Word: booing
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Since his 1962 debut as Boo Radley, the monster and savior of two Alabama children in To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall has given more than their due to some indelible movie creatures. The names Frank Burns (MASH), Tom Hagen (The Godfather), Lieut. Colonel Kilgore (Apocalypse Now), Bull Meechum (The Great Santini), Mac Sledge (Tender Mercies) and Gus McCrae (Lonesome Dove) summon sharp, overlapping impressions. The odor of anachronism hangs on most of these characters; they are uneasy with and suspicious of the modern world. While everyone else has gone slack and disorderly, they mulishly hew to an old or private...
...this gallery, add two miscreants from films opening this month: The Gingerbread Man's Dixon Doss, a wily Georgia eccentric who is sort of Boo Radley grown old and gone wrong; and, more important, E.F. ("Sonny") Dewey. E.F. is the Texas preacher in The Apostle, a complex, cantankerous drama that Duvall wrote, directed, stars in and--after all the studios turned down the $5 million project--paid for. This renegade Pentecostalist has the spiel and showmanship to fill a tent or a temple; when E.F. talks, people listen. "I'm a genu-wine, Holy Ghost, Jesus-filled preachin' machine this...
...main work he does as an actor," says Billy Bob Thornton, whose Sling Blade was partly inspired by Boo Radley, and who plays a pivotal cameo in The Apostle. "He observes characters." Screenwriter Horton Foote (Mockingbird, Tender Mercies), who recommended that Duvall play Boo Radley, praises his "eye and ear for specifics of character. He has a feel for the Southern idiom, but he brings variations to it. For Tender Mercies he tape-recorded people, then studied the accent till he got it right...
Sometimes deja vu is deja boo; the citations for worst include a few old acquaintances. But that hardly disqualifies them for a chance at lingering impact. We doubt that Little Richard or Mad magazine or Invasion of the Body Snatchers made many 10-Best lists in 1956. Who knows what orphans of 1997 will be embraced in the inevitable retrofuture...
...Boo hoo, poor Microsoft, getting pushed around by that big ol' bully, the American government. I appreciated the "everybody-loves-an-underdog" sentiment of senior David M. Weld's "Booing Bill Gates" commentary (Nov. 18), but he is sadly misled in his Panglossian views on Microsoft's "evil empire...