[For this
year’s installment of my annual VirginiaStudying
series, I wanted to highlight a handful of the many famous Americans who
have been born in the state. Add your Virginia highlights—people, places, or
otherwise—for a crowd-sourced weekend post for (Virginia) lovers!]
On three
defining military roles for the legendary actor
and product of Wise, Virginia.
1)
Buck Turgidson: Scott
was 37 and already a well-known Shakespearean
and Broadway actor when he was cast as General Buck Turgidson in Stanley
Kubrick’s groundbreaking satirical war film Dr. Strangelove, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Kubrick would later
reveal in interviews that the consummate professional Scott refused to play
the role as campily as the director wanted, and that Kubrick lied to his actor
and included rehearsal footage in the final film in order to achieve that campy
effect. But to my mind, Scott was the perfect choice for this key role in his
film’s social satire, as he could portray precisely the straight-laced seriousness
with which this militaristic madman takes the steps that will lead to nuclear
war. Some of the film is to my mind too over-the-top to work as satire, but
Scott’s Turgidson is pitch-perfect and hugely frightening as a result.
2)
George S. Patton: Scott’s
career-defining performance as the World War II general was also pitch-perfect,
and to this pacifist viewer also frightening—although I know at least as many
viewers who have found it inspiring and honorable. In truth, the brilliance of
Scott’s performance, and of Franklin Schaffner’s film (and Francis
Ford Coppola and Edmund North’s screenplay) overall, is that its Patton is
all of those things, often in the same scenes and sequences. Although Scott refused to accept his
Academy Award for the performance as a result of his lifelong antipathy to
such awards (he likewise refused a Best Supporting Actor nomination for The Hustler in 1962), the action was
itself also pitch-perfectly in keeping with the enigmatic and iconoclastic
character. If Kubrick’s film wears its anti-war heart very much on its sleeve, Patton is far harder to pin down, and
Scott’s striking performances anchor both films.
3)
Harlan Bache: Over the
next few decades Scott would spend much of his time on the stage, as well as in
supporting roles in films (and in portraying my favorite Ebeneezer Scrooge, in
Richard Donner’s 1984
adaptation of A Christmas Carol).
One of the more complex and compelling such supporting roles was as General
Harlan Bache, the armed services lifer in charge of a military school for boys
in Harold Becker’s film Taps (1981). Although
the film focuses on a group of young cadets, played by such up-and-coming stars
as Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, and Tom Cruise, it is Scott’s General Bache whose
voice and perspective on both the school and the military serve as guideposts for
those young men. While Bache is far more sane than Turgidson and far less
violent than Patton, he is still rigidly tied to his and the school’s
traditions in ways that contribute to the chaos and destruction that unfolds in
the course of the film (when the cadets take over the school rather than allow
it to close). Which is to say, this is one more enigmatic and multi-layered
performance from this all-time great.
Last Virginian
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Virginians or Virginia connections you’d highlight?
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