Every actor’s career follows its own serpentine route to a final bow. But only Alan Arkin’s career boasted an actual scene, from the 1979 comedy “The In-Laws,” of a dentist instructed by the newest and least reliable member of his extended family (Peter Falk) to “Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!” while getting shot at by would-be assassins.
Somehow the zigzagging does the trick, because it’s a comedy. And because it’s Arkin. Among the world’s great comic minimalists, or mini-maximalists, let’s say, no one could beat him for capturing so much recognizable reality inside so much insanity, while pretending everything was perfectly normal.
With Arkin, you didn’t wait for payoffs built on escalating or sudden hysteria, the way you did with Gene Wilder, his fellow comic genius. Who better to play the increasingly worried sounding board for John Cusack’s hit man in “Grosse Pointe Blank”? That 1997 comedy is a triumph of beautifully complementary casting. Two deadpans with a single thought: How can I make the other guy understand what I’m going through?
Arkin was a terrific dramatic actor, too, largely because he didn’t have to shift gears all that much. Arkin’s comic peaks, starting with his Oscar-nominated film debut as Lt. Rozanov in the 1966 “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” reside just a stone’s throw from straight drama. Very little is exaggerated or pushed with Arkin, and when he finally won his Oscar, as the rascally grandpa dance coach in “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006), it was his peers’ recognition and appreciation of all his previous triumphs en route to the win.
Arkin died at 89 Thursday, at home in Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and after his family moved to Los Angeles, Arkin tried Los Angeles City College for a while. Then Bennington College in Vermont for a while. He sang and played in the folk group The Tarriers for a while after that; they enjoyed a hit with a version of “The Banana Boat Song,” and then no more hits.
He eased into acting, though Arkin couldn’t get arrested in New York to save his fledgling actor’s life. A move to Chicago in 1960, Arkin later said, “saved my life. Literally.” Working at The Second City comedy troupe, he fell in with a choice gaggle of winners, from Paul Sand to (and especially) Barbara Harris.
“He was literally the best,” says Anne Libera, director of comedy studies for The Second City and associate professor of comedy writing and performance at Columbia College Chicago. “He was an astonishing improviser, an amazing actor, and he made discoveries that very few of his generation could touch. And that no one has made since.”
Take the 1967 film version of the thriller “Wait Until Dark,” Libera says. Arkin plays the slippery villain in that one, terrorizing Audrey Hepburn. But what and who is he? A beatnik? A guy pretending to be a beatnik? A psychopath? “He’s layering characters on top of characters,” Libera says, “and as an actor he had an ability to move behind a character’s lines and a character’s initial circumstances. He let you know that there are other worlds to explore behind the facade of every character.”
Arkin never went away for long: When movie roles grew thin, he worked more in television, and then the movie roles came back strong. He rarely seemed to be acting, and he never strained for effect. Most recently known for “The Kominsky Method,” Arkin traded fours with Michael Douglas in that Netflix series’ first two seasons, 2018-2019.
A few years before that, Arkin told an interviewer: “I’ve reached the point where, emotionally, I don’t need to act any more. Financially, I do. But emotionally, it wouldn’t matter to me if I never acted again.” Maybe that’s the key to Arkin’s special talent for simply being on camera, thinking in real time, not caring about “delivering”— and responding to his co-star at exactly the right moment. He wasn’t joke-funny, even though he won a Tony Award for his Broadway debut in a joke-funny play, “Enter Laughing.” He was human-funny.
Arkin’s first mention in the Chicago Tribune came in 1961, in one of columnist Will Leonard’s reports on the early years of the Second City ensemble. That same year, Arkin and others tried Broadway with a greatest-hits revue, “From the Second City,” which did not fly, especially in the wake of the fantastic Broadway success of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, also Chicago alums. That sort of lightning doesn’t strike twice. At the time, critic John Chapman wrote: “True satire is not poking cheerful fun at something … it must be wicked, cruel, destructive criticism, and these nice young people from Chicago aren’t up to it.”
Yes, well, Chapman was wrong on several counts with that one, whatever the show’s merits or problems. Most obviously, from the vantage point of this week: Alan Arkin was damn well up to just about anything. He was creating something new, as new and fresh and carefully observed as Nichols or May. In 1961, Arkin was only beginning to show the world how many ways there were to delineate the human condition, one pickle, one conundrum and one exquisite performance at a time.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
