversation starter. There are so many more to mention. Paul Newman in The Verdict, Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, Shirley MacLaine in Bernie, Jack Lemmon in Missing, Judi Dench as M is multiple Bond movies (seriously, what a great addition to the latter part of her career), and Burgess Meredith in anything and everything he did from the seventies on. The movies weren’t all great but I’m of the mind that Meredith made them all worthwhile. So not every actor has a great or fitting last movie. But most of them manage to put some damn fine late career work where, even if they’re not the star of the production, they still shine brightly and make a lasting impression. Just not the very last impression.