Paul L. Smith was hired to be large and frightening, and he was most frightening when he looked least interested. His bored prison guard in Midnight Express is the performance that lasts; the roaring cartoon heavies around it are the job.
Fi1m perspective
The moment is early in Midnight Express (1978). Billy is hung by the ankles and beaten on the soles of his feet, and Alan Parker holds the shot while Paul L. Smith's Hamidou gets on with it, patient and bored, as if shelling peas. We were horrified, and the horror came from the boredom: a man who shouts can be reasoned with, and this one is not even paying attention. Nothing else Smith did on screen frightened us so much, and nothing else asked so little of him. He stands, he swings, he does not change his face.
He had come to that cell the long way round. An uncredited part in Exodus (1960), filmed in Israel, was the start; he went back to Israel in 1967 as a volunteer during the Six-Day War, stayed several years, acted in local productions and directed two films. From 1973 to 1977 he was in Italy, making knockabout comedies with Michael Coby in the mould of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, five of them. He moved to Hollywood around 1977 or 1978, and within two years he had Hamidou and Bluto, the two parts anyone still remembers.
Bluto, in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980), shows the other way the business used him. He glowers and bellows and is built like the drawing, and the film needs him to be menacing, and the menace never arrives, because the fights are slack and the camera waits while men swing past each other. That is Altman's doing more than Smith's, but it shows the limit of the equipment. Take away the stillness and Smith is a big bearded man in a costume, which is what he was asked to be for most of the 1980s: Beast Rabban in David Lynch's Dune (1984), Falkon in Red Sonja (1985), Faron Crush in Sam Raimi's Crimewave (1985), Willard in the horror film Pieces (1982). He said of Lynch's film, "I had such a ball on Dune. I just cannot tell you how much." We believe him. Enjoying the work is not the same as being given different work, and he rarely was.
The credits thin out through the 1990s and stop in 1999. What remains is one performance that everyone who has seen it carries around, and a dozen that did their job and left. If you want to know what Smith could do, watch Midnight Express and watch his face in that cell, where he does nothing and it is the worst thing in the film. Then watch Popeye for Shelley Duvall, and notice how little the loud version of the same man has to offer. The industry had decided what he was for before he arrived, and he never quite got the chance to argue.
Biography
Paul L. Smith was an American actor. He appeared in feature films and on television from the 1960s, often in supporting roles as heavies and villains. His credits include the prison guard Hamidou in Midnight Express (1978), Bluto in Popeye (1980), Glossu 'Beast' Rabban in Dune (1984), Falkon in Red Sonja (1985) and the Archduke in Maverick (1994).
Smith trained at Brandeis University and Florida State University. His first film role was in Exodus (1960). He was also credited under the names Paul Smith, Paul Lawrence Smith, Bob Spencer and Adam Eden.
