Tom Sizemore RIP

A couple of nice appreciations of Tom Sizemore, who passed away yesterday from complications from a brain aneurysm. Seitz:

Part of his power came from the cognitive dissonance of seeing one of cinema’s scariest sleazebags cast as a soft-spoken guardian of civilization or a nuanced antihero with good qualities. There would be a period where you’d wait for the other shoe to drop, revealing Sizemore’s character as a secret monster — and when it became clear that he wasn’t one, his character’s allies seemed more formidable, because they’d somehow persuaded a wolf to guard the farm. 

This gets exactly at Sizemore’s gift; he appeared on screen as someone so obviously menacing and dangerous that it became a relief when you realized that he was menacing and dangerous but, at least for the next couple hours, he was more or less on your side. If you’re a connoisseur of 90s cinema, you’ll probably be able to think of 4 or 5 of his supporting performances that absolutely turned a decent movie into a good movie, or a good movie into a great movie.

And of course you cannot talk about Sizemore without discussing his self-destructive streak, which turned out to be an other-destructive streak as he was credibly accused of domestic violence and molestation (sometimes on the sets of the movies where he was making his mark). It’s dangerous to try to connect the kind of person that Sizemore depicted on film with the kind of person he was in real life (there are plenty of folks good at playing heavies who are nonetheless quite decent people, and there are plenty of addicts who manage their self-destructiveness without destroying the lives of others), but of course you have to wonder whether the darkness he was so good at presenting on the screen came from the same source as the darkness he struggle with in real life. It’s further worth noting that despite his destructiveness to himself and others Sizemore continued to find work in Hollywood, albeit often in B or direct-to-video pictures towards the end. No matter how many people you hurt, “cancellation” doesn’t stick if you have the right friends or if powerful folks still find you useful.

In only marginally related news, ever since I cancelled my cable and went all streaming I’ve watched an unusual amount of broadcast TV, usually in the background as I work or parent or some such. 50s, 60s, and 70s TV is absolutely packed with actors who had careers not dissimilar to that of Tom Sizemore, passing through the TV circuit on the way up, the way down, or the way through. Yesterday I had Perry Mason on in the background and heard an unmistakable voice:

Dall ended up having a fairly tragic end, dying in 1971. The episode also included Robert Brown, who guest starred in one of the worst Star Trek: TOS episodes of all time, and who had a chequered career that ended in 1994.

Brown died last year at the age of 96(!).