Gotta Smoke?

I've often asked myself what happened to Darwin Joston, who played Napoleon Wilson in John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13. To be honest, I never knew which of the two male leads was Darwin and which the one who played the police lieutenant, Ethan Bishop - a lot of cinematic references in this film, quite the film buff's paradise, in fact. It was even edited by 'John T Chance'.

I'm afraid Darwin is dead. He's been gone for 10 years, I'm sorry to say. Leukaemia. All right, he's a bit hammy sometimes in Assault, but overall it's a memorably COOL performance, full of humour and relaxed virility.

And the lines that Carpenter gives him and that he delivers with such relish are so damned quotable that I still use them 30 years after first seeing the film.

Yes, I have moments.

* * *

I don't recall any of Al Lettieri's movies where he didn't end up dead, and I've learned that the real thing claimed him a long time ago, in 1975, just after he'd begun to make his mark as a genuinely frightening heavy. Richard Boone preceded him in the tradition - remember Hombre - and I would say that Michael Madsen has taken up the mantle.

Before his brains were blown out in The Godfather by Al Pacino, Lettieri's Solozzo was a slickly coiffed, smart-suited and reasonably spoken 'businessman', but in The Getaway the suit was removed to reveal the Caliban beneath. In this movie he is pure Id. The scene in the vet's car, where he and the wife are throwing ribs at each other shows him as pure animal. He draws out the slut in the wife, drives the vet-husband to suicide and embodies Steve McQueen's fears of impotence and betrayal.

'Blood's a big expense.'

* * *

Frank Thring (1926-1994) is a villain I remember mainly from fifties epics, playing regal types - Pilate in Ben-Hur; Herod in King of Kings; gloriously over the top as King Aella in The Vikings. He seems to have loved roles where he could strike attitudes, as if he were in a silent film. More at home in a toga than a suit, tall, with a thin beard framing his face and an evil curl to the lip, he was a glorious old ham and I loved him for it.

'A long life, young Arrius, and the good sense to live it.'

'Gotta smoke?'