Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
In the middle of Farscape February at the Couch Avocados column, Robert Duvall passed away at 95, but I wanted to stick to discussing Farscape and give his legendary body of work its own separate space at another time. Gene Hackman, Rob Reiner, and Catherine O’Hara received memorial threads from Avocado regulars when they died, but Duvall didn’t.
Today, Duvall gets his own memorial thread here. Discuss below your favorite Duvall performances from film or TV if you have any. I love his performances in The Apostle (which Duvall also wrote and directed), A Civil Action, Rambling Rose (my favorite line from that Martha Coolidge movie is a Duvall line in a Southern drawl to Laura Dern: “Put your damn tit back in your dress. You hear me, girl? Replace that tit”), George Lucas’s THX 1138, SNL’s “Who’s More Grizzled?!” game show sketch from 1998, and, of course, the first two Godfather movies, where he was excellent as mob lawyer Tom Hagen. The third and final Godfather is a lesser Godfather installment mostly because of Duvall’s absence.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Basil Poledouris’s main title theme from Lonesome Dove, which featured Duvall’s most beloved TV role: Texas Ranger Gus McCrae.
I never watched Lonesome Dove, but I used to listen to Poledouris’s “Theme from Lonesome Dove” and “Night Mares (Deets, Newt)” repeatedly because they’re so damn good. (I have the Lonesome Dove soundtrack album because Poledouris, from Conan the Barbarian to Starship Troopers, was a fucking G.) Duvall’s death caused Lonesome Dove fans to revisit the miniseries, while his death caused me to watch for the first time earlier this week his guest spots on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.
Duvall was, unsurprisingly, phenomenal as both a socially awkward introvert who falls in love with a museum’s tiny doll of a Victorian woman in 1963’s “Miniature” and a burnt-out spy assigned to infiltrate a damaged ship piloted by aliens in 1964’s “The Chameleon” (its writers included first-season Outer Limits showrunner Joseph Stefano and, wow, a pre-Chinatown Robert Towne). In 1964’s “The Inheritors,” Duvall had the much less showy lead role of a government agent on behalf of “the Secretary of Science” who investigates the mysterious connection between wounded Vietnam War soldiers who suddenly became superintelligent—co-stars Steve Ihnat, Ivan Dixon, and James Frawley (yep, the same guy who later directed The Muppet Movie) played the showier and more challenging parts—but he was solid as an investigator who brings to mind both the Interpol equivalent of Fox Mulder who was played by Joel Fabiani on Department S a few years after “The Inheritors” and the paranormal researcher Gary Collins played on The Sixth Sense.
(When I say The Sixth Sense, I’m referring to the ’70s paranormal procedural that used to be awkwardly merged with Night Gallery in syndication, not the M. Night Shyamalan flick.)
“Miniature,” “The Chameleon,” and “The Inheritors” have been recapped before at The Avocado. The “Inheritors” recap, which promised a Part 2 that never came, was part of a series of posts about The Outer Limits that, like so many other series of posts at this site, was abandoned by its author. (You will never see me do that “I’m going out for a pack of smokes” shit at The Avocado. Whenever I write a series of posts, there is always a conclusion or a wrap-up.)
Written by frequent Twilight Zone writer Charles Beaumont, “Miniature” was his tribute to Logan’s Run novel co-author William F. Nolan, a friend of his who was shy around women, awkward in the offices where he worked, and still raised by his mother just like Duvall’s character was in the episode. “Miniature” disproves the notions that hour-long Twilight Zone episodes suck and that Rod Serling or Philip DeGuere and X-Files alum Glen Morgan—DeGuere and Morgan each showran a different hour-long reboot of The Twilight Zone—were only good when they had only a half-hour to tell a story. (Another hour-long Twilight Zone episode that disproves those notions is 2019’s underappreciated “Replay,” which guest-starred Sanaa Lathan, Damson Idris, and Steve Harris from The Practice.)
“The Chameleon” is the ’60s Outer Limits in top form. (Its science is kind of goofy, however: A government scientist invents a way to rewrite human DNA by injecting alien DNA via enlarged sound waves from a tape recording of the DNA sequence instead of via a needle. I wonder what he would say each time to subsequent spies who want to go undercover as aliens: “Do you want the jab or will it be Memorex?”) “The Inheritors,” the only two-parter in the history of both the original Outer Limits and its much longer-running ’90s reboot, is surprisingly good, especially because it came from a season of The Outer Limits that is considered by many Outer Limits fans to be a mixed bag.
My favorite of the three ’60s sci-fi anthology episodes I just experienced for the first time ended up being “Miniature.” It benefited from the longer runtime and is a good example of why Duvall was a reliable performer and an A-list Hollywood actor for such a long time, whether in The Godfather, The Apostle, or the wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination… and so much damn cigarette smoke.
