I Need Your Magic: M. Emmett Walsh (1935&2024)

Harrison Ford walks through Union Station, doubling as police headquarters, as the camera comes to meet him, disappearing behind a dusty, trash covered roof, and then finding him at the open door to a man’s office. Ford’s been picked up on some important errand, the kind that interrupted his lunch in the teeming Chinatown eatery he frequents. A man like this isn’t easily intimidated but he knows something’s up or he wouldn’t have broken his lunch date with himself to see to it. Just who does he owe such tormented allegiance? Who’s waiting for him at the end of this cab ride? He’s pressed into a shirt that’s been washed both too much and too little, his mustache seems uneven in the heavy shadows, and his eyes are sunk into his face so differently your brain conjures Picasso’s hand at a canvas. They light up in the dark, musty office. His expression changes every time the camera returns to him. He smiles like an infant when he sees Ford, the bright open features parting his five-o-clock shadow like the Red Sea. Ford shoots him a dirty look, which prompts this: “Don’t be an asshole, Deckard. I’ve got four skin jobs walking the streets.” Suddenly his face is closed, steely and round, an unmarked can of survivalist rations. This man is eating the scene alive and Ford along with him, his voice nagging and echoing like a screen door with a rusty hinge. “I need your magic,” he says. And, like that, “Blade Runner” has properly begun. There is no magic like a performance by M. Emmett Walsh. Michael Emmett Walsh was born in 1935 in Ogdensburg, NY, a picturesque town that shared a view of the St. Lawrence River with Ottawa, but the family moved to Vermont when he was young, and it was to Vermont he’d return after he’d made his fortune as one of the best film actors in America. It was Vermont where he’d succumb to the heart attack that killed him on Wednesday, the 21st. When he was three years old doctors discovered a problem in his mastoid, the bone right behind his left ear, and in curing it they permanently deafened it. And so the square jawed kid, who looked like he could have flown Apollo missions or led the Buffalo Bills to a Super Bowl win, grew up with a slurred approximation of a Vermonter accent. He had enough of a sense of self to understand he was not about to become the next Laurence Olivier, doing “King Lear” to adoring West End audiences. His only choice was to become himself. Walsh could have been an athlete or used his degree in Business Administration from Clarkson as a passport into the world of finance, but he was more taken with an extracurricular that was only just beginning to seem like a viable option. He wanted to act and did a number of college productions before his faculty advisor convinced him to go down to New York and see if he had what it took. He enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where his roommate was a young William Devane and his pastime was sneaking into plays like the Anne Bancroft production of “The Miracle Worker” at intermission, as he never had any money to see the play from the top. Doggedness and a natural, singular charisma got him his break on Broadway opposite another up-and-comer named Al Pacino. Pacino became a star. M. Emmett Walsh became the actor you get when you need to challenge your star. His screen credits began in the ignominious way of many of the greats, with bit parts of TV movies and low paying counter-culture films based on counter-culture novels shooting in Lower Manhattan, like John Schlesinger’s beloved “Midnight Cowboy” and Aram Avakian’s “End of the Road”. His first bit of real eccentric film acting came in Arthur Penn’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” based on a song by Woody Guthrie’s son Arlo, who also played the lead character. Walsh has less than a minute of screen time, yet pulls you in with his pinched expression, screaming, incoherent delivery, and natural air of corrupt authority. He plays a drill sergeant, the first time he would hide behind a uniform as he projected pure evil into the world. He does make you want to stand at attention, to guess at the menacing things swimming around in that enormous head. You see the careers born in his crooked squint, the Philip Seymour Hoffmans, the Danny McBrides, the John Goodmans, the James Gandolfinis, you see the tradition of Golden Age studio stars and character actors alike, from Edward G. Robinson to William Demarest to James Cagney to Broderick Crawford. Walsh’s DNA can be found all over the history of Hollywood, and yet he had an ineffable bluster, a good old boy charm that can freeze into terrifying purpose in the blink of an eye, as it does in his short scene in Blade Runner. Every angle a revelation, every line a new man. The 70s brought him more TV and more bit parts in counter-culture comedies like the acid western “Kid Blue,” “They Might Be Giants” based on the play by James Goldman, Brian De Palma’s “Get to Know Your Rabbit,” starring Tommy Smothers, and Norman Lear’s “Cold Turkey”. Ar