Alan Arkin, Explaining and Defending One Of His Flop Movies
In early 1983 Alan Arkin starred in an absurdist comedy called The Return of Captain Invincible. It did not become a highlight in a career that otherwise included acclaimed performances in films like The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, Catch-22 and The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, all the way up to a great late-in-life turn with Michael Douglas in the TV series The Kominsky Method.
When Arkin died Thursday at the age of 89, Captain Invincible became Captain Invisible in most of his obituaries, which is what happens when a $7 million movie grosses $55,000 upon its release.
Arkin probably wished it were a better movie, that the comedy, drama and music had meshed in a more appealing way. In an interview before its release, he still did not sound like he regretted making it.
Captain Invincible was a superhero, a parody of Superman with a dark twist. He had fought for justice in America through the early years of the 20th century and most notably became a powerful force in the defeat of Adolf Hitler.
After the war, when he returned to the United States, he was driven into exile by McCarthyist witch hunters, who cited his red cape and declared that anyone as aggressively anti-fascist as the captain must be a communist.
His reputation destroyed, Captain Invincible decamped to Australia and became a destitute drunkard. Years later his old nemesis Mr. Midnight resurfaces in America, with a plan to cleanse the cities of minorities, and Captain Invincible is tracked down to see if he can stop an evil foe again.
Alan Arkin never faced off with Adolf Hitler. But his father David I. Arkin was fired from his job as a teacher in Los Angeles in the early 1950s during the McCarthy wave when he refused to answer questions about his political beliefs. David Arkin challenged the dismissal and was repeatedly rejected until a judge finally ruled he should have been considered for reinstatement. Unfortunately, that ruling came down 30 years later, after David Arkin had died.
The firing also shut David Arkin out from the place he really wanted to work, the movies. He was relegated to the fringes of the entertainment industry, where he most notably wrote the song “Black and White” (“The ink is black / The paper’s white / Together we learn / To read and write”), a celebration of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision outlawing racial segregation in schools.
“McCarthy was a nightmare,” Alan Arkin said during an interview in early 1983. “For the country and personally.”
So Captain Invincible’s story, however strangely framed, was one he thought worth telling.
“The statement the script made,” he said, “was a strong one.”
And not just about the dangers of McCarthyism.
“We’re at a time when we don’t have heroes,” he said, “and a country without heroes is in bad shape.
“It’s dangerous for the culture to be suspicious of nobility, and the only thing people seem to believe now is exposes. We see limitations and disillusionment, when what we need is admiration free of illusions. The last hero we had was probably Kennedy.”
Nor, he said, was popular culture helping.
“The heroes in the movies now — E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark — are totally removed from our lives. Gandhi is the only one to emulate.”
Off-camera, Arkin wasn’t a particularly prominent political activist. His passion was acting, and it was acting through which he spoke.
“Acting is the only thing I killed myself studying,” he said. “Everything else was a way to kill time when I wasn’t acting.”
That included the Tarriers, a folk music group in which he played from 1955 to 1957 with Bob Carey and Erik Darling. The Tarriers don’t get enough attention as an early influence in the coming folk music revival, since among other things they recorded “Tom Dooley” before the Kingston Trio and “The Banana Boat Song” before Harry Belafonte.
They taped a show in Paris in 1957, and that live recording, Arkin mused, showed that “we’d really hit our stride.”
Arkin himself had hit the end. “I decided to leave three days after the taping,” he said. “I saw myself in the black satin pants and the sport shirt and thought, ‘What am I doing here?’
“That was a long time ago.“
He kicked around for a couple of years before he joined the comedy troupe Second City, where he said he learned what works as humor. He got discovered there in 1963 and was cast in the Broadway play Enter Laughing, for which he won a Tony. He crashed the movies in 1966 with The Russians Are Coming and was rarely without work for the rest of life.
Not all that work was acclaimed, and Arkin allowed with some bemusement that it didn’t all deserve to be.
“There’s no one criterion for choosing projects,” he said. “Some of it depends on bank statements. If I can live for a year without working, a script has to be a masterpiece. If I’m broke, I’ll do it.
Some might think that would explain Captain Invincible, which featured full-out song-and-dance production numbers juxtaposed with weird scenes like a Raiders of the Lost Ark spoof where the captain and his associate are trapped in a pit of vacuum cleaners.
Arkin still felt it had something to say. Whether audiences saw that was out of his control.
“I’ve done lots of things,” he said, “that I knew in advance would get no attention and make no money. And I’m still proud of them.
“So am I a success? That’s a crazy word. Have you fulfilled your goals? I have. I do what I want. It’s wonderful and I’m enormously grateful.”
