Lee Marvin talks- “He spoke very good English, except on the set.” – Part three of Tom Ryan’s 1980 3RRR interview with with the actor discussing Edward Dymytryk, the Blacklist, Michael Curtiz, John Wayne and John Ford

On the set of Eight Iron Men
Marvin 4th from Right.
Edward Dmytryk seated right

TR: You worked with Edward Dmytryk quite a lot?

 

LM: Yeah, Eddie did Eight Iron Men, with Stanley Kramer. And The Caine Mutiny. Raintree County…

 

He’s under a lot of pressure in the ’50s in Hollywood because of the inquisition. What was the relationship between him and people on the set as a consequence of this?

 

I wouldn’t have known anything about that. I was away in the war. I didn’t know anything about Hollywood writers and communism or anything like that. I was one of the few actors in New York during the live TV days that wouldn’t sign that pledge. I said, ‘You wanna find out about me, just look it up.’ And I worked. Every actor was supposed to sign these things for CBS and the others saying that you weren’t and never had been a communist. Because, you know, the purge was on. But I said, ‘Forget that. I ain’t signin’ nothin’, pal.’

 

Was there a real hostility to that amongst the people working in the business?

 

In Hollywood, there was, yeah. But I wasn’t aware of it because the purge was over by the time I got there. I was still in New York when all that was going on.

 

People usually identify The Comancheros as your first really big role, the role that identifies the Lee Marvin to come: the comic heavy opposite John Wayne, something repeated on a number of occasions. Is that the way you see it?

 

Oh, I thought I’d done it earlier than that, but the thing was I had Michael Curtiz. There was the magic for you. The Hungarian strongman. It was his last film. He was very ill, but still you could see the old spark there. I just love the screamers and he was a screamer. Oh, boy. And so was Hathaway and so was Ford. All my dearest memories about some of the great old-time guys are to do with their screaming ability. 

 

Marvin, John Wayne, The Comancheros

You know, Raoul Walsh would never look at an actor when he was saying a line. He’d roll a cigarette and he’d turn to the script girl and say, ‘Did he get it all?’ She’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and he’d say, ‘Alright, print it.’ 

 

Anybody who uses the word ‘hack’ to describe them misses how dynamic they are.

 

Right. With The Comancheros, they had the kitchen sink in it, boilers, anything. But it did move and it did have a lot of butt-kickin’ and guys gettin’ scalped, and fist fights and ladies of ill-repute bein’ thrown through mirrors, all the old ‘Let’s live, boys.’ A lot of that action.

 

From what I hear, Curtiz hardly spoke a word of English.

 

He spoke very good English, except on the set. Smart man.

 

So how did he relate to the actors then?

 

Well, he’d call ’em all dumb and scream at ’em. He was just sensational. Go crazy, rip up the set. He didn’t like the way something was done so he’d go off on a tangent with some actor and the actor would be shakin’ for three days, but that’s what he wanted in the scene anyway. He’d do something different and sidetrack him. It’s like a code.

 

Michael Curtiz

I can’t imagine you and John Wayne shaking on a set with Michael Curtiz shouting at you.

 

Duke was Duke. And he could take over quite easily because he was a pretty famous guy… So Duke says, ‘Mike, what are we gonna do here?’ Mike would go, ‘Dunno,’ although he did. So Duke goes, ‘For God’s sake!’ So he took over, laid down the tracks and it took ’em over an hour and a half to light the scene the way Duke wanted it. And so they finally said, ‘Ready, Mr. Curtiz,’ and Mike was asleep looking at the script, you know, pretending to read it. He says, ‘Xybnretchipo owshchwetomna, OK, let’s get zis stuff outta ze way and get on vit it.’ And I said to myself, ‘That’s the way to do it. Let him direct when nobody’s rollin’ the camera, right?’ Then we’d go to work. Good stuff.

 

Have you ever wanted to direct yourself?

 

No.

 

You didn’t direct any of the TV work that you did?

 

Oh, no, no, no.

 

Why’s that?

 

I live in front of the camera, not behind it. And I always thought that it was better havin’ a man who knew more about it than you goin’ in. I can’t wear two hats at once. I refer to myself as monosyllabic: one thought at a time. Gimme two thoughts and I start gettin’ confused. That’s why I give so much attention to that one thought. Also, I’m sure I’d lose my perspective if I was looking through the lens. I’ve never looked through a lens in my life.

 

Somebody who looked through the lens a lot was John Ford… Looking back at your films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, how do you feel about them?

 

Oh, I love ’em. I don’t know how they all turned out; the memories are all that I have. I don’t save film. I don’t have a library at home of the films that I made. Or any prints, or anything like that. Oh, I have a few stills, but mostly offstage, with the crew, or Jack, or something like that. I’m just human: I like to remember the good things. I’m sure there were some bad days, but I can’t remember them.

 

Lee Van Cleef, Marvin, Strother Martin
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Was Ford difficult to work with?

 

I thought he was as smooth as silk. I mean, I understood what he was saying. A lotta guys don’t. And therein lay the problem. If you didn’t get his message, you were in trouble.

 

His films seem to be inundated by the great strongmen of American films: you obviously, and also John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda.

 

Ward Bond, Harry Carey…

 

Was there something about Ford that attracted him to this kind of character?

 

American, yeah. He came from an Irish family just out of Boston, in Portland, Maine. His father was a publican. His brother went out first… he was the star, Frank Ford. Jack changed his name when he got to Hollywood. He started out as Sean Aloysius Feeney. 

 

John Ford

You can’t go far wrong with the name Ford in America.

 

Yeah, it’s kind of a classic. And, yeah, I’m wandering… Sorry.

 

So you found him an easy man to work with?

 

I understood him perfectly… Not perfectly, but as much as anybody did. But I never had to do the leads, like the Henry Fonda role in The Grapes of Wrath.

 

But you do in Donovan’s Reef. I mean, you share the lead with John Wayne.

 

Yeah, but I’m playing Gil Hooley. What does that tell ya?

 

I have an image of you in my head from it. A cut to a close-up of you sitting there with a toy train in front of you…

 

Yeah, yeah. That was an ad-libbed scene that he put in there. That was the honeymoon. Wasn’t that great? You know, I get married to…. um, um… Dorothy Lamour. And he didn’t let her finish the song in the film. He kept cutting to the Chinese applauding. It was brutal stuff. So we get married and the next thing I know I got a choo-choo train, and that’s it. That tells you the sex life of this marriage. Good backhand delivery stuff. I love it, I love it.

 

Marvin, John Wayne
Donovan's Reef

There’s something about his work where one always gets the sense that he’s undercutting the stature of his characters. Like Dorothy Lamour in that scene, but also you, the tough guy who’s reduced to playing with a toy train. Where’s the virility in that?

 

Sergeant Ryker is made in the same year, a weird film because it started as episodes of a TV series….

 

Did it?

 

Called Crisis.

 

Really? I didn’t know that.

 

That’s disappointing. I was hoping to get the inside story on that. Buzz Kulik made it, didn’t he?

 

Yeah. I just thought it was an anthology.

Sergeant Ryker

Editor’s note: This is the third instalment of a four part series devoted to a lengthy interview by Melbourne critic and scholar Tom Ryan with Lee Marvin. The interview was conducted on Melbourne Radio3RRR in 1980.  Part One can be accessed if you click here – Part two if you click here 

“They wouldn’t come on the set scratching their heads.” - Part 2 of Tom Ryan's legendary 3RRR 1980 interview with Lee Marvin

Editor’s note: This is the second instalment of a four part series devoted to a lengthy interview by Melbourne critic and scholar Tom Ryan with Lee Marvin. The interview was conducted on Melbourne Radio3RRR in 1980. This part deals with Martin’s time working with Fritz Lang, Henry Hathaway, Samuel Fuller and Marlon Brando among others and his work in series television. Part One can be accessed if you click here – 

*************************************

 

TR: In ’54, it was The Big Heat with Fritz Lang. Is that the first “great” film that you’re in?

 

LM: I did one right before that. I was hired in costume, with Brando, for The Wild One. It finished a week or so before the Fritz Lang film started. I talked to him and his people said, ‘No, he’s not right.’ So he says, ‘We’ll get him a haircut and shave the beard off and he’ll be alright. (then, mimicking) I high-er you for vat you are, not vat dey t’ink you are.’ Yes sir. Because he was from UFA, you know, the old Berlin film industry. A magnificent guy.

 

Fritz Lang

I’ve read interviews with Henry Fonda and others saying that he was a very difficult director to work with because he would stand just off camera, yelling directions.

 

Why not? He knew the medium. And he could lay the lines over later. But, no, I didn’t find him difficult at all. In fact, I wasn’t there for the first day of filming. I started about three days in. I went to work that day and I was standing around and there was a desk in the corner of the sound stage that had a name card on it saying ‘Fritz Lang’ along with this big magnum of champagne, well-iced, with about eight or ten glasses upended in it. I waited by it for him, he came over and I said, ‘Mr. Lang.’ I said, ‘Is there anything I should know before I get started?’ And he said, ‘No. I hire you for vat you are.’ He said, ‘Vould you care for a drink, yah?’ I said, ‘No, not when I’m working.’ He said, ‘That’s good. You I don’t worry about.’ And then, pointing to the leading man at the other end of the stage, he says, ‘It’s that SOB that I worry about.’

 

Glenn Ford?

 

Yeah, please. I went, ‘Mmm.’ So he gave me a little lift. And about eight weeks later, I happen to look over by the door and there’s a new actor comin’ on, and he’s pointin’ at me. They all had their technique.

 

Did he take a lot of time setting up shots. Was it a quick job or was it something he was gonna take a lot of time over?

 

No, he’d never ad-lib. He came to the set and, as they say, he’d done his homework. He knew exactly the scene, how he wanted it lit, and where everybody had to move. I mean you didn’t make any ‘Well, it feels better if I…’ ‘You shtand right zere.’ You didn’t become inventive in your movement for him ’cause he’d already cut the film in his head. It was a marvellous way to work, and once you got over that hump of being creative you simply did that part. And it fits in much better.

 

Marvin, Gloria Grahame, The Big Heat

Are you happy to accept that sort of a role in a film, when it’s all strictly defined, or do you prefer that ‘creative’ freedom that you didn’t get with Lang?

 

It depends on who’s directing. But absolutely. Some men I’d do anything for, others I’d say, ‘Now wait a minute. That’s not very natural,’ or something. But men like Lang knew, I mean they really knew. Hathaway, guys like that. They wouldn’t come on the set scratching their heads.

 

Were you under contract at this time?



I was never under contract. 

 

Why was that? You were working at Columbia when Harry Cohn was there.

 

Yeah. I did eight in a row there, but the reason for that was there’s a lot of roles in films that aren’t really well-described, or well-defined. And I kinda got to be called a trouble-shooter: they didn’t know what to do with a role, they’d say, ‘Give it to Lee Marvin, he’ll do something with it.’ Of course, the roles weren’t that important. Or maybe they were; I don’t know, but you know what I’m saying. When in doubt, they’d throw it at me.

 

Why do you think that was?

 

I dunno. Maybe it was because maybe I didn’t care. Maybe I knew I wasn’t going anyplace and in those days I couldn’t be intimidated. You know, I’d made it through the war and as Jimmy Whitmore, a friend of mine, said, ‘After 1945, it was all gravy.’

 

And you were seriously wounded in the war?

 

Yeah, yeah.

 

You worked with Brando on The Wild One and, of course, the inevitable question is: did he sit you on his knee as I heard he sat Sarah Douglas on his knee on the set of Superman, or was he somewhat more aloof than that?

 

He wasn’t aloof. He used to baby-sit for my children. No, he was straight. We had our shoot-out early in the film and he was just beautiful to me.

 

Marlon Brando, Marvin, The Wild One

That was when he’d just started too…

 

He’d done The Men before that. That was his first film, I believe.

 

How does his acting style sit next to your style, which seems to me far more relaxed?

 

Well, I think I know about as much about Method as he does because I studied with some pretty heavy guys. It’s just that I didn’t use it like he used it. He was dynamic. My God, I saw him in Streetcar on Broadway. He just flattened the house: they couldn’t belieeeve his Stanley Kowalski. Nothing like that had ever happened in the American theatre. He came out there and just went whammo and knocked everybody outta their chairs. He was just great, really stunning.

 

I get the sense that you’re very self-effacing which I suppose fits with the roles that you play. You’re very quiet about your approach to it. You’ve said that you had no ambitions, that you were going nowhere…

 

Well, it was a lot better than where I’d been, just let me put it that way. I didn’t think I’d ever get anywhere, that maybe someday I’d get to be a feature player or a supporting player. I never thought I’d get a lead in that industry. I’d started out with leads on live TV and worked my way down to bit parts. And the next thing you know, I was being called up for extra work and I realised the wheel was turning the wrong way, so I got outta town.

 

When M Squad came along – Frank Ballinger – was that the kind of work you’d been looking for?

 

No, I’d tried to avoid it. But a friend of mine had been touting me on it, not my agent, and I got trapped into that. But at least I hadn’t signed anything and they thought I had, so financially it worked out very well. 

Marvin,  M Squad

 

Are you happy with M Squad?

 

Yep. A lot of hard work. The difficulty I had, I think any actor has, is tying his face and his name together. And TV could do that because so many people would see it once a week, and eventually they got to know the name Lee Marvin. Because, when I first started, they thought I was a girl. I’d get calls and I’d show and there’d be 35 ingenues and me and they’d say, ‘Whoops!’ I didn’t have a masculine-sounding name. 

 

What about The Lawbreaker, which came a few years later? Obviously you hadn’t been disillusioned by the strenuous TV work of television or by what’s become at this point an increasing number of more demanding film roles.

 

Well Lawbreaker was a very interesting thing, a documentary. We got the real people, if we could, and they’d recreate their own crimes. They’d shoot that and I’d just merely narrate it – like an over-the-shoulder thing – and I found it fascinating because I was into police work after M Squad. I went around the country, to the Chicago police, and dug into the system, so to speak. And I thought it was right to get the real performances. 

 

We had a cat burglar once, I remember, and I was talking to him and he’d spent about six or seven years in, and I asked him how long it would take him to cross a bedroom, say about 12 feet across. He said, ‘Oh, about 45 minutes.’ That’s with the person sleeping. I said, ‘Why don’t they wake up?’ He said, ‘Lee, what you do is think nice thoughts. Like autumn leaves and flowing creeks.’ He said, ‘If you have a bad thought, they’re gonna wake up.’ That’s spooky stuff. You’re talking to the real guy.

 

Babe Unger was the producer of that show, and also the writer. So he did the work. He’d done Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford [Marvin appears to have mixed him up here with Lawbreaker co-producer Vernon E. Clark]. He’s a very fast, concise, exact man. So really my whole role in the thing was just the narration. In other words, it wasn’t that difficult. It wasn’t like carrying the series. The criminal was the guy we stuck with, or the policeman. Or whoever it might be.

 

To my knowledge it was never screened in Australia and I’ve never seen it. So it wasn’t the sort of thing where you’d come along and dub your voice-over afterwards?

 

No, no. I had kind of like a control room with this big screen. I’d do the lead for the day and you could see it off-air up there and I’d say, ‘This is Chief Dan so-and-so.’ And I’d say, ‘Dan, how’s it going?’ Then he’d talk to the camera. I didn’t have any acting scenes in it. I was just this authoritative voice, representing the ignorance of the audience as to how the law really works, the police part of it.

 

And around this time, you first worked with Sam Fuller in an episode of The Virginian, where you played a heavy again.

 

Yeah, that was kinda funny because they wanted me to be the judge and I said, ‘No, I don’t wanna be a judge.’ But I read the script and said, ‘I’ll play the heavy.’ So they got Lee J. Cobb to play the judge, and he ended up doing the series. It was a good heavy, though. I always liked good heavies. 

 

Lee J. Cobb, Marvin, "It Tolls for Thee" episode
from The Virginian  directed by Samuel Fuller

So Sam was the director. ‘Haha, my boy!’ (imitating Fuller) Nothing has changed: the cigars came out and off we went. And we had a lot of fun. We were on location on some very rocky mountainside, and he’s, ‘OK, kid, you see that rock over there? You climb on up there: it’ll take about a half hour. You take three rounds with you and when I give you the signal – I’ll drop my hat, right? – you fire at the stage-coach as it goes by. I said, ‘OK.’ So huffin'-and-puffin’ up the hill I climb and I‘m settling down behind a rock. I can see the camera and I’m just sittin’ there and waitin’ for the stage-coach and I look down and here are three blank cartridges from the same kind o’ rifle I’ve got. From years ago, all corroded in the sun. And I said, ‘Why that son of a gun, he’s done this shot before.’ Probably with the same stage-coach too, for all I know. Maybe the same horses as well.

 

Did you point that out to him?

 

I just looked at him and laughed and he looked at me and laughed. ‘Hahaha, kid. You’ll learn.’

 

Around this time, you also worked with Robert Aldrich, on Attack! And one gets the sense of the same things going on inside Robert Aldrich’s head that are going on inside Sam Fuller’s. A violence there, ready to explode.

 

Yeah, sure. Very much so. They were very similar in that respect, but it comes out in different ways for both men. 

 

Marvin, Eddie Albert, Attack!

Aldrich wanted me to play the sergeant and I said, ‘No, I don’t want to play a sergeant,’ ’cause I’d already done one. So he said, ‘What about the colonel?’ What colonel? I’d forgotten that because, when you read a script that fast, you just read your own lines to see if it’s there or not. So I read the colonel and said, ‘I’d love to.’ Having been a private first-class, I knew what colonels were really like. So I made him a bit of a bastard.

 

And that’s the first time you worked with Jack Palance as well, isn’t it?

 

Is it?

 

It’s a question tentatively posed.

 

I know I’ve done four or five with Jack. No! I dunno. When did I Died A Thousand Times  come out?

 

It’s before that, about ’56 I think. And Attack! was ’57.

 

OK. So it was my second time with Jack.

Marvin (left), Jack Palance (seated right),  

I Died a Thousand Times

Coming Soon Part 3: The Duke, the Hungarian & the Irishman – “All my dearest memories about some of the great old-time guys are to do with their screaming ability.”

 

"A summer stock company came into town"- Tom Ryan retrieves his legendary 1980 3RRR interview with Lee Marvin - (Part One)

Lee Marvin during war service

Lee Marvin: born February 19, 1924; died of a heart attack, August 29, 1987. Buried in Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., next to Joe Louis.

*****************

It was 1980. Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One had just been released. Lee Marvin was in Australia and was dropping by to promote the film, taking time off from his marlin fishing adventure up north. Alan Finney, then PR boss at Village-Roadshow, generously arranged for me to have an extended sit-down “chat” with the visiting star for broadcast on 3RRR. 

 

Frankly, I was in awe of the man. A WW2 veteran, who’d served in the United States 4th Marine Division during World War 2 and won a Purple Heart during the invasion of Saipan in the Pacific, he’d spent years doing bit parts before becoming one of Hollywood’s most memorable tough guys. A man’s man, I’d been told, someone who’d lock eyes with you and know immediately whether he’d rather talk to you or kill you. Better watch the eyes, I remember thinking, and be careful about the handshake.

 

If he offers me a drink, I certainly won’t be declining, or asking for a nice dry riesling. His poison of choice would be mine. Bring it on. I’d seen what he’d done to milksop James Stewart in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963) and it wasn’t going to happen to me. Admittedly that was only in the movies, but it was still him and the stories about his alcohol-fuelled ways were legend. 

 

Asked about them in a Playboy interview years before, he’d made his feelings clear. “It depends on what I’m drinking, how much I’m drinking, why I’m drinking, and who I’m drinking with.” So, I thought, I’ll just thank him, take whatever it is straight, and try to remember the words to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. 

When he strolled into the film-company board-room where the interview was to take place, he was smiling, a tall, white-haired man with a firm handshake and twinkling eyes. He clearly had no intention of killing anybody that day, there was only water on the table – even if there was a suspiciously clear liquid in the glass he was carrying when he arrived – and he was eager to accommodate. Asked by my producer, Helen Molnar, if he’d mind moving a bit closer to the microphone, he’d responded agreeably – and not unflirtatiously – in his rich, resonant boom of a voice: “I can do anything you want.”

 

TR: Would you regard yourself as someone who was born to act?

 

LM: No. No. It just worked out that way.

 

You started off very young, though…

 

Well I was 23. That’s not very young. I mean, it’s very young now, in memory, but I’d gotten out of the service when I was 21, and fooled around as a plumber’s assistant, cleaning septic tanks and diggin’ ditches in a rural town in upstate New York, the leading man pulled out – they were just out of the Neighbourhood Playhouse, a bunch of young actors – and at some party I guess I was dancing with my western boots on and they said, ‘Can he act?’ to some old-time actor. And he said, ‘Well, give him a try.’ And I read for them and they liked it. They needed a tall, loud-mouthed Texan for this role and I was giving a lot of mouth and I guess the boots sold ’em. So they hired me for $7-a-week, room and board and I loved it. And I took it from there.

 

The production was Roadside, wasn’t it?

 

That’s right. Way up in Woodstock, New York, in the Maverick Theatre. It was the summer theatre: “straw hat” they’d call it.

 

So how did you get to Broadway? Billy Budd I think it was.

 

Yeah. It was my first and last Broadway show.

 

Playbill for Billy Budd on Broadway
(click to enlarge)

I went to school for about a year and a half at the American Theatre wing, which was a spin-off from World War 2. You know, those shows like Winged Victory and stuff that they produced. And so they had a refresher course for veterans under Public Law 16, that kind of veterans’ administration stuff. So I went to that school with a lot of chaps who’d been in the marines and the navy. We had a kind of camaraderie. I don’t think we learned much, but we worked with some wonderful people. 

 

And from there, next summer I went out and was doing one-weekers here and there and eventually the ELT, the Equity Library Theatre (in Chicago), which was the Guild’s own group, were trying on a new play calledUniform of Flesh, which was written by Chapman and Cox, two young professors at Yale, on a trilogy of three of Melville’s books called O’Hara, Master-at-Arms, The Frigate United States and Billy Budd, Foretopman. It was at the ELT Theatre, which wasn’t off-Broadway then, and a year later they took it to Broadway under the title Billy Budd and I got a bit part in that.

 

At that time did you see your future as being solely in theatre, or did you have ambitions to move into live television, as you eventually did? Or into film?

 

Well, I was doing live television at the time. Billy Budd I was never happy with, ’cause I thought that all the directors had missed the point of the play. They were very aesthetic about it, but it was 1798 in the British navy which ain’t no cup o’ tea. These were rough men and they were all portrayed a little lightly for my liking, and I said, ‘Well, I’ll never do anything like this again.’ And I kinda lost my point because I was so disturbed by the play and it was a tremendous thing, but the box-office wasn’t there. 

 

And then one night I was just standing on the stage and looking out across the audience and all I could see were the green Exit signs. And I said, ‘I’m leavin’.’ And when the play closed after 110 performances, I was doing a TV show and one of the stars then had a car that he wanted driven out to California. So I said, ‘OK. Gimme your credit card and I’ll do it.’ So I drove to California and three days later I had a job.

 

And that was…

 

You’re in the Navy Now.

 

Right, that’s the first film, but I believe before that…

The first film that I had a speaking part in. I had done some extras work in New York with Preminger and people like that.

 

On what films?

 

Oh, things like Tattooed Stranger, Where the Sidewalk Ends… around ’48.

 

Well, where does the live television come in, because I believe you did a lot of work…?

 

I did about 250 live TV shows in New York in that three-year period.

 

That must have been extraordinary. I’m still amazed by the concept of live drama on TV…

 

It was. It was wild. And, of course, it was all in black and white in those days, so the sets were all purple and yellow. It was funny to walk into a room that was all purple and yellow, but I guess the contrast worked well for black and white. We even wore purple and yellow.

 

What was the rehearsal time?

 

On a half-hour thing like Escape, or any of those shows, you’d rehearse three days, one day on the floor with camera and then do it that night. It all took four or five days.

 

And then you would just simply shoot?

 

Just go, yeah.

 

There must have been some awful mistakes made at the time?

 

Tremendous, but that that was the charm of it. People would watch it – not that they had anything else to watch on the box at the time, except wrestling or boxing or something – but they used to like to see the actors go on their faces or have the set fall on them. I mean, it was a thrill to watch live TV, heh-heh.

 

Were there any recordings made of that work, or is it gone forever?

 

No. They used to make kinescopes, whatever that is. I think it was a 16mm print and they had some kind of device that they would put in the control room and then record it. I guess for libel, or something like that.

 

There are people like Sidney Lumet who used to work…

 

(Murmur of approval)

 

… and there were a lot of film directors who actually got their grounding in that work.

 

John Frankenheimer… they were all there. Oh gosh, yeah. A lot of the actors too.

 

And then we’ve got You’re in the Navy Now, the Henry Hathaway film: your first speaking part. Do you remember it?

 

Sure, very well. You wanna hear all my lines. Well there was ‘yessir’ and ‘nossir’, an awful lot of those. That was about the content of my part.

 

Right.

 

I’d be talking to myself on the ship, you know. I was playing the guy on the phone and answering the phone and the guys in the background… I’d play all four parts of the phone conversation.

 

That’s 1951…

 

No, it’s 1950.

 

Right. 

 

What you have are the release dates. Figure on nine months to release…

 

Well, after that come films like the Don Siegel one with Audie Murphy…

 

Yeah. Doool at Silvah Creeeek (guffawing)! I played Sheep Dip in that. So I know I’m gonna get mine, right? If Audie Murphy’s the Silver Kid and I’m Sheep Dip, you know that, when the game of poker is over, who’s gonna get it.

 

And that’s the start of your career as a heavy? 

 

Marvin as Sheep Dip in Duel at Silver Creek

Yeah, mainly in westerns…

 

Were you happy with that as it was happening, or did you feel constricted by it?

 

Noo-oo. Every step was more than I’d had before, you know. The minimum then was $175 a week and that was pretty good money. Then. So I got to $200 and I said, ‘Unh-huh-unh-huh-hunh, I’ve got it!’

 

But did you have any ambitions to take the Audie Murphy role at that stage, or were you happy playing the parts which were sort of comic heavies, in a way? One can sense that you’re laughing at the same time as you’re doing them.

 

Yeah, you’d put a twist to them. No, I was very content. I really was. I figured if I could ever get to $12,000 a year, I’d have it. So my sights were not set higher than I thought my talent was.

Coming soon Part 2. Lee Marvin talks about working with Fritz Lang and Henry Hathaway