The past month has seen the deaths of many film performers, most famously Elizabeth Taylor, who was everyone’s idea of what a Movie Star should be: someone who is the natural centre of every frame she appears in. Stories about Taylor's screen presence — right from the time she was a little girl, in films like National Velvet — are the stuff of legend, and her most high-profile film as an adult, the bloated, forever-in-the-making Cleopatra, seemed to be more about the actress than the Egyptian queen.
But while star power has been central to cinema’s popularity almost from the beginning, the movies could scarcely get by without their side-heroes: the comic foils whose double takes and perplexed expressions could make the lead comedian look funnier; the supporting actors who tried to be stars but fell back into stock character roles.
Two honourable “sideshow performers” left us recently: one was Navin Nischol, who had a brief stint as a leading man in the early 1970s — even playing the vanilla hero in the film Parwana, where Amitabh Bachchan had the (more interesting) negative role. The other was the American Farley Granger — a good-looking man and a competent actor if well-cast and directed, but best remembered today for films that didn't rest on his shoulders.
The best “Farley Granger Film” (defined as a judicious balance between the importance of his role, the quality of his performance and the overall quality of the film itself) is probably Nicholas Ray’s film noir They Drive By Night, about a couple on the run from the law. And Granger did play the lead in a couple of other notable movies, such as Luchino Visconti’s Senso. But the two best-known films he appeared in were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and in both he was an effective second fiddle. In Rope, he was the more passive of two young men who commit a murder “for kicks”. And in Strangers on a Train, he was the limp-wristed Guy Haines (just your regular Guy) — the perfect chump for the film’s charismatic bad boy, Bruno. In my view, both films benefit from Granger’s casting: Strangers on a Train is particularly disturbing because the villain is more attractive than the hero, and because Granger isn’t the strong Hollywood leading man who takes control of proceedings and forces the viewer to root for him.
It’s harder to make something out of Navin Nischol’s older movies; I don’t even remember most of them well. Apart from Parwana, there was the atmospheric Dhund — where Danny Denzongpa stole the show as a wheelchair-bound sadist — and the unintentionally funny Ramsay Brothers quasi-horror movie Hotel. But he had one interesting late-career role in Nagesh Kukunoor’s amusing but trite Bollywood Calling, about an American actor coming to India and getting involved with an assembly-line Bollywood production. Here, Nischol played an ageing, megalomaniacal superstar named Manu Kapoor, pointedly addressed only as Manu-ji by the fawners around him, and there was something poignant about this casting; for Manu was exactly the kind of star that Nischol never became in real life (and the kind of star that the man who played a supporting role in Parwana DID become).
Granger and Nischol are among the many performers who shone briefly and then faded away, or turned to smaller roles or TV shows for a living. But their careers are reminders of the inscrutable nature of movie stardom — how one personality might strike a chord with an audience in a particular place and time, while another doesn’t.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
