Posted seven years ago (4.20.15) by “Kano’s Razor”: “Not to belabor the point, but it’s not really a big-name actor’s responsibility to ‘make good films’ (cue the old William Goldman line), but to (a) consistently project a unique vibe or aura, and to (b) select interesting scripts that will blend with or benefit from this aura.
“You could argue that Lee Marvin was better at the former than the latter, although one could easily counter that performers will always be at the mercy of the material that’s offered them. Marvin was in pretty good company in terms of possessing a certain brand of cool — a brand that the films he starred in rarely lived up to or sagely exploited to maximum mutual benefit.”
“Love This Guy,” posted same date: “Lee Marvin finally graduated out of playing bad guys with his double role in Cat Ballou, and after that he had three years in which he appeared in really good films — Ship of Fools (’65), The Professionals (’66), The Dirty Dozen (’67) and Point Blank (’67). And that was nearly it. Three years.
“From ’68 on Marvin started turning good stuff down (William Holden‘s role in The Wild Bunch, Robert Shaw‘s role in Jaws) or starred in not-so-hot films like Pocket Money or Hell in the Pacific or Paint Your Wagon. He appeared in one final decent film, The Big Red One, in ’80. He died in ’87 at age 63.
“You spend the first forty years of your life trying to get into this business,” Marvin once said, “and the next forty years trying to get out. And then when you’re making the bread, who needs it?”
His bad-guy period was arguably more interesting — The Big Heat (’53), The Wild One (’54), Bad Day at Black Rock (’55), The Comancheros (’61), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , (’62), Donovan’s Reef (’63) and The Killers (’64).