Of course I’d known that Dennis Hopper had been ill for some time, so it didn’t come as a total shock when I heard on Saturday night that he’d died at 74, but it still cut me to the quick, even if technical difficulties have prevented me from posting about it until now. It’s also true that any filmography as massive as his must inevitably contain its share of turkeys, and that some of his most celebrated credits are not personal favorites, e.g., Rebel without a Cause (1955), a virtual checklist of things I can’t stand (James Dean, Nicholas Ray, the Method craze, and most ’50s films), and Easy Rider (1969), with its promise of a prominent directorial career immediately derailed by the train wreck of The Last Movie (1971), which I’m still curious to see. Yet in more than fifty years of filmmaking, Hopper amassed a gallery of roles in movies that were good or interesting or noteworthy, or sometimes all three, so let’s take a typically BOF-centric look.
In addition to Rebel and Dean’s last film, the interminable Giant (1956), Hopper’s early credits include guest shots on innumerable series (e.g. Medic, Cheyenne, Conflict, Sugarfoot); I Died a Thousand Times (1955), the Jack Palance remake of Bogart’s classic High Sierra (1941); and a corral full of Westerns such as John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957). Dean’s death affected him profoundly, and his attempt to follow in this legendary bad boy’s footsteps probably contributed to his falling out with director Henry Hathaway while shooting From Hell to Texas (1958). Ironically, it was with another Hathaway Western, The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), that John Wayne apparently helped get Hopper’s career back on track after his virtual exile from mainstream Hollywood.
During those lean years, however, Hopper started appearing in more of the stuff that interests me, such as episodes of The Rifleman (created by Sam Peckinpah), The Twilight Zone (“He’s Alive”), and the short-lived 87th Precinct series. Under Roger Corman’s aegis, he had his first lead role as a sailor dangerously obsessed with a mermaid in Curtis Harrington’s poetic Night Tide (1961), and later played a victim of the Queen of Blood (1966), cannibalized by Harrington from a Soviet SF film acquired by Corman. Hopper worked with Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Clint Eastwood in Hang ’Em High (1968), Wayne again in True Grit (1969), and future Easy Rider colleagues Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson, the latter acting as screenwriter, in Corman’s The Trip (1967).
Hopper had a cameo in the almost unwatchable Monkees movie Head (1968), which Nicholson wrote with director Bob Rafelson, and later appeared in Rafelson’s Black Widow (1987). Westerns continued to figure in his work, although they were increasingly unusual ones along the lines of Kid Blue (1973) and Mad Dog Morgan (1976), the latter the story of a notorious Australian bushranger. After Alain Delon in Purple Noon (1960), Hopper became the second actor to play Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic killer, Tom Ripley (as in The Talented Mr.), in Wim Wenders’s weird and wonderful The American Friend (1977), based on Ripley’s Game, which was later remade with John Malkovich.
Hopper had an indelible supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant Apocalypse Now (1979), as the drug-addled photojournalist who describes Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) as “a poet warrior in the classic sense,” a phrase I always thought well suited to himself. He worked less successfully with Coppola and Peckinpah again in, respectively, Rumble Fish and “Bloody Sam’s” sad swan song, The Osterman Weekend (both 1983), adding another famed director to his resume with Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs (1985), which I have yet to see. Hopper also notched acclaimed character roles with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which I need to revisit, and one of his most popular hits, Hoosiers (1986), which struck me as nothing special, while the same could be said of his only other directorial effort that I’ve seen, Colors (1988).
Further eclectic delights followed, such as the offbeat crime comedy Flashback (1990); The Indian Runner (1991), directed by Colors star Sean Penn; a brief but memorable turn in a Quentin Tarantino-scripted BOF favorite, Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993); and villainous roles in Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995). His most recent films I’ve seen sum up the enviable range of his career: George A. Romero’s fourth “Living Dead” series entry, Land of the Dead (2005), and the topical but scarcely hard-hitting comedy Swing Vote (2008), starring Waterworld’s Kevin Costner. You will be much missed, Mr. Hopper, and I look forward not only to savoring some old favorites again, but also to introducing myself to some of your many films I have yet to see.
“No smile for FRANK?!”
Excellent, Matthew.
Much obliged. So many films, so little time…
I think I still have “The Last Movie” on VHS. You can have it.
I accept. Is it Movie Night material?