This is a comment text. The author is responsible for the analysis and positioning in the text.
In The Godfather (1972) he had the dullest costumes and the most anemic lines, and yet the character Tom Hagen gave him his first Oscar nomination and a big break.
Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen was the legally trained consiglieri and advisor to mafia boss Vito Corleone. As a seconded agent, in one scene he is insulted by a shouting, swearing boss of a film company who will not comply with Don Corleone’s request.
“Thank you for dinner and have a very nice evening,” Duvall says when the tirade is over. “Can your car take me to the airport? Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news straight away.”
There was one typical Tom Hagen line that made Duvall the best dry ball in film history. Others in the film were forced to make threats, throw tantrums, curse, shoot and strangle. Robert Duvall contented himself with the observation that his boss “insists on hearing bad news immediately.” Robert Duvall was the understated counterpoint to The Godfather.
He had had more than ten years to learn how to maximize the impact of the lines assigned to him. After a few years in the New York theaters and several television jobs, Duvall made his film debut, apart from an early supporting role, in “Shadows over the South” (1962), now best known under the original title “To kill a mockingbird”.
In this racist drama, he played a somewhat frightening, lonely neighbor to the girl from whose perspective the events are depicted – a reserved supporting character with whom he is dating. This was followed by television roles and supporting roles in good films. Duvall starred opposite Marlon Brando in 1966’s “The Devil’s Hunt” and appeared in the 1968 car chase hit “Bullitt.” But looking back, one can see that Robert Duvall essentially waited until the 1970s, when new winds and talent flowed into Hollywood. Then he could come into his own.
The collaboration with “The Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola got his start in 1969 with “Never Love a Stranger” (original title “The Rain People”) and George Lucas’ strange science fiction film “THX 1138” (1971), on which Coppola served as an executive producer. Both failed, but then “The Godfather” came along and took Duvall to a new level in his job. He spent the rest of his career there.
His second most famous role, alongside Tom Hagen, was that of Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). Coppola directed again, and this time Duvall got to play. The macho monster Kilgore wore a huge black cowboy hat and sunglasses and attacked with helicopters that blasted Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” over loudspeakers. Duvall was given a line that became one of the most famous movie quotes: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!”
Duvall stood up for stable quality without public advertising. He had the same authority as a Clint Eastwood or a Tommy Lee Jones, but didn’t brag about his weight. In his Hollywood insider book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” (1983), screenwriter William Goldman describes a scene in 1979’s “Esset.” Duvall played a hardened colonel whose career has gone awry and who treats his family like recruits. When the son beats him at basketball during what was supposed to be a game at home, the father can’t stand it. He believes the game isn’t over yet and follows his son off the field – “Mother Pig!” – and lets the basketball hit his head: “One, two, three, cry!”.
Goldman is full of admiration: “No star would ever do that scene.” Not only is he a loser, “the guy is an unsympathetic pile of shit after he loses.”
Robert Duvall was a star who did scenes like this, and that’s why many people thought that there was always something special about a film in which he was in the cast. He appeared in several important films of the 1970s, such as the media-critical “Network” (1976), but not later the Duvall film became a phenomenon in the same class as the “Godfather” films – Duvall was in the first two – and “Apocalypse Now”. Understandably.
1993’s Falling Down comes closest, with Michael Douglas as a disaffected middle-class American who violently takes out his bitterness on everything from a golfer to a hamburger restaurant, and Duvall as a sensible cop trying to stop the berry rampage.
Otherwise, he was seen in many films that were good, but in which Robert Duvall’s participation will be the main argument in the future when they argue for a place in film history. His last film role ever was 2022’s “The Pale Blue Eye,” in which he starred alongside Christian Bale and “Pillion” actor Harry Melling.
