Leslie Carlson spent forty years playing the reasonable man in unreasonable films. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome he is the friendliest person on screen, and that is precisely why you should worry about him.
Fi1m perspective
Barry Convex sells spectacles. He turns up in Videodrome (1983) as a man with a product and a pleasant manner, and takes an interest in James Woods's Max Renn, who does not deserve anyone's interest and knows it. Leslie Carlson plays him as the friendliest person in the film, and in a film where a television set breathes, that is the thing that frightened us. Woods is never once likeable; Carlson is never anything else, and watching the unlikeable man being handled by the likeable one, we understood before Renn did who was in charge. It is the performance he is remembered for, and it deserves to be.
He came to it late, by the standards of the trade. Carlson began on stage in the United States and England after university and military service, moved to Canada at the end of the 1960s, and only started appearing in films and on television in the early 1970s. Horror found him in 1974, with Bob Clark's Black Christmas, and horror kept him: four films with David Cronenberg, of which Videodrome and The Fly (1986), where he plays Dr Cheevers, are the ones we have reviewed. He worked with Clark again on A Christmas Story (1983), as the man selling the tree, which means a good many people have seen him every December without knowing his name. Through all of it he kept working in the theatre, at the major Canadian houses, in classical parts up to and including Hamlet, so a spectacles salesman was never going to stretch him.
The pattern in the film work is the authority figure and the company man: the doctor, the executive, the person behind the desk who explains things calmly while the story goes wrong around him. The parts are small. In The Fly our review did not mention him, and that is the character actor's lot; the film belongs to Goldblum and Davis and the thing that grows out of Goldblum, and Cheevers is there to be a doctor when a doctor is needed. Carlson did that kind of work for four decades, and those who wrote about him agree to a degree that is almost dull: reliable, versatile, never a problem. The complaint, if it is one, is not about him. He was rarely given a film to carry, and when Cronenberg finally built something around him, Camera (2000), it was a short.
He kept going into the 2010s. Start with Videodrome, and when Convex comes in, watch him rather than the television. The set is doing the shouting. He is doing the work.
Biography
Leslie Carlson (also credited as Les Carlson) was an American actor who worked extensively in Canada. Born in Mitchell, South Dakota, in 1933, he earned a BFA and an MA from the University of South Dakota and began his career in stage productions in the United States and England before immigrating to Canada in the late 1960s.
He appeared in four films directed by David Cronenberg: as Barry Convex in Videodrome (1983), for which he received a Genie Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor; as Brenner in The Dead Zone (1983); as Dr. Cheevers in The Fly (1986); and in the short Camera (2000). Other notable film roles include Graham in Black Christmas (1974) and the Christmas Tree Man in A Christmas Story (1983). Carlson was also a prolific stage actor and won a Dora Award for his performance in Valley Song (1996).
He died of cancer in Toronto on 3 May 2014.
