His range was like a swinging pendulum of human temperament, allowing him to be bellowing and destructive or discreet and vulnerable — sometimes within a single film or even a single scene.
Analysis & Context
His range was like a swinging pendulum of human temperament, allowing him to be bellowing and destructive or discreet and vulnerable — sometimes within a single film or even a single scene. Critic’s Appreciation: Few Actors Could Go as Terrifyingly Big, and as Hauntingly Small, as Robert Duvall. Stay informed with the latest developments and expert analysis on this important story.
His range was like a swinging pendulum of human temperament, allowing him to be bellowing and destructive or discreet and vulnerable — sometimes within a single film or even a single scene.
Robert Duvall in 'Apocalypse Now.' myCinema/Courtesy Everett Collection Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment When people talk about an actor with range, they usually mean the wide variety of roles they can play. De Niro going from Travis Bickle to Jake LaMotta. Brando going from On the Waterfront to Guys and Dolls. Pacino playing both Michael Corleone and Tony Montana, two gangsters with diametrically opposed approaches to criminality. The same holds true for Robert Duvall, a tremendous screen actor who died on Monday at the age of 95, and whose credits — over 150 in a career spanning six decades — include everything from a Texas Ranger (Lonesome Dove) to a Texas outlaw (True Grit); a sinister TV boss (Network) to an enlightened L.A. cop (Colors); an ex-con pulling off one last job (The Outfit) to an aging rancher protecting his land (Open Range); a conniving sports journalist (The Natural) to an editor-in-chief seeking redemption (The Paper) to a Soviet dictator (Stalin). Related Stories Movies Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Walton Goggins, Viola Davis and More Remember Robert Duvall: "Your Name Will Be Spoken" Movies Robert Duvall Remembered by Mary Badham, 'Scout' to His 'Boo' in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' (Exclusive) There are a hundred other examples in Duvall’s vast filmography, which lasted all the way till he was over 90, when he held his final roles as a seasoned practitioner of black magic (The Pale Blue Eye) and the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers (Hustle). Like many actors who hailed from a generation trained under the Method — in Duvall’s case, with the legendary Sanford Meisner — and who cut their chops in the burgeoning years of television, Duvall was extremely prolific and willing to try out any part at least once. But he had a gift few performers have ever showcased to such an extent: a range that not only spread horizontally, shifting through characters across the board, but vertically, allowing him to be a big, bellowing, destructive man in one movie, and then a small, discreet, vulnerable one in the next. This extreme pendulum of human temperament meant Duvall could go from boiling hot to ice cold within a single film or even a single scene. It helped him to fully embody people at either end of the spectrum, in a series of iconic roles that made him one of the greatest. Let’s start with the famous ones: For The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola always wanted Duvall to play the soft-spoken Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen. In the director’s previous feature, The Rain People, the actor was terrifying as a nutso highway patrolman who tries to rape the film’s heroine. It was the polar opposite of Hagen, but Coppola knew Duvall had the range for both parts. What makes the actor so formidable in The Godfather is how Hagen always sits in the shadows, serving as both strategic advisor and silent moral compass to a corrupt family. An adopted son to Don Corleone, and therefore not a blood brother, Tom Hagen is a perpetual outsider who at one point becomes the Don himself. This happens during a memorable scene between Duvall and Pacino in The Godfather: Part II, after the Corleone’s Lake Tahoe compound gets ambushed. Duvall plays a man of few words, so when he looks at Pacino and says, “I always wanted to be thought of as a brother by you, Mike. A real brother,” it carries the weight of the world, and tons of contained emotion. In another Coppola classic, Apocalypse Now, Duvall portrayed a man of many words that have turned into some of the most famous lines in film history. To embody the surf-obsessed and fearless Colonel Kilgore, the actor delved into his own past in the military, first as the son of a Rear Admiral in the navy and later as a private first class in the army, which he ditched to study acting in New York. Duvall did plenty of research to build the Kilgore character, basing his performance on officers he served under at Fort Bragg and choosing a cowboy hat to mimic how members of the air calvary in Vietnam sometimes wore mementos from the American West. But it’s the actor’s delivery that everyone remembers, brilliantly going from hot to cold as he lambasts his troops during a bombing campaign, then kneels beside them to calmly state: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” — a sinister line considering the mass death happening all around them, but also perfectly true to character. The same year Apocalypse Now was released, Duvall played another bigger-than-life military man in The Great Santini, which was shot after the Coppola film and feels at times like a spinoff story for Colonel Kilgore. As the titular antihero and contender for worst screen father of 1979, Duvall em
