Film critic Roger Ebert often referred to what he called “The Stanton-Walsh Rule,” which dictated that no movie featuring Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be all bad. Ebert later had to amend the rule after Walsh appeared in the Will Smith vehicle “Wild Wild West,” but Stanton remained perhaps the quintessential character actor of an especially fertile era in American filmmaking. The gaunt, grizzled performer was an iconoclast hanging out on the periphery of the New Hollywood revolution, lending his lonesome cowboy vibes to a remarkable array of landmark films.
With his concave, craggly cheeks and haunted eyes, Harry Dean Stanton was nobody’s idea of a movie star. He looked like hard living personified. Just watching some of his films makes the theater smell like cigarettes. Whether called upon to act kindly, terrifying or just plain exhausted, Stanton was always effortlessly authentic in ways that made other actors seem phony. “He’s there,” said his friend and frequent collaborator David Lynch in the 2012 documentary “Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction,” adding, “Whatever ‘there’ needs to be, he’s there.”
Somehow, Stanton lived to the ripe old age of 91, despite in his later years confiding to friends and interviewers that “I only eat so I can smoke.” He was born 100 years ago this month, and The Brattle Theatre is celebrating with “The Stanton Rule: A Harry Dean Stanton Centennial.” Running Sunday, July 12 through Monday, July 20, the series screens 13 of the most iconic titles from a filmography that spanned seven decades, kicking off with Stanton’s 1967 turn as the prison troubadour serenading Paul Newman’s doomed “Cool Hand Luke” (July 12) with a ghostly rendition of “Just a Closer Walk With Thee.” The anti-establishment parable is an appropriate introduction to an actor whose presence in a project would soon become a token of counterculture street cred.
David Lynch (left) and Harry Dean Stanton in “Lucky.” (Courtesy Stefania Rosini/Magnolia Pictures)
The previous year, Stanton co-starred as an outlaw named Blind Dick in director Monte Hellman’s “Ride in the Whirlwind” (July 12), a moody, existentialist Western written by and starring Stanton’s old roommate, Jack Nicholson. Stanton was the best man at Nicholson’s first wedding in 1962, and the two remained close compadres throughout their lives. Nicholson often talked about going through a nudist phase in the late ‘60s, and said that when he introduced a “no clothing” rule at his house, his old pal Harry Dean was the only friend who still came by to hang out.
Rarely screened and for many years unavailable on home video, “Cisco Pike” (July 14) marked the acting debut of longtime Stanton pal Kris Kristofferson, playing a small-time musician and drug dealer to the stars trying to go straight after one bust too many. Easier said than done, as he’s being framed by a twitchy, crooked cop played by a pre-“French Connection” Gene Hackman. Shot in 1970, but unreleased until two years later, it’s not much of a thriller but works as a terrific mood piece about the death of the ‘60s dream and how everything curdled after Altamont and the Manson murders. Stanton delivers a funny, heartbreaking sidekick performance as Kristofferson’s former songwriting partner, now a washed-up junkie. The movie’s swiftest kick in the gut might be when a groupie played by Joy Bang tells Kristofferson and Stanton that their one big hit was her favorite song in junior high.
Stanton’s everyday authenticity could be especially useful in science fiction pictures like “Alien” (July 18 & 20) and “Escape from New York” (July 18 & 20), grounding the fantastical with his deadpan reactions. Stanton brings a droll, understated wit to John Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s killer-car story “Christine” (July 17), playing a police detective trying to wrap his mind around the fact that his latest murder suspect might be a 1958 Plymouth Fury. The Brattle series also includes lesser-known sci-fi B-sides like “Death Watch” (July 17). Director Bertrand Tavernier’s eerie anticipation of reality television stars Harvey Keitel as a reporter with cameras implanted in his eyeballs, sent by Stanton’s amoral TV executive to surreptitiously record a woman’s slow demise. “UFOria” (July 15) finds Stanton co-starring alongside Fred Ward and Cindy Williams as alien conspiracy theorists waiting for their own disclosure day in a movie so obscure even I haven’t seen it.
From left, Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in director Alex Cox’s 1984 film “Repo Man.” (Courtesy the Brattle)
Aliens, trash TV and automobiles all figure prominently in “Repo Man” (July 13-15). Stanton’s breakthrough role made him a bona fide movie star at age 57, and it wouldn’t have made it to theaters at all were it not for one Boston film promoter. Executives at Universal were so baffled by writer-director Alex Cox’s sneeringly hilarious 1984 debut that they’d planned to bury it on VHS, until local cinema hero George Mansour booked the film for midnight screenings at Kenmore Square’s Nickelodeon theater, where punk rockers started streaming in after evenings at seedy clubs like the Rathskeller and Spit. A cult classic was born.
Stanton’s snarling speed freak serves as an agitated Obi-Wan Kenobi to Emilio Estevez’s fledgling car thief, lecturing his apprentice on how “the life of a repo man is always intense.” Taking place in a flattened-out, anonymously scuzzy consumerist wasteland, the movie is a mocking middle finger to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Stanton’s wizened mentor may dress like a square, but this secret adrenaline junkie is way more punk rock than all these suburban kids. In what became the most quoted line of Stanton’s career, he notes a few regular folks walking by and scoffs, “Ordinary f—ing people, I hate ‘em.”
A year later, the perpetual supporting player finally landed his first lead role in Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard’s’ “Paris, Texas” (July 19), with a performance so powerful it prompted Blondie’s Debbie Harry to start her 1989 solo hit “I Want That Man” with the lines, “I wanna dance with Harry Dean/ Drive through Texas in a black limousine/ I want a piece of heaven before I die.” Stanton stars as a prodigal father returning from a mysterious four-year sojourn in the desert, and those basset hound eyes never seemed as soulful as they do under these Lone Star skies shot by legendary cinematographer Robby Müller. Stanton’s largely silent turn builds to an astonishing 20-minute monologue — courtesy of screenwriter Sam Shepard — that’s one of the most transcendent sequences in 1980s cinema.
Harry Dean Stanton (left) and Jon Cryer in director John Hughes’ 1986 film “Pretty in Pink.” (Courtesy the Brattle)
“Paris, Texas” is screening as a double feature with “Pretty in Pink” (July 19), which made Stanton the unlikely dream dad to an entire generation of teenage girls. The actor brings a ruined gravitas that’s far too sensitive for this crassly conservative teen melodrama, another of producer John Hughes’ smartly soundtracked, inexplicably beloved parables of conformity. Stanton plays Molly Ringwald’s alcoholic wreck of a father, offering sad-eyed advice in his bathrobe while she’s being wooed by Andrew McCarthy’s wealthy himbo and pestered by Jon Cryer’s nattering stalker, who brags about riding his bike past her house multiple times a day. “Pretty in Pink” is actually quite a revealing rewatch if you’ve recently seen “Obsession.” Good thing Duckie didn’t have a One Wish Willow.
His pal David Lynch understood how sparingly he could use Stanton, getting huge laughs out of repeatedly cutting back to an identical shot of the actor silently smoking and driving in “Wild at Heart,” or pulling him out in the final seconds of “The Straight Story” to deliver a line that provides the movie’s entire emotional release. Martin Scorsese similarly enlisted the actor for one of the all-time great single-scene performances in “The Last Temptation of Christ” (July 18). Stanton appears near the end of the movie as a wild-eyed, sham street preacher claiming to be the apostle Paul, confronting Willem Dafoe’s Jesus with some of the most provocative ideas in Paul Schrader’s screenplay, arguing that it doesn’t matter what actually happened up there on Golgotha, people are going to believe what they want because people need to believe in something. It’s a shattering sequence that sums up the whole picture, the kind of scene you can’t trust to just any actor. You need a legend to come in and kill it.
Stanton’s second leading role was one of his final screen appearances. Fittingly, he was playing himself, sort of. Scripted by close friends Logan Sparks and Drago Sumonja, 2017’s “Lucky” (July 16) was inspired by the actor’s own experiences as an atheist staring down the inevitability of death. Directed by the fine character actor John Carroll Lynch — who in films like “Fargo,” “Zodiac” and “Sorry, Baby” has carved out a very Stanton-esque career of his own — it’s a gentle portrait of a nonagenarian curmudgeon and his oddball community, offering a national treasure one last hour-and-a-half on the stage, while offering friends and fans a chance to say goodbye. It’s a soulful yet unsentimental sendoff, exactly what you’d expect from Harry Dean Stanton.
“The Stanton Rule: A Harry Dean Stanton Centennial” runs at the Brattle Theatre from Sunday, July 12 through Monday, July 20.
