In praise of: Alan Arkin

Speaking of Alan Arkin, who's been a treasure since he scared the shit out of the eleven-year-old me in the 1967 Audrey Hepburn thriller Wait Until Dark (wearing his wit as cannily as the black turtleneck that was Hollywood's preferred way of telegraphing "Beatnik," you wondered why the hell he was wasting time terrorizing Hepburn's shrill horror of a blind woman), David Thomson wrote a superb career overview of this "sad face in the madhouse." Consider his acerbic gravity in countless movies, duds and classics: Hearts of the West, The In-Laws, The Rocketeer, Havana, Glengarry Glen Ross, Mother Night, Grosse Pointe Blank, Gattaca, and Slums of Beverly Hills. There's an narrative here: the non-entities for which he garnered two consecutive Best Actor nominations (The Russians Are Coming! and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter -- his Peter Sellers movie and proto-Forrest Gump, respectively), together with the failure of Mike Nichols' graphic-novel rendering of Catch-22, aged him almost ten years, the better for him to play the wizened vizier who's seen better days or has no idea what a good day looks like. In any case, Arkin's gallant irony should be a tonic and instead it's a placebo, often convincing the makers of the films in which he co-stars that their satirical skewers are as pointed as Arkin's.