Jack Palance

Watch Curly Washburn on his horse in City Slickers (1991) while Billy Crystal and his friends talk. The city men fill every silence, because silence frightens them, and Palance does nothing. He does not shift in the saddle, he does not react, and the gap between their noise and his stillness is the joke. Ron Underwood understood that a tough cowboy beside men who talk their way through discomfort needs no extra help, and Palance gave him none; his restraint left the others something solid to push against. It was a face built for the job, gaunt and unreadable, with a voice like gravel under a boot, and he had been putting it to use since 1950.

Before acting he boxed professionally as Jack Brazzo, and gave it up, by his own account, when he decided he must be nuts to get his head beat in for two hundred dollars. On Broadway he understudied and then replaced Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, which tells you what sort of presence casting directors saw in him. Elia Kazan put him on film as Blackie in Panic in the Streets (1950), and within three years he had played a murderous husband in Sudden Fear (1952) and the hired gun Jack Wilson in Shane (1953). Hollywood then did what Hollywood does with a face like that, and cast him as the threat for the next two decades.

From the late 1950s he worked a great deal in Europe, most memorably as the producer Jeremy Prokosch in Godard's Contempt (1963), and made two films with Robert Aldrich. There were also spaghetti westerns, international co-productions and, by the 1980s, a run of cheap action films that few critics bothered to see, along with four years as a television host. In Tim Burton's Batman (1989) he is the crime boss Grissom, and our review gave the louder moments to Jack Nicholson and did not linger on him, which is fair; the film does not give him much to be still about.

City Slickers did. We laughed at Curly more than we expected to, and it was almost never a line; it was Underwood cutting back to that face while the tenderfeet chattered, and the face declining to move. The part works because Palance plays it exactly as he played Wilson in Shane, and the film lets the audience notice. Where the script insists on a life lesson, Palance has usually already made the point by saying nothing, and some of the more emphatic gags around him feel unnecessary as a result.

If you have only seen the later, crustier Palance, go back to Shane first and then watch City Slickers in the same week. It is the same man, and the second film knows it.