Free Landslide by Jonathan Darman Page B

to be shot in official production would be the last scene of the movie. The plan for the day was to shoot the exterior portions of the film’s climactic confrontation in which Lee Marvin’s character, Charlie Strom, tracks Reagan’s Browning and Dickinson’s Sheila Farr to an upscale suburban house. Despite suffering from a gunshot wound himself, Strom nonetheless manages to capture them both at gunpoint. Farr begs for mercy, but Strom won’t hear it; he shoots Browning and Farr dead and then lurches outside, where he stumbles in extended agony and dies. It was mostly Marvin’s scene, and mostly Marvin’s day.
    But when it came time to start shooting, Marvin wasn’t there.Reagan stepped in to fill the time, filming a simple exterior shot in which a nervous Browning hurries into the house, clutching a long case in which he’s stored a large gun. They got it on film without incident.
    The hours went by with no sign of Marvin. Morning turned to afternoon. Finally, a car came into view, careening back and forth across the street before coming to a stop on the lawn in front of the house. Out staggered Marvin, seriously drunk.
    Siegel set to work, instructing the actor on the choreography of the death stumble. Marvin, clutching a 7-Up bottle filled with vodka, nodded along silently. “Lee had a theory about drinking,” Siegel said later. “If you didn’t talk, no one could smell you.”
    Then a funny thing happened. The camera started rolling and Marvin began to resemble his character. Sure, he could be difficult to work with, but it was hard to argue with his theatrical talents. And for an actor tasked with staggering around like he’s bleeding to death, a 7-Up bottle’s worth of vodka can come in handy.
    The performance required multiple takes and reshoots. But the version that made it onscreen, cut with the interior shots to form the final scene of the film, was a tour de force. It begins with a close-up of Charlie Strom’s feet. First, viewers see blood fall onto his shoes, then his gun drops into the frame. He is steps away from death, but he’s determined to send Farr and Browning there first. Inside the house, he moves with agonized urgency, falling to the floor and yet, somehow, still managing to pull a gun on Farr and Browning. Each pleads for their life, but Marvin promptly shoots them both dead anyway. Next, he emerges back into the daylight, his white shirt soaked with blood. He wants to escape but as he struggles to get into his car, he sees a police cruiser pulling up. He points his finger as if to shoot at the cop in a final act of defiance. Then he falls straight backward. Dead. “An actor likes a death scene,” Marvin’s costar Clu Gulager would later say, and Marvin’s was “the greatest death onscreen I think I’ve ever seen.”
    Indeed, Marvin’s performance was so captivating to watch, itwas easy to forget that the film’s final sequence included two other actors’ death scenes as well. Angie Dickinson didn’t even get to die on camera. Reagan at least got to portray Browning’s final moments of life. In a five-second shot, viewers see him clutch the gunshot wound in his abdomen, raise his head in agony, and fall dead on the floor. Altogether it was a serviceable, believable performance. And an utterly forgettable one compared with the long, engrossing struggle of Marvin’s Charlie Strom, the one and only star in the scene.
    So that would be the payoff for the long weeks of work ahead of him, to be a minor character in another man’s death scene. For Reagan, too, this would be an agonizing part to play.
    A FTER ALL, R ONALD Reagan liked to be the star as well.
    For Americans in the twenty-first century, who know how the story of Reagan’s life turned out, the role of hero seems a natural fit. His presidency was filled with dramatic triumphs: the “morning in America” economic boom that followed years of economic hardship, the two landslide elections, the hard-line challenge to