How's by You?

I had been planning to do a little piece on Timothy Carey anyway, but the mood I've been in lately is perfectly summed up in this still of Carey in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, in which Carey plays one of the three French soldiers (along with Ralph Meeker and Joe Turkel) shot for their unit's refusal to fight during a battle in WWI.

I first noticed Carey in One-Eyed Jacks, a Western initially directed by Kubrick, but then directed by its star, Marlon Brando, after a falling-out between the two. Carey plays a thoroughly odious piece of work whom Brando kills after Carey attacks a girl. His character seems just intelligent enough to be evil.

In Paths of Glory, Carey is more pitiable than hateful, but in his other work for Kubrick, he plays Nikki Arane, a racist member of the gang of robbers in The Killing. This wasn't the only time Carey worked for an A-list director; he was also in John Cassevetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Carey also did a lot of television work; he appeared in a couple of episodes of Columbo as the proprietor of a greasy spoon--typecasting, if you ask me.

Carey has been dubbed a "Method character actor," and Quentin Tarantino dedicated Reservoir Dogs to him. Carey also worked for years, a la Orson Welles, on his own auteur project, The World's Greatest Sinner, in which he plays an insurance salesman who...ah, it's too ridiculous to summarize.

I was thinking about Carey because one of his films, Crime Wave, is being released as part of Warner Bros. fourth volume of Film Noir classics. And if you need any more proof of Carey's, ah, unique qualities, just check out his publicity still on IMDB.