A face built for the back seat of a getaway car: squint, grin, dimpled chin and hardly a word to say. Pollard played one kind of man for fifty years, and in Bonnie and Clyde that man is the reason the film hurts.
Fi1m perspective
Near the end of the first act of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), C. W. Moss is left in the getaway car outside a bank and, because nobody has told him not to, parks it in a space. Michael J. Pollard plays the whole thing with a face that seems to be waiting for someone to explain the joke to him. We laughed at the reversing and the horn. Then Clyde fires through the window, a clerk's face comes apart, and the laugh stuck in our throats, and part of what made it stick was Pollard, still sitting there looking pleased with himself. He is the film's fool, and the film lets him stay one.
That face did most of his work for him: the bulbous nose, the dimpled chin, the squint and the smirk, and a way of letting a line arrive late, as if it had travelled some distance to reach him. He had been at it for years before anyone noticed. There was television from 1958, including Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and Broadway, where he was the first Hugo Peabody in Bye Bye Birdie (1960). In 1966 he turned up in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and The Wild Angels. Then Arthur Penn cast him as C. W., and the persona was fixed.
Fixed is the word. For a short while the films let him carry things: Little Fauss and Big Halsy (1970), as Little Fauss opposite Robert Redford, and Dirty Little Billy (1972), which cast him as Billy the Kid and asked him to play the twitch as a psychopath's. After that he went back to the edges, where a camera could find him and leave. Andy the volunteer firefighter in Roxanne (1987), Herman in Scrooged (1988), Bug Bailey in Dick Tracy (1990), where Warren Beatty, his Clyde, was now directing him, and a late turn as Stucky in Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003). We have not reviewed these and will not pretend to have weighed them, but the parts describe themselves: the odd man in the corner, there to be looked at.
The criticism is the obvious one, and it is fair: after 1967 he was hardly ever asked to do anything but this. Pollard seems to have known it. Asked in 1969 about his screen persona, he said: "Same thing I've been doing for 10 years, man." There is no complaint in that, and we are not sure there should be. Most actors spend a career looking for one face an audience will remember. He had his before he was thirty, and it does its best work in a film that still holds, cut by Dede Allen, in which a boy parks a car and a man dies for it. Start there. Watch him when he is not speaking, which is most of the time.
Biography
Michael J. Pollard was an American character actor. Born Michael John Pollack Jr. on 30 May 1939 in Passaic, New Jersey, he attended Montclair Academy and studied at the Actors Studio in New York. He made his Broadway debut in 1958 in Comes a Day and appeared in the original productions of A Loss of Roses (1959) and Bye Bye Birdie (1960).
Pollard is best known for playing C. W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and a BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles. His other film and television credits include Star Trek (1966), Roxanne (1987), Tango & Cash (1989), Dick Tracy (1990) and House of 1000 Corpses (2003). He died on 20 November 2019 in Los Angeles.
