Tierney played killers and bosses for half a century and never asked to be liked. Large, hoarse and unsmiling, he has the same effect in 1945 as in 1992: the other men on screen lower their voices.
Fi1m perspective
Joe Cabot arrives late in Reservoir Dogs (1992), after the men in black suits have spent most of the film shouting at each other in a warehouse, and he does not shout. He barks. Tierney gets his lines out in short hoarse bursts, as if speech were a chore he would rather hand to somebody else, and the crew who have been at each other's throats for an hour do what he says. He is a big man in a bad mood, and Tarantino, who has built the whole film around the wait for him, knows that is all the part needs.
It is also, more or less, the only part Tierney ever played. He came into films in 1943 after stage work and an RKO contract, and the title role in Dillinger (1945) made him a screen gangster for good. RKO followed it with Born to Kill (1947), in which he is Sam Wild, a jealous conman who kills when crossed, and The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), in which he is a hitchhiker you should not have stopped for. Max Nosseck directed him twice, Robert Wise once, and the critics of the day did not always approve: the nastiness was thought overdone and the men he played not fit company for an evening. He is never asked to be charming, and he does not try.
The work thinned out from the late 1950s and came only now and then through the sixties and seventies. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1983 and found supporting parts in film and television, among them Lt. Hanley in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor (1985), a film we rate and in which he is one more face in a crowded frame. Then Tarantino put him at the top of a crew of younger men and let him quiet them. He kept working in guest roles until Evicted (1999), and then stopped.
We felt the warehouse cool when he walked in, and it took us a moment to work out why, because he does so little: he stands, he rasps, and he looks at the men as though he has already decided which of them is lying. The other actors are working hard. He is not, or does not appear to be. That is the strength and the limit together. Fifty years of the same man means fifty years without a surprise, and anyone hoping to find a hidden Tierney in the RKO pictures will find the same face, younger and no kinder.
"I resented those pictures they put me in," he said. "I never thought of myself as that kind of guy." The pictures did not care what he thought of himself, and on the evidence of the screen, neither did we. See Reservoir Dogs for the boss, then Born to Kill for the same man at twenty-eight with nobody yet to answer to.
Biography
Lawrence Tierney was an American actor known for portraying gangsters and tough guys. Born Lawrence James Tierney on 15 March 1919 in Brooklyn, New York, he began his screen career in the early 1940s after stage work. His breakthrough came with the title role in the 1945 film Dillinger.
Tierney appeared in numerous crime and noir films during the 1940s and 1950s, including Born to Kill (1947). He had a long career spanning over fifty years, with roles often mirroring his reputation for off-screen volatility. In 1992 he played crime boss Joe Cabot in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
He was the brother of actor Scott Brady. Tierney died of pneumonia on 26 February 2002 in Los Angeles, aged 82.
