R.I.P. Dan O'Herlihy

Lost among the obituaries of the past week was the passing of 85 year old Irish actor Dan O'Herlihy. O' Herlihy built quite a list of credits. He made his film debut in Carol Reed's Odd Man Out, and made his splash in Hollywood playing Macduff in Orson Welles' Macbeth. He may be more familiar to some as the "Old Man" in the RoboCop films, and as a reptilian extraterranean in The Last Starfighter. He was also in John Huston's swan song The Dead.

O' Herlihy is probably best known for his title role in Luis Buñuel's Las Adventuras de Robinson Crusoe, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in 1954 (although the film was shot in 1952). The movie was a first of a many things for Buñuel: his first color film, his first all-English language film, and his first to receive an Academy Award nomination; and Robinson Crusoe may seem, on the surface, atypical for Buñuel, but it contains many touches that are exclusively Buñuel: the erotic charge when Robinson sees the fluttering wind tossed garments on the scarecrow, and also when Friday puts on those same garments (and Robinson quickly tells him to remove them); the theological discussion between Robinson and Friday in which Robinson fails to convince the pagan Friday of the moral superiority of Christianity. What also makes the film is O'Herlihy's performance, and the transformation his character takes from being a callous slave trader to a man overwhelmed by loneliness, from a man who sees Friday as a servant, and then as a comrade, then as a friend. It's a remarkable performance, especially when there are many scenes where it is just O'Herlihy, the beach, the jungle, and the camera.

My favorite O'Herlihy role may be that as General Warren Black in Sidney Lumet's Fail Safe (usually dismissed as the overly serious flipside to Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, but is just as good, in my book, and may even be better after Strangelove's time worn jokiness wears off). O'Herlihy pays a dovish general who is ordered to make the ultimate sacrifice at the film's chilling climax. "There's nothing more to be said," he says coldly, muffled by a black oxygen mask in the cockpit of the B-52. He then recites his last orders and performs his last act, horrible and unimaginable, as the rest of the crew watch, frozen in terror. We hear just the whine of the bomber's jets, heavy breathing, and these words: "The matador...the matador...."