It's just another Monday in mid-December, until we noted that it is Day Fifteen of our Holiday jaunt. Even we find ourselves humming along with those Hawaiian-tinged guitar chords, the invocation "...Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright..." led by Lee Marvin as the unlikeliest but memorable Wise Man (or is it wise guy?) as one of the Magi bearing gifts. A startled Duke Wayne is probably trying to decide if Mr. Marvin is Balthazar, Melchior and Caspar. Or perhaps he's wondering how John Ford talked him and a clutch of other Hollywood veterans into appearing in a home movie masquerading as an "entertainment" in Donovan's Reef (1963). Only John Ford could have persuaded these legendary tough guys to take on the task of translating a traditional Christmas into a loopy paean to a "pantheistic paradise" in which even pugnacious Marvin--after some tedious fisticuffs--winds up not only participating in a holiday pageant at the leaky church, but married and playing with a toy train.
Lee Marvin, a Marine veteran of the Pacific in WWII, a former plumber's assistant, and unlikely actor, cut a path through the Hollywood jungle that won him an Academy Award for Cat Ballou (1965), even though many of us think he probably should have been seriously considered long before for his unredeemable baddie in The Big Heat (1953), his realistic role in Attack (1957) and not least of all for his brilliantly lacerating performances in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Point Blank (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), The Iceman Cometh (1973) or The Big Red One (1980).
He could be amusingly self-deprecating, (when he wasn't intimidating his interviewers), but Marvin seemed to acknowledge his inner desire to expiate his turmoil when he once commented about his acting that "[t]o show my strength is nothing. To show my weakness is everything." A knowledge of violence seemed to haunt his life and inform his acting, giving his indelible presence on screen unmatched by any other actor you or I can think of. Sometimes it seems that his career was a constant struggle to bring some artful sense of order, reason and perspective to his own pitiless self-knowledge about the impulses that create violence, courage and fear in a person. His ambivalence toward his profession veered from the profanely funny to self disgust, when he said "You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get in this f***ing business, and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you're making the bread, who needs it?" I think Lee Marvin needed it and we can treasure the gift of often painful knowledge he brought.
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