Word: connors
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...curse of the greatest TV actors is that no one believes they're acting. As Archie Bunker, the beseiged blue-collar bigot and patriarch of "All in the Family," Carroll O'Connor became his character so completely and physically that it was impossible to imagine him as a separate person. It wasn't just his New York-y delivery - those "youses" and "terlets" - but the way he carried himself: the tousled hair, the bone-weary shamble, the plaintive Irish eyes rolling heavenward at the dingbats and pinkos who surrounded him in his own house...
...Connor played him, Archie Bunker was perpetually and evocatively tired: tired from his job working the loading docks, tired from dealing with the new world of strangers (blacks, Jews, Catholics) who moved into his Queens neighborhood in a period of urban flux, tired of the shocks to his system as a lifetime of immutable values changed around him minute by minute. He put the "lump" in "lumpenproletariat." "All in the Family," the boundary-shattering comedy about what folks used to call "the generation gap," would have been a classic regardless, because of the passion of producer Norman Lear's ideas...
...Because, make no mistake, the man was acting. Unlike his braying, spluttering character, O'Connor was born in the Bronx but his real voice was no Bronx cheer; he was soft-spoken and thoughtful and said that he never heard Archie Bunkerisms growing up in his well-off childhood home. An accomplished journeyman stage and film actor, O'Connor made Archie into a character - dry and operatic, hateful and touching - where a cartoon would have sufficed. It would have been easy to make Archie a caricature (and he was one) or a straw man (he was that too). It would...
...Connor's Archie Bunker - at least for the show's raw, groundbreaking first half-decade - captured a moment that political historians take for granted now but that Americans were only vaguely aware of at the time: the splintering of the classic New Deal Democrat coalition. Blue-collar union guys (like Archie) had depended on FDR and organized labor to secure them contracts, provide Social Security, look after their comfort: in short, to protect them and keep their world stable. Social justice to Archie was a pot roast on their table and an evening sit-down in his favorite chair...
...account of actual events submitted to Poe -- is reflected in several of his own short stories, including the marvellously titled "Heavy Put-Away, or a Hustle Not Wholly Devoid of a Certain Grossness, Granted," found in this collection. An account of a mean prank worthy of Flannery O'Connor at her darkest, "Heavy" is one of Southern's most pointed comments about human nature, and a perfect example of his crisp, succinct approach to writing (one can think of several crime novelists - e.g.think Donald Westlake - who would have spun "Heavy" into a full-length "scam" novel...