CChristopher Walken, born eighty years ago in the great city of New York to a Scottish mother and a German father, is without a doubt a very American actor, one of the best, one of the smartest, in some films even one of the loveliest – but the most American about him (this climax has to be here, for once) is his talent for the un-American, his presence that negates and denies everything else that makes American cinema heroes men, all the toughness, the determination, the strength of the muscles and nerves, which one, as a spectator, can admire with good reason.
And they would still seem sterile, a bit stupid and provincial if someone didn’t keep coming, and Christopher Walken, who ignores these role specifications, who, apparently with great pleasure and without fear of the manly men, softens and androgynous, dangerously sensual, decadent, ironic and rather opaque.
He is the author of his roles
If that is skill, acting brilliance, then you actually have to draw a few completely different lines through film history. Their heroic sagas are almost always told along the lines of the directors’ and producers’ biographies and careers. But Walken would then be the author of his roles himself, not perhaps the plots and the dialogues – but still the inventor of a character who, from the sensitive recruit Nick Chevotarevich in “The Deer Hunter” to the super gangster Max Shreck in “Batman Returns” to to the Sicilian mafioso in “True Romance”, has more in common than the directors who follow an author theory might like. One of the legends that has been told about Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Tony Scott’s “True Romance” is that the actors, such as Walken and Dennis Hopper, would have given up high fees as long as they were allowed to speak Tarantino’s dialogues.
Lucky for the cinema
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Movies with Christopher Walken
In the scene they both have in common, Hopper knows he won’t survive and Walken knows he’s going to shoot Hopper, so it’s just a matter of what nasty things Hopper says and the expression Walken puts on before he does draws his gun. And today, thirty years later, you can also see that it was Tarantino’s great fortune, indeed the impetus that his career needed at the time. If Tarantino had paid for Walken to narrate his lines (and spread the legend of their irresistible character), that would have been understandable.
His striptease is a hit on Youtube
Christopher Walken has been acting since he could barely spell the word drama school, as a young boy, in commercials and TV shows, and another legend has it that after a brief stint alongside Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, both of them predicted a great future for him had been. It was then, twenty-five years later, but The Deer Hunter that brought him fame and an Oscar. It was the Vietnamese prison camp scene, the Russian roulette, the game of fear, pathetic desperation, finally courage on his face that, in the film, made even the tough Robert De Niro cry.
Almost as impressive was the bar scene at the beginning of the film, when the men, still in America, are drinking beer and playing pool. And then “Can’t Take my Eyes off You” comes out of the loudspeakers, everyone bellows along and lets themselves be carried away to a certain body pounding. While Walken dares an almost graceful dance with the cue and the balls – it is as if a window of utopia opened in the midst of the proletarian monotony. Because the fact that Walken is a dancer, even in films in which he neither sings nor moves to the rhythm of the music, is perhaps the strongest attraction that his performances have to offer: a body that has a dangerously erotic relationship with itself seem to have. In 1981, Herbert Ross attempted to celebrate and revitalize the musical genre with Pennies from Heaven, which unfortunately did not go down well with audiences. But the scene in which Walken dances a striptease to Cole Porter’s “Let’s Misbehave,” a song originally intended for a female voice, remains a scandal more than forty years later. And a hit on Youtube.
Of course, Walken kept getting offers to play the libertine, the decadent, the European, and of course he didn’t turn it down and was up to the roles – even if he did, where the films only tried to exploit his image, in the Bond film ” A View to a Kill, for example, fell short of his potential. No, the challenge of his presence, the genius of his game, is revealed most effectively where he plays the American, but the man who embodies everything America longs for and fears when looking in the mirror. Or just on the screen. He’s lucky for the cinema.