At one point, Roger Ebert had said that he had never seen a bad movie with M. Emmet Walsh. The character had over 230 acting credits to his name according to imdb.com. However, his manager said he was actually in 119 feature films and about 250 TV productions. He did comedies, dramas, horror, fantasy, sci-fi and even action. On March 19, Walsh died at the age of 88 a few days shy his birthday on March 23.
As for the late Ebert, apparently, he had forgotten the one-and-a-half star dismissal of Raising Arizona, where Walsh appeared in two scenes as Nicholas Cage’s loquacious co-worker. Or the thumbs down he gave Harry and the Hendersons, where Walsh played John Lithgow’s father, which is funny because he was only 10 years older. He also gave a one-and-a-half star dismissal to Wildcats, the football sports comedy starring Goldie Hawn and still give a two-and-a-half star review to Fletch where Walsh played “Dr. JellyFinger” who gives the title character a rectal examination as he sings “Moon River.”
That’s the life of a character actor. You take a job. You work a few days, a few weeks or a few months. He co-starred alongside Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, as well as in Missing in Action alongside Chuck Norris and in Red Scorpion alongside Dolph Lundgren. He must have been unavailable for those Expendable movies, but judging by the last one, it was probably for the best.
No, the role most people remember him from as Loren Visser, the slimy, sweating sleazebucket of a private investigator in Blood Simple. who wore the same yellow leisure suit with the cowboy hat and drove the older model Volkswagen beetle. Walsh took a role that could’ve been written as a Texan perverted hick and gave the role some maturity that was needed. Written by Joel and Ethan Coen, Visser isn’t a stereotype. He’s smarter than he looks as he is hired by bar owner, Julian Marty (Dan Hadeya), to kill his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), who is having an affair with Ray (John Getz), who has been terminated from the bar.
However, Visser decides to do something different and still get his money from Marty. Unfortunately, he leaves his cigarette lighter he received being an Elks Lodge as Man of the Year under some decaying fish Marty caught while out of town. It makes you wonder what Visser had done in the past to be named Man of the Year. Was he a former cop or something? He seems to fascinated by Soviet Russia.
The role helped make Walsh a bigger name even though he argued with the Coen Brothers over the climax scene in which he didn’t think he should pick his hat up off the floor. When told to humor the filmmakers by doing it, he responded that’s what he was doing by being in the movie. He also requested to be paid in cash every day he was on set. Walsh would win the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.
Walsh’s abilities to play any type of character is what made him so prolific. In Blade Runner, he was the bigoted police supervisor Bryant. In My Best Friend’s Wedding, he was the jovial father to Dermot Mulrooney’s character who engages in the impromptu singing of “I Sang A Little Prayer” in the restaurant. He played the real-life Joe Lempke in the TV After-School Special “The Woman Who Willed a Miracle.” Lempke and his wife, May (Cloris Leachman), adopted a blind mentally challenged baby who, despite his condition, learned to play the piano and sing.
I was just watching him the other day as Coach Turnbull alongside Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School. Whereas actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio pick and choose their roles, sometimes skipping a year or more, he couldn’t be afforded that luxury. Or he just didn’t want to. So, he took multiple roles in movies and TV a year. He appeared as a bus passenger in the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy one of his earliest roles, in the Oscar-winning Ordinary People, and then in the Oscar-winning Reds.
A graduate of Clarkson University in 1958, he was later presented the Golden Knight Award by Clarkson’s Alumni Association in 1998. If there was a popular TV show from the late 1960s to current times, Walsh probably appeared on at least one episode. He was on All in the Family, The Bob Newhart Show, The Rockford Files, Baretta, Little House on the Prairie, Tales From the Crypt, The X-Files, Home Improvement, Frasier and Sneaky Pete to name just a small fraction.
Born of Irish descent, he became deaf in his left ear at the age of 3. He also performed on the stage in a Broadway debut alongside Al Pacino in 1969 when they were in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? One of his most memorable film roles as a madman in The Jerk who chooses Navin Johnson’s name out of the St. Louis phonebook and tries to shoot him. While it wouldn’t be appropriate to do a scene like that today, it’s comic gold as Walsh’s madman is a horrible shot and keeps hitting oil cans next to Navin as Martin hilariously thinks the madman is targeting the cans.
If you want a good recommendation, check him out as the shady CIA Agent Fred Miller alongside Denzel Washington, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Robert Townsend in The Mighty Quinn. He would also appear as Sheriff Harv in the cult classic sci-fi horror comedy Critters. There’s so many roles to mention. I’ve seen Silkwood multiple times and I still don’t think he had a single line of dialogue in the movie.
He reportedly died of a cardiac arrest on March 19, which was the Spring Equinox. Incidentally, he would also appear in the 1992 independent movie Equinox, because of course he did.
What is your favorite role or movie of his? Please comment.
Zane Says 