Legendary screenwriter William Goldman once said of Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” Time only seems to vindicate him further, with a few exceptions.
Chief among those exceptions was Philip Baker Hall, who, in his screen persona, was something like the last dependable man in America. Hall, who died on June 12 at the age of 90, was widely admired by critics for his frequently fleeting but always unforgettable appearances in a series of classic films, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Yet it wasn’t Hall’s productivity that stood out as much as his surprising constancy. To be sure, anyone who acted as long and as often as he did is bound to accumulate a diverse array of credits, but there was definitely a Hall type: a man who spoke decisively, acted prudently, and gave an impression of unquestioned proficiency. With his firm baritone, unsentimental bearing, and unsmiling countenance, Hall managed to persuade moviegoers that he was a gambler with a storehouse of tricks (Hard Eight), a porno-theater mogul (Boogie Nights), and a handwriting expert on the trail of the Zodiac killer (Zodiac).
No matter what Hall said, we tended to nod our heads, even when, in a memorable guest spot on a 1991 episode of Seinfeld, he was cast as a fast-talking, finger-pointing, trenchcoat-wearing New York Public Library “investigations officer” on the hunt for delinquent book-borrowers. “’71 — that was my first year on the job,” says Hall’s character, Lt. Joe Bookman. “Bad year for libraries. Bad year for America. Hippies burning library cards. Abbie Hoffman telling everybody to steal books.” Delivering such lines with straight-faced conviction, Hall confers his signature world-weary seriousness of purpose to a one-note character.
That Hall invested conviction in roles that other actors might have passed on or called in reflected a thespian whose climb was more like a slog. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1931 to a factory worker named William and his wife Berdene, Hall studied acting at the University of Toledo and spent years toiling on the stage before gaining a foothold in Hollywood. In the 1970s, film and TV gigs started to trickle in, but industry enthusiasm was low. As the actor recalled in a 2018 interview in the Washington Post, an agent at the time leveled with him: “What I see is a middle-aged guy, not especially good-looking, short, over 40.”
It was already Hollywood’s loss for not finding roles for Hall earlier: His deadpan, been-there, done-that presence could have played well on the classic TV series of the 1960s, such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Hawaii Five-O — just as it later did on Family Ties, Matlock, and L.A. Law, each among the shows in which Hall appeared in the wake of his first major opportunity on the big screen: In 1984, immortalizing a role he had first had on the stage, Hall starred as Richard Nixon in Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. The film is among the best of its star and director — though, truth to tell, Hall’s raving, hysterical, worked-up performance is quite far from the persona contemporary audiences later came to know.
Over time, Hall’s visibility increased. He was an IRS official in Say Anything and the police commissioner in Ghostbusters II. In the early 1990s, having taken note of Hall’s underutilized skill set, aspiring filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson fashioned a lead role for an actor who had mostly been confined to bits. “He was a fan of my work, so how could I not like him?” Hall told the Washington Post. Anderson’s feature film Hard Eight, starring Hall as a wisdom-dispensing gambler, seemed to exist in an alternate cinematic universe in which it was a given that this aging actor had, all along, shared the screen with, and in fact stolen scenes from, the likes of co-stars Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, and John C. Reilly. Alas, more star parts were not in the offing — this is ageist Hollywood, after all — but plenty of showy supporting turns followed, including in Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia, as the sheriff in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, and as Everett Dirksen in John Frankenheimer’s Path to War.
Amazingly, Hall never received an Oscar nomination, not even a supporting one, but his loss means that the screen has just become a little less credible and a lot less authentic. Earlier generations had Walter Cronkite as the voice to be trusted no matter what. We had Philip Baker Hall.
Peter Tonguette is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
