The passage of time prepares one with a sense of acceptance for the death of admired personages; this musing is more of a personal “coming-to-grips” with the approaching finale to an era of popular culture that will shortly reside solely in films, books, the Internet and the remembrances of second generation intimates. More than regret, I feel a sense of disappointment that the era of cinematic history which comprised a significant part of my baby boomer upbringing is becoming relegated to table book nostalgia as the last icons from the era of Old Hollywood depart due to exorable passage of time. . Richard Widmark always commanded my attention. Regardless of the role or the movie, Widmark excelled at essaying transfixed characterizations that ranged from in-your-face resolve to pure psychopath. His work on screen invariably conveyed a sense of larger purpose along with the notion that hell (or a reasonable facsimile)...

  No actor exemplified the downtrodden film noir schlemiel better than Percy Helton. If his hunched frame and marsupial-like features weren’t enough to convince audiences of his servile timidity, there was always the unique Helton voice which made his screen characterizations permanently distinctive. Never was a vocal inflection more perfectly suited to a performer. Percy Helton uttered his lines with a breathy vocal lilt akin to the sigh of an exhausted calliope. When alarmed or threatened- a frequent occurrence- he reached a higher octave reminiscent of a damaged ukulele. Even though the diminutive performer seemed to be specifically constructed as a mid-century urban whipping boy, Helton’s thespian roots dated back to the nineteenth century. He made his stage debut in 1896 with his vaudevillian father, Alf Helton, at the Tony Pastor Theatre on 14th Street in New York City. Percy Helton was two years old. At age eleven, he appeared with...

  There are few performers around that exude the instant recognizability that compresses multiple generations of movie lovers into a solitary entity of affection and respect as does Robert Loggia. I must confess that I immediately succumbed as well. When Bob and his wife Audrey drove up to the parking lot in the rear of the Egyptian Theatre where I was waiting to greet them on Wednesday night, I experienced a film buff's psychological voltage spike: "Holy Cow, it really is Robert Loggia - what a guy!" Loggia started out in the mid 1950's and as he remarked following the screening of The Garment Jungle that after finishing college, the Army and then studying acting with Stella Adler ( I may have the order wrong...), he immediately went to work as an actor. Bob readily admitted that, "I never had to 'pay my dues' waiting tables and the like." He studied...