I’ve said this before but it bears repeating. In Charley Varrick, John Vernon‘s Maynard Boyle is a mob-connected banker who is enormously relieved when Walter Matthau tells him he wants to return $750K that was unintentionally stolen during a Las Cruces bank robbery. After he hangs up, Vernon makes a gesture with his left hand that says “sometimes there’s God, so quickly!” It’s the most elegant piece of acting that Vernon ever performed, and yet when I mentioned this to Vernon on the set of Hail To The Chief in the spring of ’85 he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He all but ignored me, and I was probably the only guy on the planet who’d ever recognized, much less said to him, that his Charley Varrick hand gesture (it happens at exactly the 2:00 mark) was some kind of beautiful.