The name George C. Scott has descended into the mists of obscurity, and in no time at all—he died a mere 11 years ago. Such a thing would have seemed impossible only two decades earlier, when George C. Scott was universally considered one of the great American actors and, by many, the greatest American actor. How does it happen that a reputation like Scott’s can go into permanent eclipse? What did he have when he was at his best that no longer speaks to us?
The answer is simple: Scott’s surpassing gift was his ability to convey authority of an old-fashioned sort: the intimidating, formidable, ramrod-straight authority that isn’t afraid of, and doesn’t back down in, a fight. He was, in other words, a man of a different time, unironic and unevolved, and we don’t know men like him any longer, or if we do, we make fun of them for being retrogressive and reactionary.
Like all actors of distinction, who must learn to inhabit the bodies and souls of other people, Scott was (to use Isaac Rosenfeld’s memorable words written in a different context) “as sensitive as a fresh burn,” and that sensitivity was a torment to him even though he lived an amazing American success story.
The son of a coal miner, Scott joined the Marines and then went to the University of Missouri on the G.I. Bill. His military experience and his gratitude to the United States for the relative ease with which he rose through the social strata would always separate him from the bulk of his profession; he often inveighed against Hollywood’s hostility to the Vietnam war. While he was studying journalism at Mizzou, he stumbled into the theater scene there and discovered, to his own surprise and the surprise of others, that he could do anything—classic melodrama, light comedy, bits, leads. Scott was a type that no longer exists: a middlebrow striver hungry for highbrow status. Throughout the high-water mark of his career, during the 1970s, he would leave film stardom behind and take months at a time to direct and star in revivals of very dated works by Eugene O’Neill and Noel Coward presented in relatively small New York theaters to spotty effect.
Only two years after his first professional role off-Broadway playing Richard III, Scott hit the screen as an aggressive prosecutor in Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and a Mephistophelean gambler in The Hustler (1961), winning Oscar nominations for both. While watching a screening of an awful 1966 film called The Bible, in which a magisterial Scott played the patriarch Abraham, 20th Century Fox chieftan Darryl Zanuck turned to a producer on his lot and said, “There’s your Patton.” Four years later, Scott inhabited the role of the controversial World War II general and delivered one of the cinema’s towering performances, for which he won an Oscar despite loudly refusing his nomination. The next year, he gave astounding force to the role of a suicidal Jewish doctor who works at a medical center that seems to specialize in killing patients in a brilliant black comedy called The Hospital.
Scott had everything, and he just let it all dribble away. He made only one decent movie after The Hospital—a wonderful and gentle Depression-era film parody called Movie Movie in 1978. Movie Movie was a flop, and so was everything else he touched. He played a scientist training talking dolphins to become CIA assassins in an all-time inadvertent comedy classic called The Day of the Dolphin; he played a humane German Zeppelin commander in a horrendous disaster flick called The Hindenburg. His most self-destructive act was to sink millions of his own into a cringe-inducing Social-Darwinist embarrassment called The Savage Is Loose about a shipwrecked family of three whose son decides to challenge his father for the sexual favors of the mother.
A riveting biography by David Sheward called Rage and Glory (2008), one of the best showbiz books of recent years, lays Scott bare: He was a violent alcoholic who literally drank himself to death when he refused to give up alcohol to prepare for an operation intended to sew up a hole in his heart. The drinking made him vicious—he beat up women as various as the formidable Colleen Dewhurst (twice his wife) and Ava Gardner (who tore out his heart as she had torn out Frank Sinatra’s)—even though it was intended to dull the pain. In the end, the George C. Scott story is the same old, same old: The booze he thought he needed to get through life actually impaired it, worsened it, coarsened him, destroyed his judgment, and finally killed him. Such a death dated him as surely as his pre-feminist authority did. It will take a change in the culture for us to see a George C. Scott revival anytime soon.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.
