What a career, what a man.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to wifey about him while watching Lonely are the Brave on daytime TV and like Olivia de Havilland who's still around and the same age as him, we reckoned he couldn't have had much longer to go.
Like his good friend and often co-star Burt Lancaster, he was one of the first big stars to break from the traditional Hollywood setup of studio control over what he could do and create his own film company back in the 50's giving himself much more control over his career, not that his choices were always the most financially rewarding.
But without the likes of him pioneering this independence, people like Cassevetes would never have been able to get off the ground.
I really liked much of his work, from as a child seeing him in the early 60's in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea at school at one of the Christmas film shows that we used to have. While not the best of the films he appeared in, in later years when viewing it again it was remarkable for the truly awful ham acting of much of the cast and the strange vaguely homoerotic outfits of the sailors of the Nautilus, but it bought him, and probably lots of kids of that era, to my attention at an early age.
This was closely followed by seeing him in the influential The Vikings, a film I still find watchable and entertaining to this day over 60 years since it was made.
Later I watched his notable films Gunfight at the OK Corral, Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Heroes of Telemark and also several of his lesser known films, all usually good quality productions.
I'd highly recomend Lonely are the Brave for the cineasts amongst you, a wonderful little elegaic black and white film about the fate of an end of an era traditional cowboy as the ranges became fenced off.
There's very few of them left now.
