PAEAN TO JACK WARDEN
Of course there are other actors like him (M. Emmet Walsh). And there those actors that are so distinctive that I can see many different faces of theirs at instant recall: De Niro, Seymour-Hoffman, Michelle Williams, Liv Ullman, Day-Lewis, but for all their uncanny sphinx-like acrobatics, I’m moved to write about a character actor with little glitz but brilliant comic timing and dependability — he could swear with the best of them and his pronouncement of the word “shit” in his Newark, New Jersey snarl cannot by one-upped by anyone. Witness a trifecta at the beginning of 1981’s uneven So Fine: “Now look you look like a mature woman. You mind if I use a mature word? This is what we call real cheap shit. (Gets fuzz in his mouth.) Even tastes like shit.”
I’ve only seen Warden in two early films — probably the same ones everyone else remembers: 12 Angry Men and The Bachelor Party (Paddy Chayefsky script). Then there is a dip until in the mid-70s when he claims two Best Supporting Actor nominations in two Warren Beatty projects: Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait. Then he goes on to fine work in Being There, Used Cars, The Verdict, and a few Woody Allen films. But this is all surface gloss, what most interests me about Warden are the feelings I attached to him as a teenager, seeing him mainly in those later films from the 70’s onward. Street-smart, supporting but also stealing the show — the guy you want to hear talk because he’s a great gabber. This added up to an uncouth comfort to me — akin to, “Oh, Jack Warden is in this film, it must be okay” — which of course was not always the case. Warden could repeat performances, but they always felt new, bold, devil-may-care — his men were the voice of reason, seeing through the bullshit, cajoling (mostly in The Verdict). At his zaniest and most over-the-top (Used Cars) he made me laugh a mile a second. Gaston Bachelard has said “the poetic image expresses us by making us what it expresses.” Warden’s poetic image is his mortgaged face, the beady blue eyes, and that nasal compound voice that comes out of his body like an ancient rusty squeeze bod, spritzing and kvetching here and there toward a number of vicissitudes. He is the distinct Uncle I like to see again, who tells me how the world really is. That uncouth comfort in his pronunciations of curse words is priceless and redolent of a time when we had less information and more feeling for our fellow humans. Jack Warden is there if you need him.
