Richard Lynch, born in 1940, has been menacing the screens (both small and silver) for nearly 50 years. Once you have seen his threatening face, often playing the lead psychopath, you will most probably have it burned into your memory for a long time. Moreover, that’s the interesting part; Richard Lynch burned his body to into a grizzled mockery of his former smoldering good looks by igniting his gasoline drenched self during an acid trip in 1967. If it were not for this incident, chances are, you would have never heard of this guy, but because of his disfiguration, Richard began to catch work in roles that would have normally flown beneath a better looking actor’s radar.

During the early 1970’s, Hollywood was flooded with leading men. Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Warren Beatty all struggled with each other for the top roles while other actors such as Robert Duvall, James Caan, Harry Dean Stanton, Eli Wallach and Hal Holbrook soaked up the most popular supporting roles. this massive glut of acting power and talent even affected the way we view and how Hollywood treats antagonists and bad guys. Leading men, often losing out on major parts, would wisely opt to play the main character’s adversary just so they could get the kind of work that would garner them precious screen time. This left only henchmen roles for the taking, and Richard Lynch, reaching up with gnarled and scarred hands, took as many of these roles as humanly possible.

Richard Lynch is the guy you see in every movie and say to yourself “hey, it’s that guy again,” then you usually forget about him until you see him the next time.

Often called “the poor man’s Rutger Hauer,” Lynch got his start in 1973’s “Scarecrow,” where he plays Riley, a jailed antisocial, yet likable dreg who befriends Al Pacino while his main character is incarcerated. It can be argued that any person acting in a role opposite both Pacino and Gene Hackman is fast-tracked for stardom, but it can also be said that any actor, given only 20 minutes of screen time between two such cinematic and egotistical giants had better make the most of that stunted portion of time. Lynch did, and translated that miniscule timeframe into decades of quality work.

Those roles have translated themselves into nearly 40 years of solid performances, if such roles as thieves, rapists, knife wielding baddies, and murderers can be called solid. After Scarecrow, his performance in “The Seven Ups” (opposite Roy Scheider) which had but a handful of lines, cemented his typecast for the next 4 decades. If you needed an actor to play some sort of psychopath for your 1970s, 80s, or 90s television show, chances are you gave Richard Lynch a call on the telephone. For the remainder of still busy career, he has made a huge mark on the small screen, playing in such notable television series as “Starsky and Hutch,” “TJ Hooker,” “The Fall Guy,” “Baywatch,” “Six Feet Under,” and even “Charmed.” The list goes on and on, because any role is open to this master sleazeball.

Still currently active, Lynch has been trying his hand at producing, helping make 2006’s horror film “Wedding Slashers,” which did not do well with critics, but since these movies never actually do well with critics, can be easily forgiven. And speaking of what actors are up to these days, it must be noted that Gene Hackman, that great 1970s icon who first crossed paths with Richard Lynch way back in 1973…well, Gene is doing voiceover work for Lowes Hardware commercials.

Some Great sleazeball performances by Lynch:

* The Ninth Configuration
* Invasion USA (opposite Chuck Norris)
* Savage Dawn (opposite George Kennedy)
* Lockdown
* Halloween (2007 version)
* Mil Mascaras vs. the Aztec Mummy (where he shocks us by playing the President of the United States)

There is an old saying that goes something like this: you have to have seen it to have to believe it. What this means, is that watching things modifies how your belief system works. For example, if you grow up in an abusive household, chances are you are going to be abusive as well. I am very aware that this is a generalization, but as I grow older, I find that generalizations have a way of increasingly being truer than they were just a few years before. I like to apply my generalizations to several parts of my life as well, viewing actions, stories, and even others through a fine mesh that I like to think strains things in a slewed manner towards my sweeping opinions.

You will, if you live long enough, probably do this too. No matter how you try to play it, no matter how you allow your youth to deny it, when you become a fat old fart, you are going to start thinking that the younger people in your life are crazy…and not just in a “normal crazy” manner, oh no. you are going to see these young punks come up with all these ideas, ideas that they love, and ideas that you think are totally moronic. It’s just the normal progression of life. Back when the Sex Pistols were new, parents reviled them, saying they were damaging to children and to values the world over…now they are accepted and gasp, dare I say it, given honors for their music.

It is good that I mention a media figure and how the conception of it (or them) has changed over time. I want to talk about media here. I watch a lot of movies. How many? In the last year, I have downloaded 574 individual full length films and by a rough estimate (I put the ones I have watched into a separate folder), I have watched 540 of them. This translates to about one and a half movies per day, every day, for the last year. since I am so high on my self-made ideas concerning generalization, it is only natural that I apply it to this large portion of my life.

This series of articles are about character actors. Character actors are actors who are described as bit players, secondary parts, and individuals not integral to the part, while also helping the plot move along. Type-cast cookie cutter parts are made for character actors. But sometimes, despite the writer’s shackles and the director’s prison-like ideas, a talent will rise above the constraints that the term “character actor” bestows upon the poor individuals, rising like some modern day Phileas Fogg clinging to his balloon. And like Fogg, when they do this, they are catapulted into brilliant careers that, literally speaking, are comparable to brilliant careers.

Now I want to shift your thinking a bit here. At first we were talking about character actors, which is fine, but I want to narrow this chat down a bit, to focus our mind’s laser beam a bit more acutely so that we can excise out just a different chunk, a similar chunk yet darker, of the whole character actor “body.” You may know of several character actors, guys like Alec Baldwin or Donald Pleasance, guys who, despite their grand talents, just didn’t have that UMPH, just didn’t have that one thing to hurl them over the precipice of “Leading Man” and then shoot them into true Hollywood stardom. But these two examples, these guys are what the industry calls “straight men.” They play (normally) the guy (or gal, as the case permits) off to the side who, despite doing a great job, is only there to expedite the plot or to serve as cinematographical cannon fodder. The beam I am using wants to cut further than that and wants to cut out the really sinister guys. The guys who give your girlfriends the creeps as you drive them home from the theater. The guys who might have been good looking if they didn’t have “rapists eyes” or that long scar running down their right cheek. I want to talk about Sleazeballs.

These guys may or may not be the “almost leading man,” and they may or may not be central to the plot. But somehow, their looks, talent, or a combination of both literally drips like a poison off of the screen and into you, sickening yet causing you to wonder; just why is this guy so despicable? Why does this guy make my skin crawl like I have just seen a spider in the shower stall? Why is this guy so seducing, yet so ugly at the same time?

So with much ado, and a lot of typing I have found myself here, introducing my first sleazeball character actor, and that actor is: Jack Elam.

Jack Elam was a character actor sleazeball who’s walleyed appearance immediately propelled him away from ever playing good guy or hero roles and accelerated him straight into the world of bad guys. He mostly starred in westerns and early on in his illustrious career, usually played one of the thugs that the main antagonist would employ to do his dirty work. Conversely, in real life, he was a kind man who was remembered as a great friend. But that’s not the point!

He played several emotionless killers, most notably “Snaky” in the western classic “Once Upon A Time In The West” but as he was used more and more (in both film and television) in humorous roles it was discovered that Jack had a (forgive the bad rhyme) knack for the comedic. Roles for such Disney classics as “Hot Lead, Cold Feet” and “The Apple Dumpling Gang” cemented his longevity in both acting career and genre.

One of his most remarkable performances was his portrayal of drug abusing Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing in the 1981 comedy “The Canonball Run” where he held his own against such acting talents as Dom DeLuise, Dean Martin, Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Sammy Davis Jr., and Roger Moore. If you haven’t seen this film, do so, as it is a great and sweeping comedy that will have you gaping at all of the cameo appearances that occur during its 95 minute run. Also, look for Adrienne Barbeau in her souped up suit while she drives a Lamborgini at scandalous speeds.

Sadly, Elam left our lives in 2003 after a life of entertainment that spanned 50 years and over 100 full length features. Since his television appearances are beyond count, here are some of his movies, should you be inclined to check out some of his work. Within this list, I have tried to give equal time to the sleazeball as well as the funnyman roles that both worked together to make Jack Elam famous:

* The Far Country
* Jubal
* The Way West
* Once Upon a Time in the West
* Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County
* Hannie Caulder
* The Apple Dumpling Gang and The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
* Cannonball Run and Cannonball Run II
* Suburban Commando

Josie

Josie was a big girl. She had a grease burn pattern of freckles that only splayed out on her nose and under her pale green blue eyes. Her hair was that half way point between red-ish and brown-ish, and looked like kinked wire most of the time, and most especially when she was huffing and puffing at work. Like most girls of her size, she had a tendency to be bossy. “Do-this-Do-that, yarr,” was something you could find coming out of her mouth as she pulled a hank of hair out of her face while she hefted boxes or tossed items onto a cart. She wasn’t mean, just had a misunderstanding with the world that made you think she was always demanding. I am sure she had a heart of gold someplace inside there, but to tell you the truth, I had never seen it. Our relationship was purely a business coupling. She was my frozen food manager and I was her boss. When time came around when she needed something, she had a way of turning you off by challenging you for it rather than just asking nicely. But for all that, I understood her as well as I understood any woman, and I thought of her as one of the people on my team whom which I could “go to” when I really needed a job to get done.

“Trucks comin in, boss,” her wide, almost child-like, face popped into my office. “I’m gonna grab a couple of these guys off the front end to help me unload it…six hundred piece truck…”

I didn’t even bother looking out the door to see if the front end was busy or not, it didn’t matter. She was going to take the people she needed regardless of the situation going on out there, and if I were to argue, it would have only made matters worse. I got up to go help the cashiers and baggers if they needed it while she physically maneuvered two of my cart boys towards the back room and the waiting truck.

“Gotta big one,” she said to one of the boys (who looked scrawny next to her presence and girth). “You sure you can pull a twelve hundred pound pallet off a reefer truck?” She added a hard clap on the back that only added to her jovial sarcasm towards work, towards men, and towards life most of the time.

When you meet a girl like Josie, you think they never cry. They have this untouchable attitude and swagger that belies the fact that at one point in time, during their lives of “being one of the boys,” they were somebody’s pretty little girl. I knew this about Josie. I knew that once, not quite so long ago, her mother had dressed her in lace, had gotten her pictures taken at Wal-Mart for framed nostalgia hung on the walls in the hallway. I knew that Josie had wished to be Sleeping Beauty, waiting for her kiss. She cried all right, and she cried just like any other woman. Because of this, I was the one who let her be the bossy slob she wanted to be.

On the day that Josie died, I found out that she had been involved with someone. I hadn’t known about it up until that point, but while she was in the hospital, her lover, one of my butchers, had called to let us know the bad news. From what I gather now, they had been pretty happy together and had plans to be married. Tentative plans yes, but there had been some discussion, so I guess it wasn’t just another one of those “work romances” that always ends badly while someone gets fired. He was a tall skinny guy who didn’t look like he belonged with her. In every way, he was the exact opposite of her.

He has this almost-handlebar mustache that he would finger nervously when she was around. Listening to her boss him as he cut meat in the prep room had almost cost him his hand, but he didn’t seem to mind. She was talking loud enough that you could hear her out on the sales floor and he was using the band saw to cut country style pork ribs. I only mention that it was country pork ribs because there is a spur of bone in that cut that is always tricky even if you are using a band saw. She was doing her brassy thing while he wasn’t paying attention, the saw caught on the bone and he ran his hand into the thing at an odd angle. Only a last second jerk had saved the hand, but he did manage to cut the top of two fingers and his thumb off…at a diagonal. Later, they put the pieces back on and he was fine.

So they had been lovers and it seemed that things were okay. Again, I have to stress that I had no knowledge of this, and was completely in the dark when the butcher called me on the phone. Josie and her lover liked to go horseback riding. Her grandfather had died and left here about thirty acres and a barn, and the two would spend weekends out there, getting drunk, riding the horses, and doing whatever an odd couple like that does under the sheets. He called me and his voice was even more shakier than normal.

“I-I-I d-don’t know how to tell you this, but Josie…she’s really sick. She’s in the emergency room and the doctors have given her a double mastectomy. “
“What???” why would they give her a double mastectomy? What was really wrong with Josie?

The butcher tried to explain to me as best he could what had happened. It seems that Josie had been climbing over a barbed wire fence on her farm and had scraped herself just under her pendulous and gargantuan boobs. The scratch, just a minor irritation, had been ignored and pretty much forgotten. A month went by and since she was no longer thinking about it, she didn’t think that her stomach pains had anything to do with the old rusty wound. But something was wrong with it. Some microbe or virus was on that barbed wire and the scrape had provided an entrance for it to enter her body. He was crying now, making little sobs into the phone. He then hung up, leaving me in my office, wondering what the hell was going on.

A few hours later, the phone rang again and all he could blurt out was “She’s…dead…” and then a nurse was on the phone, telling me what had happened. Somehow, horse manure had gotten on the fence and in that manure, there was a flesh eating virus that had attacked her through the scratch. Since it had taken so long to become a problem, nobody was thinking about the scratch at all, and were worried that something sinister was going on here at the store. More specifically, in her freezer. The county health guys came out and shut down my frozen food section for a month while we all got over the shock and loss we were feeling. Josie might not have been the nicest person in the world, or the most generous, but she was one of us and even if we didn’t like her, she was part of the team.

During the double mastectomy, air had gotten into the wound and sped up the flesh eating process. The doctors, trying to race ahead of the ravenous virus, quickly amputated her arms and legs. It was like they were taking her apart to keep her alive. The virus got into her heart and liver and she just faded out of life within a few short moments.

The store sent a few of us to the funeral and of course the casket was closed. It was a bright spring day and there wasn’t any of that cliché dark rain falling. The butcher stood at the end of the group, not saying anything and avoiding Josie’s family. Then we all left to go back to the store. When I got back, I put my jacket over the back of my chair and walked back to the freezer in the back room. I opened the door, breaking the county health department’s yellow seal tape, as a cloud of fog rolled out into the back room like a spooky wave. I walked into the freezer and wondered what I was going to do next.

One of my high school math teachers was a retired marine who had served a few tours in Vietnam. He was a really likable guy who often told funny stories about the screw ups and practical jokes he saw perpetrated by many of the men with which he served. I say that he was likable because I want to point out that this guy was a firecracker. He could go off at any time on any person when the topic of death in Vietnam was raised. It was an odd juxtaposition; one minute he would be laughing and telling stories about how his company commander had bollixed an order form so that instead of the intended 1000 telephone poles, 1 million of the things had appeared at camp, to the next minute when some dumbass would ask him how many people he had killed while “in country.”

Doing that was like punching him in the stomach. He didn’t like to remember all the gruesome stuff that went on over there. He dealt with the monsters in his past by only remembering the good times. This was true for my four years in high school except for once. One time he slipped and talked about the death of one of his buddies in Vietnam, and when he told it, there wasn’t the tiniest bit of humor or that gleam that came to his eyes when somebody mentioned telephone poles.

He began his story by hitching up his pants and then casually tossing the chalk he constantly carried onto his bare, almost obsessively Spartan desk. The original question had been raised by one of the students: Should I buy a motorcycle?

Well, he said, you may like the idea of motor cycles, but let me tell you-hitch of the pants again-I had a friend die in Vietnam because of a motorcycle…

At the sound of the words “die” and “Vietnam” the class grew instantly quiet as if frozen by some glacier of grisly interest. The same kind of unmoving and uncaring stares you see when people go by a car wreck in slow motion. The class knew something was up, all those frozen eyes were on the math teacher.

“My buddy,” he began, “was in such-in-such company, doing work for such-in-such division, while also running errands and notes from such-in-such platoon to such-in-such commander. While I was on duty watching the camp’s main border at a checkpoint, he raced up to me on one of those army green painted motorcycles that you can't tell who made. He wanted to stop off at my guard shack to grab a couple of smokes for his trip. “Going up to such-in-such today, want me to grab you a case of beer or something?” he asked the young math teacher. “Nah, “ the teacher continued, “but maybe you could bring back a few of them such-in-such whores or something?” My teacher was always saying something about the whores in Vietnam, but I think he just did it to shock the young suburban kids who he was teaching.

“I dug a few cigarettes out of my pocket and gave them to my buddy. He stuck them in a pocket on his arm and then fetched out his army issue motorcycle helmet. This helmet was one of those kinds of helmets that has a small ridge just above the forehead and underneath that, a face visor that covered the wearer from the forehead on down to the chin. He revved the motorcycle’s engine once, grinned at me even though I couldn’t see his face, you just knew it was a grin because his eyes crinkled. Then he put his foot up on the peg and sped off down the gravel and dirt road that led away from me, my guard shack, and the camp. Routine business, be back in two hours.”

This is where that firecracker change came over my math teacher. This was where you could tell he was angry and sad and mad all at once about something that happened back then, and he was uncomfortable about it to the point where his skin turned a shade of Fourth of July. He started gesturing with his hands while he talked, it looked like he was trying to shake hands with an invisible somebody and it looked like he was swatting at invisible flies all at once. “The thing was,” he said cautiously, “was that it wasn’t routine business that day. For some reason, after eleven months of no action and absolutely no excitement, the Viet Cong decided to launch a mortar attack on our camp. The attack probably lasted only fifteen minutes, but when bombs are going off and buildings are getting pulverized and all you hear is the thud and thump of those mortars, everything slows down. It felt like that mortar attack took an hour at least. My buddy was on his way home during that attack. No, he wasn’t hit by a mortar…that would be stupid and have no point in me telling you to be cautious about motorcycles. So he was driving down the dirt and gravel road that led into the camp. I could see him from my crouched position in the guard shack, he looked to be going about sixty miles an hour and by the way he was jerking the bike around the road, I could tell he was having trouble keeping control of the thing on the slippy-slidy gravel.

My math teacher paced back and forth, more talking to himself than the class now. I pictured a young man, his blue eyes peeping above the sill of a window in a guard shack as he watched a distant man who was racing down a road on a motorcycle. The eyes were wide and incredulous as they roved under the green helmet he was wearing. A look of total concentration on his face, as if he were willing the motorcycle to maintain control and make it back in once piece.

"A bunch of things happened all in the same few seconds,” the teacher said. “My buddy’s front wheel hit a mortal round hole in the dirt of the road while at the same time, the back wheel got out from under him and started to slide sideways. I actually stood up in the guard shack to watch the accident even though there were explosions going off around the compound. Machine gun fire rattled the panes of glass in the windows. “

“The bike jumped,” he motioned with his hands as he said this. “It didn’t lurch forward or anything like that, it just hopped upwards like it was surprised or something. My buddy looked like a bronco rider in a rodeo. His hands left the handlebars and his body was thrown forward by the speed and force that the bike had once had. He did a flat somersault in midair and landed about fifty feet from the bike, which was dumbly staggering around on bent wheels until it hit the grass on the side of the road and collapsed in the ditch there. But my buddy didn’t just land. He bounced. It was like watching a skipping stone as it flashes across a pond. His body shuddered each time he struck the dirt and gravel and his head rebounded each time he hit. Somebody grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me back down into the security of the guard shack.”
“I struggled amid the broken glass, flying papers, and upturned furniture of the shack as a scrambled to the open doorway. I was trying to see if I could peep around the doorway. Maybe my buddy was okay. He had taken a horrible spill, but he did have helmet on and that was something…right?”

“Within five minutes of his wreck, Sarge Such-in-such came running to the shack, he told us that the helicopters had spotted the enemy’s nest and was really pouring it on. The all-clear should be sounded in a few minutes. I didn’t wait that long. I got up off the floor and sprinted down the dusty road trying to get to my buddy before somebody in my unit stopped me. Nobody did and I got to his stretched-out form. Underneath the cracked visor, dirty with scratches and grime from his journey, I could see that his eyes were open. He had a strange grin on his face that didn’t look quite right. People talk about how clowns are creepy and it think it’s because of the smile they paint on. Well, my buddy’s smile wasn’t quite that creepy, but it still looked out of place on his normally brown alive mug.” My teacher took a short deep breath, more like an involuntary gasp than anything involving respiration. Then quit his pacing and turned to face the class, head on. All the firecracker red had left his face. The explosion was over, and you could only see the pale refection of a man who has gone beyond normal limits and is pushed out into the grim savagery of reality. He spoke slowly now, measuring each word.

“My first thought was to look after his wounds. After a quick glance, I saw that most of the blood on his uniform was from road rash. Bits of gravel stuck into his bare arms and he was going to walk with a limp for a while because he had landed badly on his side. No big deal, anybody who has ever ridden a motorcycle knows you are going to take a spill or two, and you will probably eat some gravel at some point. Then I figured I had better get the helmet off of his head. He wasn’t moving but I was sure he was alive and was going to need all the air he could get. I struggled with the straps for a few seconds before bringing my service knife-we called them k-bars-up to his chin. I cut the strap and while my hand was carefully pulling it out of the way, I noticed it was damp with tacky blood.”

“Oh shit,” I thought to myself, and my teacher actually said “oh shit” to the classroom. Yet another boundary we had crossed that day. “Oh shit,” my teacher thought to himself. He may have cut an artery or a vein in his neck. He told us that he searched around the throat of his friend and found nothing. Now was time to get that helmet off.

“I put my hands on the helmet like you would do anytime you were taking one off. I put my palms against the sides with my fingers towards the back. I could feel the dirt of the road under his helmet, but I could also feel that the helmet had been slammed pretty hard. Bits of plastic and jagged edges stuck out from the back of the thing, so I gave a quick tug and took the whole thing off his head.”

At this point, his voice was barely above a growl. The whole class was zeroed in on him and giving him undivided attention.

“When I got the helmet off, it was the only thing holding his skull together.” The class physically reacted as one. Just like a being repulsed, the students all moved backwards and gasped at the same time. It was involuntary. My teacher finished by telling us that the only thing left of his buddy’s head was a leaky puddle of destroyed tissue and bone…and only a barely recognizable face that was flattened out against that “god damned” road in Vietnam.

"And that is why I wont ride a motorcycle..."

Of all the stories I was told by that teacher, that was the only one that had any instance of sadness, regret, fear, and anger in it. And while the story was far too gruesome to be one that you would tell your students, nobody ever complained. Nobody ever bothered that teacher about “how many kills he had made over in ‘Nam,” and as if a little spark of sadness gives respect, it also humbled and made him more real.