8/13/2023 0 Comments Docxtor from cannonball runReynolds just wanted to have a good time - and, in the process, to give the audience one. (Even years later, when Paul Thomas Anderson tried to turn him back into a serious actor with Boogie Nights, Reynolds seemed unimpressed, even though his performance in the movie’s terrific - a rare time his disdain was kept under wraps.) (It was his turn before it was Sylvester Stallone’s.) He could have leaned into those expectations, but he had no interest in it. And what he lacked in finesse, he made up for in the kind of brute force that made him the latest guy to be labeled the Next Brando. When Reynolds’ movie career was really coming into shape in the early Seventies, he still had that halfback’s physique revealing nearly as much of him onscreen - Gunsmoke had made sure to show off his arms whenever possible, and he spends most of Deliverance in a half-unzipped wetsuit - as that Cosmopolitan spread. We loved him because he commanded the screen, but also because he never tried to hide when he just didn’t care, nor when the only thing that mattered to him - which was often - was goofing off. (Or, at times, the scene he was in during a movie he otherwise seemed to enjoy.)īut that transparency was of a piece with his talk show appearances, with that blooper reel, his classic naked centerfold in a 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan, and the rest of the Burt Reynolds package. He picked a lot of bad projects even at his peak, and no star of his stature in the last 50 years more obviously betrayed his discomfort or boredom when he didn’t like the movie he was in. He only starred in a handful of movies that were genuinely great (and only some of them even aspired to be, as opposed to the stuntman dramedy Hooper, which was a simple idea executed with enormous affection for the subject). I thought of the Tonight Show clip - one of many appearances where he and Carson couldn’t stop laughing in the other’s presence - and the blooper reel because they do a better job of capturing exactly why Reynolds was as big a star he was, for as long as he was. ![]() (Reynolds passed, and later admitted what a big mistake that was.) He had raw talent to spare, which he discovered, in perfect Reynolds fashion, practically by accident: After the premature end of his football career at Florida State, he found himself taking junior college English classes and his teacher insisted on putting him on stage. Why did my mind instantly turn not to moments’ from Reynolds’ storied career - whether his star-making Gunsmoke turn as “halfbreed” blacksmith Quint Asper, Seventies movie classics like Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Hooper, or his comeback role as a porn auteur in Boogie Nights - but to him screwing around with his famous pals? (Or to MacDonald’s pitch-perfect recreation of that?) It’s not a knock on Reynolds the actor, who was limited in some ways, but also possessed of such undeniable charisma that the James Bond producers tried to hire him to replace Sean Connery, despite him being as American as a pickup truck with a gun rack.
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