An old friend died this week. Fortunately, I had a chance to see him again just after he left.
I’ve always been a fan of actor Robert Duvall. He played Captain “Gus” McCrae in television’s “Lonesome Dove.” That miniseries swept across the West from Texas to Montana and back again as McCrae and his former companion from the Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow F. Call, (played by Tommy Lee Jones) leads a herd of stolen cattle north to the promise of a fresh start in pristine Montana.
I think it’s fair to refer to Texas as part of the West. Since the miniseries was based on the eponymous, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Larry McMurtry, “Dove’s” Western cred is secure in my eyes.
McCrae might be the character Duvall is best known for, but he had a run in the 1970s that stacks up with the resumé of any great actor. He starred in “Apocalypse Now,” “The Great Santini,” and “The Godfather, Parts I & II,” all among my favorites.
In “Apocalypse” Duvall, playing Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” Kilgore, commander of an air cavalry unit in Vietnam, utters one of the greatest lines in cinema history: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” followed, a few beats later, by, “The smell, you know that gasoline smell … smelled … like victory.”
Duvall played an important role in shaping the Kilgore character. If you’ve seen the movie, you might find it unbelievable that he toned down Kilgore, one of the most over-the-top characters in a movie filled with over-the-top characters. The film, after all, is a fever dream of the horrors of war. But Duvall thought director Francis Ford Coppola’s script went a little too far and reined in the surfing-obsessed Kilgore just enough.
In case you’re wondering what this has to do with the outdoors, Coppola is an aficionado of fine outdoor gear and has purchased a few handmade quail calls from one of my craftsman hunting buddies, so there.
One film of Duvall’s you might not have seen is, “The Great Santini.” In it, he plays a Marine pilot who runs his family like a military unit. It’s my favorite Duvall performance; one for which he earned an Academy Award nomination as best actor.
However, my favorite Duvall movie is “The Godfather.” Flip a coin on I or II. I’m Sicilian and those movies have always had a hold on me. We’ve no mob connections, but “The Godfather” is really about family, a Sicilian family, so it resonates. I watch both over and over, whenever I stumble upon them playing on cable, and every few years I watch them from beginning to end.
Duvall may not be a war-time consigliere, but he did a fine job keeping Michael Corleone out of prison.
Until I heard the news of Duvall’s death, I hadn’t seen the film that finally earned him his Oscar for best actor: “Tender Mercies.”
In it, Duvall plays a washed up, drunken wreck of a country singer, a man who hasn’t seen his daughter since she was a baby. But Mac Sledge finds love, God and even his long-lost daughter. When they’re reunited, she tells him she has a memory of him singing to her the song, “On the Wings of a Dove.” Sledge denies it, but after she leaves, he sings the song while watching her drive away.
We hope, before the movie ends, he’ll get a shot at redemption, and sing “On the Wings of a Dove” to her again. He never gets the chance.
Despite the circumstances, it was nice to see my old friend. His presence lives on in all those great old movies of his, and I plan to watch them as often as I can.
And if I get a chance to sing to someone who matters to me, I’ll make sure to do so.
You should too.