In The
Wild Angels (1966), Roger Corman’s brash precursor to Easy
Rider, Bruce Dern plays a character called Loser, a rebellious biker
in a gang of swastika sporting Hells Angels. He’s dead inside the first 30
minutes of the film, a victim of The Man, of course. When Loser’s funeral
becomes an anarchic happening inside a church, his corpse is dragged out of its
coffin and passed around the party like a leather jacketed rag doll, fags and
booze put in its mouth. It is some credit to Dern that he can command a
screen he shares with Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra while playing dead meat.
(The Driver)
Much of the press that has greeted Dern’s great performance in Alexander
Payne’s Nebraska has focussed on how underrated he has been as
an actor, and it’s true that the only significant recognition he has had prior
to the Best Actor award at Cannes this year, a Supporting Actor Oscar
nomination for Coming Home in 1979, seems meagre reward for a
career as enduring and distinctive as his. It’s likely this has something to do
with the roles that he’s most famous for, characters characterised as
“wackos and sickos” by David Letterman in an interview, more poetically
described by Dern himself as guys who “live just beyond where the buses
run”, though neither description does justice to the variety of his roles he
has taken. He has been cowboys, cops and criminals, soldiers and swindlers,
straight men and fall guys. Dern appeared in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964),
though it was in TV and with Roger Corman’s low budget gems where he really cut
his chops, emerging from the Corman stable alongside the likes of Dennis Hopper
and Jack Nicholson into a cynical 1970s Hollywood and a generation of
filmmakers who were far from happy with the status quo. He worked with
Nicholson on Drive, He Said (1971) and The King of Marvin Gardens
(1972), and is particularly brilliant as the bunco artist failing to convince
his brother to come in on a dodgy deal in the later of these two BBS
productions. Silent Running (1972) became a platform for cult hero
worship rather than further leading roles, and he became defined as a character
actor, playing opposite the genuine movie stars of the period; Nicholson,
Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby (1974), Ryan O’Neal in The Driver (1978).
Coming Home and the Oscar nomination were expected to be another
stepping stone to bigger roles, and while these never materialised, he never
stopped working, and by the 1990s, a younger generation of filmmakers were
casting him with due reverence. His performance in James Foley’s underrated Jim
Thompson adaptation After Dark, My Sweet (1990) is
pitch perfect, sleazy and outsmarted, a character less clever than he thinks he
is; playing an alcoholic vet willing to give serial killer Aileen Wuornos (as
portrayed by Charlize Theron) the time of day in Patty Jenkins’ Monster (2003),
he emerges from the film as its one unambiguously sympathetic character; and
he’s along for the ride in Quentin Tarantino’s slavery romp Django Unchained
(2012).
(The King of Marvin Gardens)
Tarantino
recently referred to Dern as a “national treasure”, and his appearance in two
of the year’s key releases, as well as all the seasonal awards buzz around Nebraska,
give that claim credibility. Notoriously, Dern was the only actor to have
killed John Wayne on screen, shooting Wayne in the back in The Cowboys (1972).
After that film, Dern received death threats. It seems that enough time has
passed and now Hollywood can forgive him for messing with The Duke.
(Nebraska)
Michael Hayden
IFI Head of Programming
A focus on Bruce Dern's career runs at the IFI from December 14th to 22nd. His latest film, Nebraska (directed by Alexander Payne) is currently showing.
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