53rd San Francisco International Film Festival 22 April - 6 May 2010

AWARDS/

An Evening with Robert Duvall
Friday, April 30
7:30 PM Castro Theatre
429 Castro Street (near Market)
Members $20, general $25

The Film Society honors the incomparable Robert Duvall with this year's Peter J. Owens Award. Hailed by the New York Times as "the American Laurence Olivier," Duvall's nearly 50 years on the screen has made him one of cinema's most respected and beloved actors. From his screen debut as the mysterious and misunderstood Boo Radley in the classic film To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to his indelible Academy Award–nominated performances in The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Great Santini, The Apostle and A Civil Action, Duvall has demonstrated an astonishing range and a capaciousness of spirit that have kept him in demand throughout his remarkable career. Duvall won the Best Actor Oscar for his nuanced performance in the 1983 film Tender Mercies. An onstage interview will be followed by a screening of Duvall's most recent film Get Low.

An Acting Apostle
By Pam Grady

The dialogue read beautifully on the page to film director John Hillcoat, busy adapting Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road. But when it came time to shoot the scene in which Viggo Mortensen meets a lone old man, it didn't work. It felt contrived. So Hillcoat asked Robert Duvall, the actor playing the older man, if he could find a way to make the dialogue more personal. "In one take, Duvall came up with this back story about having his own kid and not being able to talk about what happened to him. And the tears," Hillcoat recalled in Vanity Fair, "Everyone's jaw dropped, and just as soon as the scene ended, we all started cheering. That's a testament to an amazing actor."

That remarkable ability to tap into the humanity of a character and bring it strikingly alive has now sustained Duvall for over five decades and 80 movies, and counting. He remains among the busiest actors in American film, the rare performer who is both star and exceptional craftsman, moving seamlessly between lead and supporting roles. It is a career that built slowly before a sudden explosion into public consciousness as Tom Hagen, the Corleone consigliere in The Godfather.

Born in San Diego in 1931, the son of a rear admiral, Duvall majored in drama at Illinois's Principia College, continuing his studies in New York with revered acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. It was there that the late playwright Horton Foote first saw Duvall, in a 1957 production of his play The Midnight Caller. Five years later, Duvall made his screen debut playing Arthur "Boo" Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), his big break coming via screenwriter Foote, who suggested him to director Robert Mulligan.

Through the 1960s, Duvall worked constantly on television and stage, winning an Obie in 1965 for his role in Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge and making his Broadway debut as a psychopath menacing a blind woman in Wait Until Dark. Movie roles were relatively rare, but included memorable turns as outlaw Ned Pepper in True Grit (1969) and priggish Major Frank Burns in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970). In 1969, he made one of the most important connections of his career when Francis Ford Coppola cast him as a highway patrolman who gets involved with a runaway housewife in The Rain People.

Three years later, The Godfather made him a star and a first-time Academy Award nominee, for Best Supporting Actor. After a cameo in The Conversation (1974) and a reprise of Hagen in The Godfather Part II (1974) came Apocalypse Now (1979). Duvall received his second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor that year and a permanent place in cinematic lore for his role as a maniacal lieutenant colonel who zestfully declares, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!" He received his first Best Actor nomination for his indelible interpretation of a Marine fighter pilot who treats his family as an extension of the Corps in The Great Santini (1979).

As important to Duvall as Coppola was Horton Foote. Their relationship continued after To Kill a Mockingbird with the actor playing a cuckolded bank officer in Arthur Penn's adaptation of Foote's The Chase (1966) and, in one of his first starring roles, a farmer in Tomorrow (1972), Foote's adaptation of a William Faulkner short story. Then, in 1983, came Tender Mercies, in which Foote created for Duvall the character of Mac Sledge, an alcoholic former country music star who gets an unexpected shot at redemption. Duvall wrote and sang his own songs, and this time took home the Best Actor Oscar for a performance Roger Ebert called, "one of his most understated."

Duvall received two more Oscar nominations for his roles as a volatile evangelical preacher in 1997's The Apostle and a brilliant corporate attorney in A Civil Action (1998). He wrote and directed the former and it is a signature role. The character's devotion to God is real, but so is his explosive temper. "Duvall has created as complete a person as the screen allows," wrote the Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan.

The actor's latest character almost brings his career full circle, for like To Kill a Mockingbird's Boo Radley, Get Low's Felix Bush is another Depression-era outsider feared and misunderstood by his neighbors. But unlike Boo, Felix is neither mute nor meek, an ornery recluse who decides to confront the decades-old tragedy that inspired wild rumors and his isolation with a "living" funeral. The role in this darkly funny drama marks another triumph for Duvall. His complex performance as a wounded soul who hides behind a cantankerous façade recalls something else Turan wrote about The Apostle that applies to so much of Duvall's career, "Unlike the classic star turn that obliterates the competition, the integrity of Duvall's acting brings almost everyone else's work up a notch."

Pam Grady is a San Francisco-based critic and journalist who contributes to Box Office, FilmStew, the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications.

FESTIVAL SCREENING
Get Low

Robert Duvall Selected Filmography
2009       Crazy Heart
2009       Get Low
2009       The Road
2007       Lucky You
2007       We Own The Night
2005       Thank You For Smoking
2003       Secondhand Lions
2003       Open Range
2002       Assassination Tango
2000       Gone In Sixty Seconds
1998       A Civil Action
1998       Colors
1997       The Apostle
1996       Phenomenon
1996       Sling Blade
1995       The Scarlet Letter
1993       Falling Down
1991       Rambling Rose
1990       Days of Thunder
1983       Tender Mercies
1984       The Natural
1979       Apocalypse Now
1979       The Great Santini
1976       Network
1974       The Godfather Part II
1972       The Godfather
1971       THX 1138
1970       M*A*S*H
1969       The Rain People
1969       True Grit
1968       Bullitt
1966       The Chase
1962       To Kill a Mockingbird

Previous Recipients
2009       Robert Redford
2008       Maria Bello
2007       Robin Williams
2006       Ed Harris
2005       Joan Allen
2004       Chris Cooper
2003       Dustin Hoffman
2002       Kevin Spacey
2001       Stockard Channing
2000       Winona Ryder
1999       Sean Penn
1998       Nicolas Cage
1997       Annette Bening
1996       Harvey Keitel
Previously Known As Piper-Heidsieck Award
1995       Tim Roth
1994       Gérard Depardieu
1993       Danny Glover
1992       Geena Davis
1991       Anjelica Huston