James Gammon

Some people are just born to play a certain kind of role. Sam Shepard referred to “alcoholic Midwesterners who leave their families and get lost in the Southwestern desert,” and was very firm that his long-time friend James Gammon played those characters very well. I don’t know if the whiskey that he said was part of it rose to the level of alcoholism, but he did have the face and the voice. He played a lot of cowboys and other sorts of grizzled old men. He played a lot of lawmen and a lot of outlaws over the years, and a lot of Southerners and a lot of Westerners. There was just something about him.

He was, in fact, from the tiny town of Newman, Illinois—bigger then than it is now but still very small by anyone’s standards. When his parents divorced, he ended up in Florida, where he started behind the camera, but then he went to Hollywood, where he started acting. He helped found the Met Theatre, still a going production company in LA. He was brought to the Public Theater in New York to appear in Curse of the Starving Class, starting a lifelong friendship with its author, Shepard.

It’s not particularly surprising that his first TV appearance was on The Wild Wild West in 1966. However, several of his other early appearances are more so. His third TV credit was the extremely obscure one-season Captain Nice, a superhero show starring William Daniels. Likewise he was henchman Osiris on a King Tut-themed episode of Batman. He was on an alien-themed show called The Invaders, one which also featured Gene Hackman and Wayne Rogers. Kung Fu is considerably less surprising.

But of course he was Lou Brown. This is the role I’ve seen him in I don’t actually know how many times. The matter-of-fact way he says he’ll get back to someone about the opportunity to coach a major league baseball team because he’s got a guy on the other line about a set of whitewalls is deeply funny. It’s hard to say what the funniest moment in the movie is, but that’s got to make the list. He’s got to walk a fine line in the role, being one of the few characters to sometimes be funny on purpose. He’s kind when necessary but never openly affectionate.

His characters were, at least of the ones I’ve seen, seldom stupid. Oh, sometimes all they had was a brute cunning, as in his episode of Crossing Jordan. But often they were smarter than people assumed they were and played off that. Sure, that’s unlikely to be true of his Batman goon; those characters weren’t drawn well enough to have personalities at all and existed to be insulted by the villain and beat up by the Dynamic Duo. Everybody’s got to have a misstep or two in their career, and I’m sure it paid the bills.