Retirement? The Rowdyman’s not interested

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/01/2011 (5353 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The glint in his eye remains undimmed, and the mischievous smile endures. Gordon Pinsent, at age 80, is a man enlivened by his work.

The veteran Canadian actor — one of the few on whom the overused label “national treasure” seems a perfect fit — loves the collaborative, creative process of making movies and staging plays, and clearly has no intention of quitting anytime soon.

“I’ll be dragged offstage, and they won’t know whether it’s me or the play that stinks,” Pinsent offers in the new documentary profile Gordon Pinsent: Still Rowdy After All These Years, which premieres Sunday at 7 p.m. on Bravo!.

“I’ll just go right off the stage, my dear, and go right in the hole, because I don’t see (quitting) happening, because it’s too great a love. It can be glorious.”

As this well-crafted and engaging hour reveals, Pinsent’s passion for performing runs deep, dating back to his wartime childhood in Grand Falls, when movies and radio shows and a steady stream of overseas-bound Hollywood stars through nearby Gander’s airport captivated the young dreamer and set him on a singular path through life.

He left Newfoundland in 1948 to chase his dream; a brief and uneventful stint in the army was followed by an equally abbreviated marriage, to a Winnipegger, that produced two children but had no chance of surviving Pinsent’s need to pursue a career in the arts.

“I felt dreadful,” the actor recalls. “I felt as though, ‘I’m useless, concentrating on a kind of life that would not pay me a living, and it certainly wouldn’t be enough to have a family with.’ But yet this hunger, this thing that I had not done before that marriage, I finally had to do, and that was to go out and see if it would happen. That’s the best I could have done, and off I went.” And where he went was first to Toronto, where he went from extras work to bit parts to eventually starring in his own CBC show, Quentin Durgens, M.P., and then to Hollywood, a frustrating chapter in Pinsent’s life that is aptly summarized by the inclusion of clips from the 1972 B-movie feature Blacula.

“Those were awful times,” he recalls, “when you weren’t sure if anyone believed in you, and you didn’t believe in yourself…. In Hollywood, the phone wasn’t ringing. Well, the phone was ringing, but it wasn’t exactly the call I was waiting for.”

Determined to regain control of his career, Pinsent decided to create a role for himself; following the “write what you know” credo, he focused on a place and a character he knew very well — and The Rowdyman was born.

Nearly 40 years later, Pinsent is still identified with and, to a certain extent, defined by that role, which the next generation of Newfoundland artists and Canadian actors interviewed in the film declare to have laid the blueprint for what can be achieved in film and television in this country. And yes, if this profile is any indication, he is still rowdy after all those years.

 

— — —

 

Skins to win?: The much-anticipated North American version of the controversial hit British series Skins arrives on pay-TV this week (Monday at 11 p.m., Movie Central), and the pond-crossing adaptation is, well, a bit thin.

The series, in which a cast of unknowns plays out the struggles and sexually charged misadventures of a bunch of high-school friends, seeks to be border-pushing and edgy in its portrayal of 21st-century teen life, but its somewhat limp storylines make it feel like a slightly overheated and naughtier-for-cable version of Degrassi.

The mix of characters is familiar — the popular kid, the druggie kid, the confused-sexuality kid, the nerdily responsible kid — and the narrative through the first few episodes takes viewers on a slightly louder tour of places that Degrassi and 90210 have visited many times.

One can’t help wondering if, in the journey from Bristol, where the original was based, to Toronto, where this new version was shot, something got lost in the shuffle.

 

— — —

 

There ought (in this case, not) to be a Law: Even in the most skilled of hands, the creation of quirky dramas is a tricky business. And nobody in TV history has had more success with this narrow genre than David E. Kelley, who cut his irreverent-lawyer-show teeth on L.A. Law and then went on to produce The Practice, Ally McBeal and Boston Legal.

Those were hits. Harry’s Law, which premieres Monday at 9 p.m. on NBC and Citytv, is a by-a-mile miss.

This strained and over-reaching effort stars Oscar winner Kathy Bates as a lawyer named Harriet “Harry” Korn, who gets so bored practising patent law that she takes to smoking pot in her office. Of course, she gets fired. Of course, she’s forced to find a way to redefine herself and rediscover her passion for the law.

The answer she needs literally hits her in the head, in the form of a suicide-attempting roof-leaper who bounces off an awning and lands on Harry’s noggin. It turns out he was trying to off himself because he’s facing a third-strike drug charge, and what he really needs is a brilliant lawyer to save him from a long stretch in the slammer.

There’s more goofy stuff that happens to help Harry figure out her new career direction, and none of it is any more believable than the initial clients-from-heaven gag. Before long, Harry’s running a law office that doubles as a ladies’ shoe store.

Don’t ask. Explaining will just make it seem even sillier.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca