Edmond O’Brien was born on 10 September 1915. Sadly, he died at 69 years old from Alzheimer’s disease.
For most of my life, Edmond O’Brien was some B-movie actor who starred in DOA. Shows what I know! He won the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award and Golden Globe for The Barefoot Contessa. These institutions nominated him again 10 years later for Seven Days in May. But he didn’t win either this time.
All that said, O’Brien is still what I consider a psychotronic actor. He was in a ton of films that psychotronic fans will like. In addition to DOA, he was in the noir films The Killers (1946), A Double Life (1947), and White Heat (1949). He also had notable roles in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Fantastic Voyage (1966), and The Wild Bunch (1969). And he played Winston Smith in 1984 (1956).
For me, Edmond O’Brien is most notable for his role in another noir classic, The Hitch-Hiker. I wrote in my capsule review of the film, “The film is ultimately about how good people respond to evil… I find it a much more compelling rendering of evil than No Country for Old Men.” That’s high praise although maybe not as high as it seems given that I consider No Country interesting but overrated.
Here is a solid print of The Hitch-Hiker from Archive. Watch it as a tribute to Edmond O’Brien. You won’t regret it!
Edmond O’Brien via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
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I should see some of those movies again, I don’t remember them well. But I was really impressed by O’Brien in The Hitch-Hiker. You could tell it’s one of those parts where a veteran character actor got to do a major role and absolutely nailed it. I liked the bit at the end where the cops let the other guy whack the killer a few times, then pull him off, and O’Brien’s there to chill him out.
You know in a modern movie their revenge on the killer would be sadistic and encourage the audience to root for vigilante justice. Ida Lupino gives the audience a little revenge, then has the grownups take over.
And 71 minutes! Perfect.
Right. In the days MAGA looks back on, restraint was considered good. They are looking back further to when you could beat your slaves.
One day, I must write an article about film lengths. I think 70 minutes is about the perfect length for a feature film. But I realized something just today: the reason action sequences go on so long in superhero films is because it’s cheap. It costs little more to do a 15-minute sequence than it does to do a 3-minute sequence because most of it is special effects. But it’s boring! One of the biggest aspects of making a feature film is getting the pacing right. Now this is ignored because the studios assume everyone wants to watch superhero films for two and a half hours. It’s crazy!
I’m sure you’re right. I think it’s also because prices are so high. A ticket to a first-run movie here is $17. Studios think, if you’re charging people $17 for tickets, you’ve got to give them Size and Spectacle and Epic Length.
I don’t know how theaters can survive this way. I don’t know anybody who actually goes to movies anymore. I see, maybe, one a year?
I like movie theaters. I used to work in one. It was the best job I ever had. (Didn’t pay shit, but it was great.) I think there IS something about being in a movie theater that’s different from watching at home. But a lot of that is lost now. For one thing, nobody else is there.
I think the last thing I genuinely enjoyed in a movie theater was watching the US women’s World Cup team win a game. Place was fucking packed. Tickets were free (but you bet your butt the theater made a mint on concessions, the lines were looooong).
How can movie theaters get audiences back for stuff that isn’t all digital effects and big spectacle? I don’t know. I don’t know if they can.
I think the theaters might be do well if they, I don’t know, tried to be creative? They’ve all (along with Hollywood itself) decided that only young people go to the movies so there’s no point in reaching out to anyone else. I just finished reading a book on the history of drive-in theaters. And it’s shocking all the things owners did to bring in customers. In one case, a theater owner set up free washers and driers so women could do laundry while they watched! I’m old enough to remember that some drive-ins had playgrounds. I think going to the movies has to be made into an event. I was at a theater in Arizona that was a full restaurants with waiters who served you in your seat. Portland, of course, has pub theaters. Owners can do new things. Trump is just a sign of how Americans have lost their way. Business owners think they should just be given money without having to work for it. It’s funny how all the things that conservatives say about the poor is actually true of the rich.
Right! Those World Cup games were PACKED. I’ve also seen Lynx basketball playoff games that were totally packed. Again, free admission, but they completely cleaned up on concessions. With an audience that was totally multi-generational. There are ways to make money running a theater if you’re not lazy about it. But I think those places are all indie-operated. The big chains are totally clueless!
I know from family lore that white men in the 1950s and 1960s could basically hit the road with nothing and know that there would be jobs around that they could easily get. I think mediocre white men had it this way for so long that they got the impression that they were brilliant. And a lot of the business community has this same philosophy: “I don’t need to do anything; I deserve to have a successful business.” And that’s as true at the top. What is the number one way big corporations goose their sagging fortunes? Firing workers. We have a society that is set up to glorify mediocrity — as long as it is in the pursuit (no matter how pathetic) of profit.