In the first installment of a new series devoted to Stacy Keach, Vincent Albarano looks at three of the great American actor’s most daring performances in the 1970s
From his first starring appearance in Aram Avakian’s End of the Road (1970), Stacy Keach commanded attention with his gripping portrayal of hopeless catatonia. Keach’s recent college grad, Jacob Horner, falls into a deep, helpless depression and is unable to do anything but stand and stare blankly ahead at the barren future. In his subsequent films, he perfected that expressionless visage and brought it to every role to some degree. There are easy and cheap comparisons to that dead gaze reflecting the turmoil of the times, a theme that End of the Road makes readily apparent in its approach. Despite his early performances ranging from comedy, action, and even exploitation, Keach’s most striking showings hone in on this existential terror. He shifts the encompassing societal outrage to personal horror stories and burrows into the souls of three damaged men.
Well-respected now, but largely overlooked for the first stretch of his career, Stacy Keach was as much a feature of the 1970s cinema of desperation as more widely celebrated players like Warren Oates, James Caan, or Elliott Gould — another familiar face adrift in onscreen estrangement. The ’70s were Keach’s golden decade. Tough yet soft-spoken, his best roles of the era express a threatening tenderness simmering beneath his hard eyes. He packs a severity that is always capable of cutting up when the tension gets too high. Keach’s presence reflects the contradictory positions of comfortable unpredictability.
This is the first in a series of profiles tracking Keach’s performances from 1969-1982. This thirteen-year stretch comprises his most daring and impressive work; it also cuts off before his hiatus from feature films in favor of theater (his truest love as an actor) and television. The three roles discussed below — in Fat City, The New Centurions, and The Killer Inside Me — are among his best and most highly regarded, but they only scratch the surface of his range during that period.
Fat City (John Huston, 1972)
Fat City revived John Huston’s career and demonstrated that a studio veteran could best the young punks when it came to New Hollywood’s gritty realism. It’s also the film that truly announced Keach’s arrival, the role forever cited as his standout performance. As amazing as he performed elsewhere, as heartbreaking as his other roles could be, there’s truth in the fact that he never quite topped his showing as the permanently besotted light heavyweight boxer Billy Tully. From the sad little hungover shuffle he performs setting foot out into the sunlight at the start of the film, to the head-bobbing hooch stupor of its closing moments, Keach plays Tully like a man who couldn’t dry out in the desert. Convinced he was screwed on his last pro fight, an affair in Panama where he sustained a suspiciously bad cut, Tully has been out of the ring and on the skids for years. Weighed down by the loss of his wife along with his career as a pug, he’s content to bounce between pick-up jobs and always keeps a handy pint of the hard stuff in his hip pocket to crest the ridge of each dying day. For all the defeats he’s faced on and off the tarp, Keach never loses control and makes Tully see just how hopeless his lot is. Fat City is a film full of false starts, of the fibs we tell ourselves to keep trudging through the same rut looking for the small hope of a way out.
Inspired by the promise he sees in 18-year-old amateur Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges), Tully tries to mount his comeback. But he can’t keep his lips off the bottle or the despair out of his mind long enough to really commit himself. Hurt by the sport that he loves, the one thing he ever bothered to give a shot, and the woman who made it seem like anything else mattered, Tully has given up. Keach understands that Tully’s real handicap isn’t his scarred eyebrows but his fear of losing again. He doesn’t have the promise or potential that once seemed real enough to make him try at all. The sad truth of the film is that nobody has what it takes to climb any higher than they are. For all their promise, these men are confined by their own circumstances to the dusty drags of Stockton, California.
Keach’s behind-the-scenes boxing training paid off in the mid-movie comeback fight he barely wins against an aging Mexican heavyweight. Tully is so battered and bruised that he pisses blood before the bout even happens. That’s the essence of the movie in one short sequence: even the victories we manage to claim are hollow assists, whether by fate or some other nonsensical force. Keach brings an awareness to his character that, in the world of this film, nothing that’s good happens because of one’s own abilities. Keach lets his face slip into a blank thousand-yard stare as the last pull of booze sets in and clouds every moment of prior clarity. The odds never existed for his would-be prizefighter, and rather than offering anything close to catharsis, Keach materializes a psychic decay from the first gin-soaked frames of the film. Every smile and seemingly happy moment we witness are the result of a bottle, and whatever past victories Billy may have had are long since memories. The thing about memories is that they can never mean as much to someone they don’t belong to, and the only impression Keach lets us gather is of a proud man suffering but unable to concede the ten count.
The New Centurions (Richard Fleischer, 1972)
Released eight days after Fat City, The New Centurions depicts the catatonia of naiveté and the jadedness of experience. The film follows rookie cop Roy Fehler (Keach) as he descends into the void shift by shift. We start broad, spending plenty of time with fellow new recruits Sergio Duran (Erik Estrada) and Gus Plebesly (Scott Wilson), tracking their early days with veterans just as Fehler learns everything under Andy Kilvinsky (George C. Scott). As the film goes on, the focus zeroes in on Fehler. At the start, he’s idealistic, devoted to positive change and community outreach. He understands the conditions of poverty and repression that contribute to crime. Fehler is studying law, working as a cop to see the system from the inside, and support his young family. He’s all smiles, using his easy charm to diffuse situations and ease into his new routine. Keach perfectly portrays Fehler’s slide from fresh-faced innocence to suicidal deathtripping.
Billy Tully’s dreams are dead when we meet him in Fat City, his comeback just an illusory stab at the past. Roy loses sight of the promise and potential of his former life before our very eyes. His aspirations diminish every time he enters his black-and-white. His idealism lets him believe that even as the world slips out of control, his role is essential to maintain some sense of humanity. But Keach never allows Roy to consider the fact that perhaps that service is a task for which he’s wholly unequipped. As he learns during his short stretch on the L.A. vice squad, applied police practice is incompatible with human decency. At his lowest, realizing what degenerate, demoralizing work he’s committed himself to, his wife, Dorothy (Jane Alexander), walks out on him and admits she just can’t care anymore. Keach plays Roy’s rage not as a man abandoned — his defeat is in being a true-blue cop that can’t be understood by those he loves, too strong headed to realize the hurt he does to others in the name of protecting and serving.
The entire film offers portents of what awaits Fehler. “Maybe I should have killed her,” he spouts after a run-in with an abusive mother curdles his stomach for the first time. In the next scene, he’s adding fingers of scotch to his morning orange juice and calmly brushing off the realization that he’s failed all of his prerequisites for law school. A glimpse at his potential future following the suicide of a senior officer really sets the rot in. His boozing on shift leads him to stash pints in call boxes along his beat and get chastised by younger cops. There’s a hairpin sense of sympathy and disgust throughout the film that’s all in Keach’s hands. The role is both pathetic and enraging. We’re livid as we watch him put the make on a robbery victim and later harass a woman fresh out of the pen over her outfit. The minute she gets fed up and speeds off with Roy trapped in her driver’s side window, we’re right back on Fehler’s side. Battered and bruised after this ordeal, he returns to see the robbery victim (Rosalind Cash), a nurse who saved him from a shotgun blast to the stomach years before, and they fall in love. This may be a convenient device, but Keach dives into the development like a man truly given something to live for. It’s what makes the film’s ending sting that much more, the only possible way this film could close. Redemption offered and denied in just a short span. With a new, supportive woman in his life, Roy cleans up his act and considers not being a cop for the first time in years. Finally free of the martyr complex of police work, he doesn’t realize how limited his time is but still tries to live like everything matters. Ready to right the mistakes of his past, he loses it all.
The Killer Inside Me (Burt Kennedy, 1976)
If The New Centurions offers a picture of creeping towards oblivion and the futility of pulling yourself back, The Killer Inside Me is a portrait of living on a razor’s edge and loving every minute of it — until you get nicked. Already a fan of Jim Thompson’s writing at the time Keach accepted the role, he knew the depths of psychosis he would have to plumb to play the murderous sheriff Lou Ford in Burt Kennedy’s adaptation. The key to Keach’s interpretation is the lame folksiness he brings from Thompson’s novel, sharing awkward non-sequiturs about the weather and various scraps of advice. Raised by teachers but destined to be a cop, Ford emerged from a mass of contradictions. He isn’t respected by the men in town but working behind the badge allows Ford to call the shots, and he’s always happy to exercise power to keep the peace. That Keachian Catatonia resurfaces throughout the film as his father’s disapproving, gaunt ghost materializes in glimpses to watch over his son. Lou Ford may be an evil bastard, but he’s a man haunted as much as he himself perpetrates terror. A dripping faucet triggers the droning command of “Turn it off,” the sink overflowing with memories of abuse and uneasy Oedipal desires. Even Ford’s peeping Tom tendencies take him back to his parents’ kinky sex games, his face mortified and feeling each childhood blow anew.
Trouble starts to show when Ford is called to drive perpetually wasted Joyce Lakeland (another perfect counter role by Fat City’s Susan Tyrell) out of town. Her violent response triggers Ford’s abusive instincts. His slack-jawed horror after slapping her, coupled with his childish surprise when she acknowledges he actually hurt her is the core of his character. Proving that he isn’t the only pervert in town, Joyce is into the damaged deputy and they set off on a poisoned relationship that works out to be Ford’s undoing. By the time Ford and Joyce’s blackmail plot against the mayor’s son is in motion, Ford is a lot of things to a lot of people. He may not be respected to his face, but he is the town problem solver when things get dirty. Spurred by self-preservation as much as uncontrollable rage, Ford finds himself backed into a corner his father taught him to navigate all too well. When he turns to violence, Keach smartly plays a man sculpted by the sins of his parents but not absolved of his own acts, his dirty desires shaping the man he became. He’s a guy who can’t believe the things his hands are doing, but he doesn’t seem eager to regain control either. Rather than play out Thompson’s excruciating beating in real time, as the 2010 remake is eager to do, Keach plays Ford’s violence as a psychic scar, an instantaneous eruption whose consequences rather than its means carry the impact. Keach’s hollow, gaping face communicates more physical agony than any amount of blood on the screen ever could.
That descent into full-tilt madness claims plenty of innocent victims, including a troubled kid Ford mentored but frames for his own crimes. Chatting in the holding cell, Keach drops his nice guy act with a calm confession of his own deeds. “Don’t say I’m not that kind of guy, because you just don’t know.” By the time Jason Smith (John Carradine) shows up late in the film as a doctor looking to buy Ford’s home, the madness is all consuming. Lounging in his robe, Ford plays calm manipulator, his corny act left at the side as he enunciates perfectly and cites medical texts outside of the common cop’s reach. Telling the doc about his constant feelings of persecution, Ford assures the old man that his schizophrenia is under control without ever being asked. Ford knows exactly what he is and why he does these things, but his façade of social competency begins to fail him, his mind deteriorating within a single sentence as he loses control over his sanity. As his mother’s voice echoes: “Any mental or physical disease can be contracted by thinking about it.” Even more than his killings, the film’s final stretch shows Keach’s understanding of the broken man, someone who’s been adrift the entire time even as his life has outwardly appeared on track. So twisted by his childhood brush with perverse nurturing, he never stood a chance. The film’s conclusion turns into a nightmare funhouse of rancid memories, taunting laughter, and violent storms both natural and human. The jaunty march that accompanies Ford to his death is the only sound remaining in a mind unraveled. He accepts his fate while smiling, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, and in this universe, it just might be.
Each of these roles is a study in wounded pride, of self-deceit and the unwillingness to admit that the things you’ve done are bound to kill you, or that they’re all you’ll amount to. Roy Fehler and Billy Tully are never too far gone to change their lots, but they won’t allow themselves to do the painful work that would require. Lou Ford never stood a chance — his very upbringing tainted his core. He deceives those around him as a means of self-preservation. Fat City is a lawless film, one without concern for morality or religion. It defies neither of these orders; they just don’t figure into the slowly shifting parts of its whole. The New Centurions is concerned with the struggle for human law and decency in a world gone mad, where even the supposed protectors can’t hold their worlds together long enough to assist anyone else. The Killer Inside Me puts the rule of law in the hands of sociopathy. Justice and security become absolute impossibilities in the face of such evil. It’s also the only film here about outward deceit, Fat City and Centurions trucking in unvarnished honesty.
Like Tully’s scarred eyebrows, Fehler’s gut is his weakness. It’s the one point that can still bring him down even after his heart and soul have hardened to rock. Caught in a shootout, Fehler whimpers, tears his helmet off and clutches it to his stomach, fetal regression actualized as existential agony. “Not in the stomach… It can’t happen now… I’m just beginning to know.” Stacy Keach knows how to play men with wounds on the outside as much as within. He brought a vulnerability to each of his lost men, giving them not a chance for a life of happiness or security, but a place on the screen. That’s more than they would have asked for themselves. Fehler gets closest to what it’s all about: “It just keeps tightening. I feel like I’m glued together.” No glue can hold up to that kind of daily strain.
Vincent Albarano is the author of Aesthetic Deviations: Shot-On-Video Horror, 1984-1994. Purchase a copy from Headpress or Amazon
Check out his Experimental Kindergarten zines here
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