The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 5, 1985 Thursday

On screen, Alan Arkin just plays himself

BYLINE: SALEM ALATON; GAM

LENGTH: 751 words

BY SALEM ALATON
ALAN ARKIN'S voice would sound familiar over a telephone and most people
would recognize him soon enough across a hotel lobby. But when he starts
to say something - almost anything - that feeling of familiarity only gets
deeper. That's because, even sitting in a Toronto restaurant, Arkin stays
in character, playing the same role he has brought to the screen so often
- himself.

One of the stars of Joshua Then and Now, which opens the Festival of
Festivals tonight, Arkin agrees that he puts a lot of himself into his
performances. "What attracts me (to acting) is not the glamor, not the
burying yourself in other people or the pretending to bury yourself in
other people. Because I never do, anyway. It's always me. No matter how
far away from it you think you're getting, it's always 95 per cent you."
Joshua received a mixed reception at the Cannes film festival, but
people still loved Arkin. Playing Reuben, the small-time crook who is
father to writer Joshua (played by James Woods), Arkin was, as ever, born
of the street, although this time the street was in Montreal rather than
Brooklyn. And, as ever, he was funny - a wiseacre philosopher, a guy whose
taint of vice somehow dominates his personality less than his humanity.

Arkin says he looks forward to seeing the picture for the first time
tonight, when he'll appear at the University Theatre in the role of a
visiting Hollywood star. "Everybody else seems to be happy," he says. "If
it's terrible, it's painful. If it's good, it's very nice - like life."
Sitting nearby, Barbara Dana, Arkin's actress-screenwriter wife, and Tony,
his teenage son, share a look of equanimity that suggests life is more
good than terrible back home in rural New York state.

The language in the film "was extraordinary," although Arkin freely
reveals he has yet to read the novel that author Mordecai Richler based
his screenplay on. And Ted Kotcheff is "at least one of the best directors
I've ever worked with."
"Ted had me in motion more than I anticipated, and it was slightly
jarring when I did it," he says. "I was afraid it was going to bury me,
bury the dialogue." More realistically, Arkin may have unwittingly
upstaged everyone else, perhaps even the film itself.

Playing 95 per cent himself (certainly his chilling hood in Wait Until Dark must count as an exception), the 
graduate of Chicago's Second City comedy troupe started in feature films in 1966 as the Soviet submarine 
commander in The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! He has also been the bumbler 
Inspector Clouseau, the single father of Popi, the director of Little Murders and, along the way, the 
unforgettable deaf mute of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. "For a long time I was playing people who were 
strangers to the environment that they found themselves in, outsiders who were thrown into situations they 
were unprepared for. I used to feel a little bit uncomfortable almost everywhere, sort of not belonging. Now 
I take it the other way - I'm pretty comfortable almost anywhere." Two reasons for this newfound comfort 
sit just across the table. "They're my best friends," Tony says, referring to his parents, and Arkin says of his 
son that "I've learned a lot from this guy." Home, as the saying goes, seems to be where the heart is. "I feel 
like where we are now," Arkin says, "is the only home I've ever had." Growing up in Jewish Brooklyn, "I 
didn't feel like I was capable of terribly much. If you had 3 1/2 hours, I could tell you why. I think most 
people don't think they're capable of much. That's why people bury themselves in careers, and use the 
careers as a filter for all the things that they don't feel themselves capable of in a hundred thousand other 
areas." That's why Arkin is an insider at home and still something of an outsider in the industry for which 
he says he'd gladly act for free as long as he's paid $100 an hour to attend meetings. "I don't hang around 
with other actors. I've seen people say to them, 'You're great.' And I don't get that. And that's fine with me. 
A lot of actors get excited by someone doing something inventive. That doesn't excite me any more. But 
when somebody comes up - it hasn't happened very often, maybe three or four times in my life - and tells 
me they've changed their feelings about deaf people as a result of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or with 
Popi they said they used to hate Puerto Ricans and they can't any more, that makes me happy."