Ode to Madeline Kahn by Craig Hammill

I’ve always wavered on weather the term “character actor” is the highest compliment or a kind of back-handed misunderstanding of some of moviedom’s greatest talents.

Gene Hackman once said something to the effect that he much preferred being a character actor to a leading man. And my sense is that he meant he had way more latitude to play good, bad, morally ambiguous than many of cinema’s leading stars who might be straight jacketed by roles the public wants them to play to the exclusion of any risk-taking.

When I think character actor, personally, I think of some of my favorite performers delivering rich, nuanced, stylized performances of tremendous artistry of which many of leading actor folks are just not capable. Character actors like Thelma Ritter (Rear Window, Pickup on South Street, The Misfits) or Takashi Shimura (Drunken Angel, Ikiru, Seven Samurai) or Gunnar Bjornstand (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Smiles on a Summer Night) or Timothy Spahl (Life is Sweet, Turner, the Harry Potter movies) have always been sheer delight for me when they show up in anything.

And it’s fascinating to see some of the world’s most talented performers like Gary Oldman, the aforementioned Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro, even Daniel Day Lewis gravitate towards character parts rather than deliver a performance you’ve already seen before.

And so all of this is to say that a few weeks ago we screened Peter Bogdonavich’s Paper Moon here at the Secret Movie Club Theater and suddenly Madeline Kahn blasted on the screen as the Depression era exotic dancer, hustler Trixie Delight and I fell in love all over again.

Madeline Kahn has such an exquisite sense of comic timing that there are comic grace notes within comic grace notes in anything she does. Maybe that’s due to her training as an opera singer. But there’s definitely a musicality and idiosynchrisy to her performances that immediately makes you smile when she enters from stage left.

In Paper Moon, she plays a hustler who connects with Ryan O Neal’s hustler and they begin a kind of relationship of love and convenience. But Trixie can never win over O’ Neal’s young partner/potential daughter Tatum O Neal because Tatum can see right through Trixie’s act.

There’s a great scene on a hill where Kahn tries to win Tatum over. And as she realizes that Tatum is the immovable object blocking Trixie’s unstoppable force Kahn switches to an honest plea than finally collapses into anger, frustration, and threats.

It’s a pretty amazing piece of acting that should be studied and celebrated.

Kahn may be most famous for her two hilarious turns in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles as a kind of Marlene Dietriech in the old west and Young Frankenstein as the Bride of Frankenstein (though she starts off as Victor Frankenstein’s amusingly distant and disinterested fiance).

In both movies Kahn is asked to play a kind of comedic sexpot/woman of the world. And in each performance she zeroes in on THAT character’s most interesting/dynamic trait. In Saddles, it’s the characters world weariness. In Young Frank, it’s the character’s seeming disdain for feckless men.

Kahn also played tons of theater as singer/performer. Her rendition of Sondheim’s Not Getting Married from Company may be one of THE definitive versions because again Kahn comes at the song as a character rather than a singer (something I think Sondheim would have valued as he took the same approach as a songwriter).

So whereas many singers thrill the audience on the virtousity of just getting through the song (it’s one of the most notoriously hard songs to sing as it requires the singer to SING extremely fast through a comic web of complex neurotic lyrics at an impossible tempo), Kahn actually finds a moment to pause and SPEAK a lyric or two. This choice is both technically brilliant (she can reset for the next part) AND allows some character nuance/shading other performers miss.

It was a tragedy when Kahn died way too early at the age of fifty seven from ovarian cancer in the mid 1990’s. Like Gilda Radner’s death, Kahn’s death denied us selfish groundlings years of more brilliant performances. But the wealth of performances Kahn did deliver is a treasure trove for any filmmaker and any performer.

Please dive into them as soon as you can. Your heart will runneth over. God bless you Madeline.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club