Doc makes leading man of familiar face in films

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This article was published 26/06/2015 (4115 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

DICK who?

Younger audiences aren’t likely to be familiar with the actor who takes centre stage of this affectionate film biography.

Even for people who have been going to movies for the past 60 years, Dick Miller is a guy who has resided on the periphery of pop consciousness. His early screen work was mostly done for legendary producer Roger Corman in cheap quickies, such as the 1955 western Apache Woman (in which he economically played both a cowboy and an Indian), the original 1960 version of Little Shop of Horrors (he’s the guy who orders a bouquet of flowers and then proceeds to eat it), Not of This Earth — he’s a wiseguy door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman — and the alien invasion movie War of the Satellites (1958), in which he played a weird amalgam of scientist and hipster.

Among genre fans, Miller peaked with the horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood (1959) in the lead role of coffee-house busboy-turned-artist-turned-serial killer Walter Paisley, a well-meaning shlub who finds success among the beatnik set by presenting his clay-covered murder victims as sculptures.

Miller is given somewhat more validation as an artist in this film. The Bronx-born former boxer has apparently always had star quality, yet real stardom eluded him in favour of other Corman alumni such as Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. In conversations with Miller, his fabulous missus Lainie Miller and family members, it emerges that a lack of ambition, coupled with a lack of audition skills, may have hurt him.

Still, his sheer screen presence saw him enjoy three distinct phases to his career. In the early Corman years, he was such a reliable everyman actor, Corman gave him the impossible task of explaining the cobbled-together plot of The Terror (1963) in a single, mad expository speech.

The second phase saw him getting work from the Corman acolytes who worked at the producer’s New World Pictures, influential sorts including Allan Arkush, John Sayles, Jonathan Kaplan and especially Joe Dante, who loves the actor so wholeheartedly, he has cast Miller in all his movies, from Gremlins to this year’s Burying the Ex.

The third phase has resembled the career of the working actor in both TV and movies. (Genre fans will still delight in seeing him as the luckless gun-shop clerk in The Terminator.)

While this doc is somewhat shapeless and meandering, it does ultimately identify the pleasure audiences get from Miller’s performances. In that microcosmic way, it pays big-picture homage not just to this one great character actor, but to all great character actors.

Local film writer Caelum Vatnsdal, the author of an upcoming biography of Miller, will introduce the Friday night 9 p.m. screening at Cinematheque with a Skype interview with the actor to follow.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca