Stephen King once said of novelist Donald E. Westlake that on sunny days he wrote comic crime novels under his real name about a hapless crook named Dortmunder, and on dark and rainy days he wrote serious pulp fiction under the pen name of Richard Stark about a hardboiled heister named Parker. At one point in his career, Westlake commanded more money as Stark than he did under his real name, and Parker was one of the most popular characters in the crime genre.

No less than six movies (not to mention a new series of graphic novels) have been based on the Parker books, beginning in 1967 with director John Boorman’s brilliantly stylized thriller “Point Blank,” based the first book in the series, “The Hunter,” and starring Lee Marvin as the relentless and remorseless anti-hero (with his name changed to Walker). The same book was adapted for the screen again in 1999 with less artistic success as “Payback,” starring Mel Gibson in the re-named character of Porter.

 Director John Flynn’s “The Outfit” (1973), starring Robert Duvall as Parker (changed to Macklin) is an obscure gem worth seeking out, as is French director Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in U.S.A.” (1966), which is a very loose (and unauthorized) adaptation of “The Jugger.” A little-seen 1983 Canadian film treatment of “Slayground,” starring Peter Coyote as Parker (changed to Stone), is incoherent and unwatchable.

Which brings us to 1968′s “The Split” (now manufactured on demand by Warner Archives at wbshop.com) starring Jim Brown as Parker (renamed McLaine). It’s based on “The Seventh,” about the robbery of a professional football stadium’s box office receipts in the midst of a big game. Somehow, screenwriter Robert Sabaroff and director Gordon Flemyng managed to drain the story of all the noir atmospherics and suspenseful unpredictability that were hallmarks of the Parker books. The sunny L.A. locations look bleached out and storyline is as routine and clichéd as a ’60s made-for-TV movie. But it’s interesting to watch the stellar cast that includes Julie Harris, Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Jack Klugman, Warren Oates, James Whitmore and Donald Sutherland, all at their sinister best in spite of the mediocre script and direction.

 The period fashions and funky Quincy Jones soundtrack are a lot of fun, too. And “The Split” has the distinction of being the first movie to earn an “R” rating under the then-new MPAA system, but the violence that branded it is pretty tame by today’s standards, and especially Stark standards.

— Gene Triplett

He was easygoing and charming on camera, but private and reserved off. He was born in Canada but became such an iconic figure on screen that fellow actor Sidney Poitier said of him, “He is a genuine American movie star.”

Glenn Ford might not have gained the lofty status and respect of such Hollywood titans as Clark Gable, James Stewart or Henry Fonda, but in a career that featured roles in such classics as “The Blackboard Jungle,” “Gilda,” “Jubal,” “The Big Heat,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” he certainly ranks among cinema’s most versatile, durable and endearing leading men.

Now Ford, one of the last old-school leading men of Hollywood’s defunct studio system, gets an intimate insider’s biography, “Glenn Ford: A Life” (University of Wisconsin Press, $24.95), written by the actor’s only child, Peter Ford.

Son of Glenn Ford and dancer Eleanor Powell, Peter Ford writes an expectedly celebratory account of his father’s eventful life and career. But this biography isn’t merely a PR job, as the writer offers up an honest and clear-eyed assessment of his father’s shortcomings, as well as his impressive career.

Drawing on the Ford family collection of diaries, letters, audiotapes, unpublished reminiscences and rare candid photographs – plus interviews with family, friends and professional colleagues – Peter Ford assembles a remarkably frank and revealing portrait of his father as a driven actor, an American patriot and military veteran, a loving family man and a mercurial Hollywood man about town.

While much of the book focuses on Ford’s 60-plus years in movies, his versatile array of roles from westerns to romantic comedies to hardboiled crime pictures and dramas, and his long marriage to tap-dance star Powell, the son doesn’t blink at revealing his father’s wild side and many infidelities.

At various times, Ford was linked to such leading ladies as Joan Crawford, Dinah Shore, Brigitte Bardot, Connie Stevens, Debbie Reynolds, Hope Lang and Judy Garland. The biographer gives special attention to his father’s romantic roundelay with an aggressive and somewhat predatory Bette Davis.

But Ford’s decades-long, on-and-off relationship with “Gilda” co-star Rita Hayworth gets the deepest attention from the author. Apparently, it was a serious, tumultuous and complex relationship that eventually drew the ire of other Hayworth paramours and mentors, including Orson Welles and Columbia’s tyrannical Harry Cohn.

Eventually, Ford would marry four times – his 16-year marriage to Peter’s mother lasting the longest – and his stormy marital record finally left him emotionally and financially bankrupt.

But in the book’s intimate recollections by scores of colleagues – co-stars including Poitier, Ernest Borgnine, Shirley Jones, James Whitmore, Carl Reiner and Angela Lansbury and directors Vincent Sherman, Delbert Mann and Richard Donner – we get a picture of a mercurial personality who was very different in private than he was in public.

It’s a fact that Glenn Ford himself acknowledged in a 1949 interview quoted in the biography, where he said, “We are all three people – the person we think we are, the person the world thinks we are and the person we really are.” Apparently, Ford packed a lot of living into his eventful life.

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

It’s that time of year when movie critics everywhere are busy with bookkeeping, tallying up 2010’s screen offerings and issuing their Top 10 lists.

But dictating the year’s “best” films is so often a rote ritual, driven by urgencies of the upcoming awards season and marked by a certain inevitability as studios march out their prestige pictures and promotional blitzes to generate maximum holiday fanfare. Thus, many top 10 lists are necessarily top-heavy with these inescapable Oscar contenders.

The fated suspects show up on every list – “The Social Network,” “Inception,” “The King’s Speech,” “Black Swan” and so on. And rightfully so. These are indeed among the year’s indisputable best. (* Below, see the 10 best voted by members of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. A worthy roster indeed.)

In a mild act of rebellion, we hereby issue our highly subjective list – not of “bests” but of “favorites.” These movies might not show up on others’ lists and they might not figure into the manufactured hype of the pre-Oscar run-up, but they’re movies we found among the most thoughtful, stimulating and/or fun and entertaining in 2010.

Here they are, in no particular order:

- “Metropolis” – Though it was originally released in 1928, the restored version with 25 minutes of formerly lost footage makes Fritz Lang’s futuristic silent masterpiece feel finally complete, like a brand new film. Its release was truly one of the year’s highlights.

- Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”) – Taken individually, the films of this Swedish-language trio had their excesses and lapses. But collectively, their chilly Nordic noir style, psychological complexity, exhilarating thrills and indelible characters added up to a relentlessly haunting and compelling time in the theatrical darkness.

- “The Ghost Writer” – Roman Polanski’s personal and legal demons notwithstanding, the Oscar-winning maker of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” showed he still has the master’s touch with this cool, cunning and polished political thriller that packed in loads of sinister, Hitchcockian intrigue and a memorable climactic wallop.

Ewan McGregor

- “My Dog Tulip” – While “Toy Story 3” will certainly garner the lion’s share of animation kudos, this modest, hand-drawn treat for canine lovers (originally released in 2009 but just now making U.S. rounds) adapts British academic J.R. Ackerley’s wise and prickly 1956 memoir of life with his exuberant German shepherd. It’s a human-scale story that’s a tad more sophisticated, rough-edged and offbeat than the broad-stroke, family-friendly stuff that studio animation units have polished to glossy perfection.

- “Leaves of Grass” – Tulsa native Tim Blake Nelson corrals an unruly passel of influences – classics, philosophy, spiky comedy, bleak drama, the Coen brothers – to produce a smart, funny and bracingly irreverent journey back to the quirky offshoots of his Okie roots. All the parts come together neatly in this light-dark film (the title itself suggests a heady dichotomy – wacky tobacky or the words of Walt Whitman?), which is graced with an uncanny duel performance by star Edward Norton.

Norton and Norton

- “Restrepo” – Few films capture the gut-level jolts of panic, fear, exhilaration, macho humor and numbing boredom that informs this stunning documentary which charts a year with one American military platoon posted in Afghanistan’s deadliest valley. Writer Sebastian Junger (author of “The Perfect Storm”) skips the politics of the war and concentrates on the daily grind of the combat soldier. The result is harrowing and enlightening in a way that makes us think about the war viscerally, without the petty fog of punditry.

- “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” – Comedienne Joan Rivers – acerbic, opinionated and strident – is not everyone’s cup of tea. But in this nakedly revealing documentary she emerges as both a savvy and vulnerable survivor, a tough woman with a grinding work ethic and an endless (some would say crass) hunger for celebrity. It parts the curtain of celebrity culture, and what it shows us isn’t always pretty but is always funny and thought-provoking.

- “Red” – This is how you make a formula action blockbuster (with a savvy AARP vibe). Surrounding the droll Bruce Willis with a nicely aged supporting cast – Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Richard Dreyfuss, Ernest Borgnine – this swift, engaging spy romp expends loads of bullets and bombs in service of pure popcorn entertainment and makes other blockbusters seem puny and pompous by comparison.

- “Inside Job” – No one will confuse this pithy piece of documentary journalism with popcorn entertainment. But as an exhaustive and infuriating look into the darkest heart of Wall Street greed, it’s a movie that should not be missed by Average Joes with paltry bank accounts and 401(k) retirement plans. Amoral financial “insiders’ have pushed the country to the brink of ruin while padding their pockets with obscene profits, and director Charles Ferguson’s film brings home with chilling clarity the enormity and tragedy of our badly broken banking system.

- “A Film Unfinished” – Media’s capacity to sell “the big lie” was never so profoundly and disturbingly demonstrated than in this potent documentary built around Nazi archival film supposedly depicting the daily lives of happy and well-off Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. Director Yael Hersonki reassembles all of the SS propaganda footage (the film unfinished) and contrasts it with recollections of Holocaust survivors and a chastened SS cameraman to create of vivid, horrific portrait of genocide unfolding.

* OFCC Top 10:

“The Social Network” (best of the year)
“Inception”
“Black Swan”
“The Fighter”
“True Grit”
“The King’s Speech”
“Toy Story 3”
“Winter’s Bone”
“The Kids Are All Right”
“127 Hours”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Being John Malkovich – consummate film and stage actor, theatrical impresario, opera director, disco owner, clothing designer, international bon vivant – is clearly something the man relishes while not taking himself too seriously.

While mixing it up with journalists during a press day hosted by Summit Entertainment on the release of his latest film, “Red,” Malkovich proved himself a man for all seasons while spanning such topics as his acting philosophy; his love of costumes, props and fashion; his attitude toward directors and his surprisingly enthusiastic embrace of critics.

For “Red,” he plays Marvin Boggs, a deeply paranoid, ex-CIA operative who is forced out of reclusive retirement by his former, over-the-hill colleagues when they themselves become assassination targets in a dastardly government conspiracy. Malkovich, who joins an all-star ensemble featuring Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, Mary-Louise Parker and Ernest Borgnine, waxed on about the pleasure of watching other actors work.

“I thought this film would be absolutely fun,” he said. “All of the cast I knew slightly. Helen I knew more, but I have run across Morgan several times when I lived in New York and we both just did theater, and I always found him very charming and fun to be around. And Bruce I knew probably the least, although I’d come across Bruce a couple of times and had nice chats with him before. They’re all pros.

“I like watching all these people. They know what they’re doing,” he continued. “Of course, I’ve seen Richard Dreyfus in tons of things, but working with him was maybe one of the bigger surprises because having never worked with him you really see why he was one of the biggest movie stars in the entire world. He’s absolutely fantastic to watch, and I think all of us felt that way. Not that we were shocked or stunned, but I think we all felt that way, that it was tremendous fun to watch Richard.”

Malkovich said he was only vaguely familiar with the graphic novel on which “Red” is based, and he grinned slyly when told it was much darker and more violent than the movie.

“So it’s more a violent book than comic book,” he quipped. “I met the author, but I didn’t read it. The truth is, unless you’re involved in the adaptation or unless you have sufficient lead time and you’re in a position with the people producing it, it doesn’t do any good to read a book (of the source material) because what you’re going to be making is the screenplay.”

On his approach to film acting:

“All I do is read the screenplay many, many times, and then when you show up you get a sense of what people are doing,” he explained. “And I always look at the whole thing, not really what I’m doing because whatever I’m doing will happen anyway. I look at the whole thing and see basically – are you a point or a counterpoint in this scene, in this story, at this moment? That’s really how I look at things.

“People often ask me about roles,” he said. “I’ve done a few films where I’ve had a fantastic role, and even maybe I was OK in it. But if the film isn’t good you’re much better off not having made it. Even if it was a wonderful role. If the film doesn’t work it’s just a big waste of time and money and effort.”

From his background in theater, Malkovich said he developed a skill in films of using props and costumes to distinguish characters.

“I have a tendency to have very good relationships with costumers,” he said. “Generally, I collaborate quite closely with them, and even have several very good friends who are costumers. But obviously it’s a very important element of what I do. Or it could be in collaboration with the makeup artist or wig maker or whoever it is. Anything that has some impact in a visual term, because that’s the first thing an audience sees. I spent a lot of time with the armorers on this movie discussing the various weapons.”

When he was told that Helen Mirren said she based her character, a sniper turned domestic diva, on Martha Stewart, Malkovich laughed.

“I actually base all my characters on Martha Stewart,” he said. “Somehow people lack the discernment to have ever grasped that. That’s very funny, what Helen said. That is really good.”

Malkovich said he has always had an affinity for clothes, and that has allowed him to broaden his horizons beyond acting.

“I’ve always loved clothes and fabric and details,” he said. “I always liked to look at photos of people dressed up when I was a kid. But not even dressed up in the super glamorous way but to just to see what people wore and how they presented themselves.

“ And I have for a long, long time been a fabric collector – that’s totally removed from any kind of fashion thing,” he said. “And then I spent many years working off and on in fashion. I think it’s also connected to the fact that I studied costuming and costumed in the theater. I have a very specific notion about how a thing should or shouldn’t look. I wrote and directed three little fashion films for my friend Bella Freud, an English designer, which I loved working on. I just did a lot of work in fashion over the years.”

All of which, Malkovich said, lead to him creating his own fashion line.

“It’s called Technobohemian,” he explained. “I stopped a line I had four or five years ago, and for this one I’m right now working on our forth collection for fall-winter 2011. It is out of Prato, next to Florence.”

Most people would think an actor of Malkovich’s stature might be reluctant to give much control of his performances over to directors. But, he said, he enjoys being closely directed.

“Quite closely, which is what I prefer,” the actor said. “When you go into editing it’s exceedingly important that the director has a catholicity of options. I think there are basically two schools of acting – some actors are highly reticent to commit anything to celluloid that is not their choice. In other words, they have an idea about it and they want pretty much exactly that or only that.

“Now I have nothing against that,” he said. “Then, there’s probably another type of actor, which is what I am, which I would prefer that the director make clear what he wants from me. Not to the extent of being a crypto-fascist, because I’ve certainly encountered that and it’s kind of dull.

“Of course, there are directors who leave you completely alone and that can be OK, too. Really, I can go either way, or any of a hundred ways. Because my basic feeling is directing a movie is, more or less a terrible job. And why not try to be a helpful and constructive presence on the set. It’s not an easy job and that’s at least what I’ve tried to do in my career.”

Malkovich’s expansive, philosophical attitude toward his art also extends to reactions from critics. He welcomes their input, good or bad.

“One must always remember that the very same thing that causes person X to love something you do is that self-same thing that causes person Y to detest you and person S to be utterly indifferent,” he explained. “This is life. And it behooves performers starting out that once you put yourself in the public eye, there will be people who profoundly dislike you. And all gradations in between. It’s OK. When I read that review (a particularly scathing from he got recently from a Turkish critic), besides thinking it was extremely funny and well written, I could kind of agree or I could take the point. I’ve made a lifetime of fairly in-depth self-criticism, but people are welcome to help.”

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK — Imagine Martha Stewart brandishing a blazing automatic weapon, dispatching scores of marauding thugs, then going home, tying on an apron and a sweet smile and

baking a cake.

That’s essentially the image Helen Mirren had in mind when she stepped into the role of Victoria, retired British assassin turned bed-and-breakfast maven, in the star-studded action-comedy “Red.”

The Academy Award-winning actress who in 2003 was named a Dame of the British Empire for her services to drama was appropriately decked out in a royal red jacket as she faced a room full of journalists at the Four Seasons Hotel for a pre-opening news conference hosted by Summit Entertainment. “Red” (drawn from a pop-cult DC Comics graphic novel) is an old-school action picture about an aging band of former espionage operatives who are jarred out of retirement when they become targets themselves for assassination by CIA hit squads.

With an ensemble that includes Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Richard Dreyfuss, Mary-Louise Parker and Ernest Borgnine, Mirren said she was challenged to find a proper way to approach the darkly comic story and to hold her own with the powerhouse cast.

“I approached it very seriously, like I do everything,” she said. “It’s not a comedy, really. It’s a comedic action picture, or something like that. It’s always great to find someone that you can pin your character on. Obviously, in ‘The Queen’ it was very easy to find the person to pin the character on. She’s called Queen Elizabeth.

“But here I was kind of looking for who this woman might be, and then I had this flash of inspiration, and Martha Stewart came into my mind. And I thought, that’s who it is, it’s Martha Stewart,” Mirren said. “From that point on, I based everything on Martha Stewart. The hair was Martha, the color even; the clothes were Martha.

“Because I thought Martha Stewart combines this perfect combination of sweetness and gentleness and unbelievable efficiency with this kind of laser-like ability to concentrate and get the job done. And I thought that was the perfect sort of thing for Victoria.

“So I had a picture of Martha up in my trailer and in the makeup room, so every day I could look at her and be inspired,” she said. “That was just my secret story. I mean, obviously, I didn’t try and imitate her or impersonate her. That wasn’t the point. It was just getting inside of Martha.”

Mirren said the inspiration came partly from firsthand experience.

“I have been on (Martha’s) TV show, actually,” she said. “The woman is amazing. I watch her show, and I’m always sitting there with a note paper jotting down ideas. She’s an amazing fund of lovely domestic information that I love. When I was on her show, I think we repotted something — I do love gardening, and I know quite a bit about gardening — and we were repotting or regenerating geraniums or something like that. I can’t quite remember.”

Noting that this role is far afield from her 2006 Oscar-winning turn in “The Queen” and her upcoming, gender-bending performance as Prospero (or Prospera) in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Mirren said she relishes variety in her acting choices.

“The whole idea is to do something different from what you’ve just done, and, you know, ‘The Queen’ was an incredible experience for me in terms of the attention the film got,” she said. “But that kind of attention kind of sticks, and I was getting a bit sick of people saying, ‘Oh, you’re so regal and you play all these queens.’ I thought, actually I don’t play queens, I play all sorts of different things. For a long time before that I was a police detective (in PBS’s “Prime Suspect” series) and I transmogrified into ‘The Queen.’ And you just want to always try to push the last thing out of people’s minds so they can look at you in a fresh light.”

If queenly reserve defined her last major film role, Mirren said the elegant but deadly British secret service sniper Victoria constitutes an invigorating change of pace.

“It’s always great fun to do action scenes,” she said. “They’re called action scenes because they do the acting for you. You don’t have to ‘act’ in action scenes; the action does it all for you. It’s great. And I was very lucky because a lot of my action scenes were with John Malkovich, and he was just so good at all that gun stuff. He was just brilliant. I mean, John with all those big guns, you wouldn’t believe it.

“The difficult thing I found was not sticking my tongue out as I was shooting my gun,” she said. “Because you tend to go (sticks out her tongue), and they would say, ‘Helen, that doesn’t look very professional.’”

Of the film’s huge arsenal of military-grade automatic weapons, Mirren expresses a careful ambivalence.

“I don’t like to ever say a gun is fun, but guns can be fun in the sense of target practice,” she said, carefully choosing her words. “Trying to hit a target, carefully, is interesting. And I guess on that level I liked the sniper gun. I can’t believe I’m even saying that.

“But the guns I found most horrifying were these small machine guns,” she continued. “They’re terrible because you can cause such havoc. I mean I could literally wipe almost all of you out (nervous laughter from the collected press) if I had one here. I haven’t got one here. That would be a headline, wouldn’t it? But I mean, awful, these little hand machine guns that can do terrible things. Dreadful, dreadful.”

Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren

Malkovich, in a separate interview, expressed a more abstract admiration for the film’s heavy weaponry. He plays the decidedly unhinged former black-ops assassin Marvin Boggs, who appears to have a very complicated psychological relationship with his oversized guns.

“The Swedish K (M45 submachine gun) is one of the most elegant form-meets-function guns that ever existed. I wish I had one. I don’t mean right now,” Malkovich said with a sly grin. “I like to squeeze off a few rounds like everyone else. I don’t hunt or anything like that. I did show Helen the sign over the armorer’s door which said, ‘If you know how many guns you have, you don’t have enough.’ And Helen said she was going to use that for a Christmas card.

“Guns, I wouldn’t want one, really,” he continued. “But I can appreciate their designs or the elegance of a design or how it actually functions. I’m happy with that, but I’m not packing and I won’t be anytime in the near future.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Action

BY DENNIS KING

Ernest Borgnine, Bruce Willis

NEW YORK — The reluctantly retired spies of “Red” find their enforced idleness a soul-deadening curse. So when they’re forced to take up arms again to battle a nefarious government conspiracy, they are born anew.

During a recent news conference for the film hosted by Summit Entertainment, the stars were asked about their own plans or visions of the perfect retirement. Here’s what they said:

Helen Mirren, 65

“As night follows day, inevitably it will happen, but I have no idea what I’d do. I think we all have a dream of what it would be like not to work and to grow heirloom tomatoes. And I do have that dream. It would be lovely; I do love gardening and all of that. But I do love my work, and mostly I love the people that I get to work with. In my job I get to constantly meet and work with and be involved with clever, imaginative people who constantly surprise you and push you forward and inspire you. So I think I would miss that a lot if I didn’t work anymore.”

John Malkovich, 56

“My feeling about that is they’ll retire me when it’s time, and they won’t have the slightest compunction about that, nor should they. I will have lived a very, very long, incredibly blessed life. I will have had the most extraordinary, pretty much undeserved opportunities for 34 years now. I will have worked with and had the pleasure of having met some of the most incredibly interesting people and some of most gifted filmmakers around the world. So, when they retire me — yeah, sure, I’d miss the people, as Helen said. But that’ll be that. Playing golf? Probably not. I’ve never really thought about that. That’s almost an existential conundrum. Oh, I don’t see the point of it, really. It doesn’t make sense to me to retire from what you love.”

Morgan Freeman, 73

“You’re asking if I live into my 90s and can no longer get work, what would I do? I really haven’t thought about it. I’m like George Burns, I expect to be working well into my late 90s, because they’re going to figure out a way to use me, even as a corpse. But I think once you get too old to work you’re too old to do anything. So you might as well just lie down somewhere. That’s my thinking. You gotta have a reason to get up in the morning and go somewhere and do something. And if I don’t have work … well, I don’t know. The people who look forward to their retirement must not be enjoying their life nearly as much as I enjoy mine.”

Bruce Willis, 55

“I’ve never really thought about it as work. I still don’t look at what I do as work. There are a lot of people who do work hard and have really difficult jobs, and whether it’s digging holes in the ground or carrying cinder blocks up a hundred-foot ladder to a roof, that is something that feels like work to me. I think defending your country and being prepared to sacrifice your life is a really difficult job. I think actors catch a break. We have it easy. It’s a real novel thing to see actors like Eli Wallach and Ernest Borgnine still show up for work. I’m as fascinated by their talent and enthusiasm as everyone else was when they first watched them 40, 50, 60 years ago.”

Ernest Borgnine, 93

“Hey, I’m 93 years old. It’s all gold from here.”

Bruce Willis: “Wow! I’ll take 93 right now.”

Listed on wimgo Movies under Action

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – At 93, Ernest Borgnine is happy to share the secret of his success with anyone who asks.

Ernest Borgnine

“I’m the laziest man in the world. No really, I’m the laziest guy in the world,” the robust Borgnine said during a recent press conference for his new film, “Red.” “Simply because if I don’t have to move, I don’t move. But when it comes to working, and I’m in front of people like you, the bread and butter of our institution, we go on from there. This is what it’s all about, and it’s always my pleasure to sit down and talk to (the press).”

Flattery, the wily old actor knows, is the name of the game.

In a wide-ranging chat with journalists during a press event at the Four Seasons Hotel, hosted by Summit Entertainment, Borgnine waxed on about three highlights of his long and storied acting career – his Oscar-winning turn in the 1955 classic “Marty,” his tour of duty on the TV sitcom “McHale’s Navy” and his giddy gig as the voice of Mermaid Man on the animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

“Marty,” Borgnine allowed, was the role that made his career.

“For a long time I was cast as nothing more than killers. I was sticking pitchforks in Lee Marvin’s back, I was doing every kind of awful thing,” he said. “Anyway, came a time I was making a picture down in Mexico with director Bob Aldrich (‘Vera Cruz,’ 1954), and they asked if he knew anyone who’d be right for ‘Marty.’ And he said, ‘I only know one fella and that’s Ernie Borgnine.’ And they went, ‘come on. Ernie Borgnine’s a killer.’ He said, ‘No, don’t kid yourself. He’s an actor.’ And he convinced them, and they called me in.

“When we finished ‘Marty,’ we did the whole thing in 14 shooting days. We did all our work here in New York and we went home,” he continued. “And we found out to our dismay that, holy mackerel, they (the studio) wanted to take a tax loss. They only wanted to make half the picture and then shelve it. But the tax man said, ‘no, no, no, I’m sorry but they passed a law where you have to finish the picture, show it one time and then you can take your tax loss.’ So I made the picture for $5,000, believe it or not, with another promise of $5,000 more, which I never saw, if I signed a seven-year contract with (producers) Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster, so there we were.

“We finished ‘Marty,’ and the first thing you know, there was a fellow named Walter Seltzer, who I’ll never forget, who was instrumental in showing the picture, not to the big hoi-poloi but to bootblacks and to barbers and to manicurists and he worked up from there. And the first thing you know they found out about it at Toots Shorr and the boys coming in from the New York Yankees. And Joe DiMaggio was heard to say, ‘hey, this is a good picture, isn’t it.’ It came out and we won everything in sight.”

“McHale’s Navy,” which ran from 1962-66, was, Borgnine said, one of the best times he ever had as an actor.

“Listen, I want to tell you, people paid to get on our show,” he said with a hearty laugh. “We were a group that got together, and I told them, ‘Look, I’m supposed to be Lt. Commander McHale and the one thing I believe in is having fun. If you’re going to work at your trade, have fun.’ And so this is what we used to do. In those days we used to start at 8 o’clock, 7:30 sometimes. And by the time it reached noontime, we already had 12 pages of dialogue in the can and ready to go. And one time we shot the whole thing in a day and a half, believe it or not. And we were given three days to shoot it. And someone said, this is great, we don’t have to come in tomorrow. And I said, ‘come in tomorrow because if Universal finds out that you can make it in a day and a half, you’re going to make it in one day.’ So, we came back and we kept going at three days at a crack. But we had fun.

“The Navy wouldn’t have anything to do with us for the very first year, even the second,” Borgnine recalled. “They were a little queasy about it. They said, this is not the Navy. Anyway, so one day I get a call to go to Washington, to the Pentagon. And I said, ‘what do I have to do there?’ And they said I was going to have lunch with the Secretary of the Navy. So I walk into this place, beautiful offices and everything else – the Pentagon, pretty good. And I’m sitting down to this white table and sailors are serving us. And I said, ‘Sir, this is wonderful but why?’ And he said, ‘you’re the best damn recruiter we’ve ever had.’ I actually found out that there were men who had become officers in the Navy simply because they were fans of ‘McHale’s Navy.’ You can’t beat that.”

Borgnine said he has tried to stay in touch with members of his old crew over the years.

“I’m still working with Tim Conway, are you kiddin’,” he said. “He does Barnacle Boy and I do Mermaid Man in ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’ And I’ve got a SpongeBob to make next Wednesday. It’s crazy, but, hey, it’s a living.”

How did he land the SpongeBob job?

“They called me up because I had done things like ‘All Dogs Go to Heaven,’ and they liked what I did,” he said. “And they said, ‘how’d you like to do this crazy thing here?’ They didn’t call it crazy cause it’s a lot of money. And I said, ‘you bet.’ Because your voice becomes the actor.

“I remember one time giving a speech in Washington at the Press Club over there, and they asked if I’d mind very much coming out and saying hello to a bunch of little girls who had sent food over to the soldiers. I said, ‘no, not at all,’ so I walked out there and this lady told them this man has made an awful lot of movies, and I interrupted and asked how many of them had seen my movies? And all these little girls looked and me and zilch, nothing. And I said, ‘how many of you know SpongeBob?’ Yes! I said, ‘well I happen to be Mermaid Man,’ and I was home free. Couldn’t do anything wrong. It’s all in how you play the game.

“And now today I’m known from little kids to old, old people, and it’s a joy to be able to say, ‘Hi, I’m Ernest Borgnine. How are you?’”

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