M. Emmet Walsh Was The Rare “Character Actor” Who Also Happened To Be The Best Part Of Every Movie He Appeared In

Like a lot of people of my generation, the first time I was introduced to M. Emmet Walsh, I heard his voice before I ever saw his face. The Coen Brothers’ debut movie, Blood Simple (1984), opens on scenes of a blasted Texas landscape and then a voice, unctuous and insinuating, oozes into “the world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee.” He pronounces it “GARN-tee.” He says “I don’t care if you’re the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or Man of the Year–something can always go wrong” and he says “Pope of Rome” like “PO-PA-Rome,” like a discount ravioli canned in ketchup sauce and who gives awards for “Man of the Year?” and how is it a more powerful position than head Catholic or POTUS?  “And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for  help and watch him fly,” he says “HALP” as he lays out this vile sermon, this moral equivocation that continues with how “now in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else– that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas… and down here, you’re on your own.” When he says “down here,” he makes it sound somehow like he’s talking about Hell because he is. Because noir is meeting the girl of your dreams and, in that moment, knowing how as sure as you’re going to have the best sex of your life, you’re going to die for the terrible things you’re about to do for her. I had heard a lot of voiceovers by the time I saw Blood Simple, but I’d never heard a voice quite like his before: the kind of voice that makes you want to take a long, hot shower and think about your decisions.

In the film, the voice belongs to P.I. Loren Visser, decked out in a yellow leisure suit and a ten-gallon hat, who gets involved in an adultery case that turns into a murder-for-hire fiasco that turns into one of the great final laughs, final lines, and final shots of the entire decade. Mortally wounded, Visser figures out too late that there’s been a bad misunderstanding and laughs M. Emmet Walsh’s indescribable laugh. More cackle than laugh. More exploding hyena than cackle. “Well, ma’am, if I see him,” he says, referring to a person no one seems to know is dead except for him, “I’ll sure give him the message.” The version I grew up with ends with Neil Diamond crooning “I’m a Believer” from his 1967 album “Just For You,” the year after The Monkees made it into a smash #1 hit and it’s the only version of Blood Simple I’ll watch. It’s one of the reasons I own a VCR and keep it in good working condition. Neil’s “I’m a Believer” feels sadder, sleazier than The Four Tops’ “Same Old Song,” a Motown classic favored by the Coens and inserted in every post-VHS cut of the film. It feels more nihilistic, more a match to Walsh’s opening monologue about individualism at the expense of the greater good; opportunism as North Star ethics what could be more American? Money as the only God in an empty universe? I’m a believer and Walsh was the better barker for the nightmare of the 1980s capitalist sideshow than Gordon Gekko. We are a nation of fat men in big hats. P.I. Visser is a good Texan with a gun and a white, ten-gallon hat. He’s just smart enough. We have an election this year, just wait and see.

I saw Blade Runner for the first time that year, too, afraid to see it sooner because of its advertised “additional scenes of violence” restored to its home video release. There he is right away, Deckard’s boss Bryant, who Deckard’s exhausted voiceover introduces as a man who in “history books” was the kind of cop who “used to call Black men n******.” Sweaty, furtive, wearing a mustache badly, he looks like a very bad boy caught in the act of frying ants with a magnifying glass. He assigns the task of assassinating a small band of human-passing “Replicants” manufactured for various unsavory tasks for the pleasure of their human masters with an indescribable mixture of glee and coy shame. He is grotesque. There he is again as the H.I. McDunnough’s foreman in the Coens’ next film Raising Arizona, telling an endless story of a traffic accident in which he and his partner Bill Parker are “approaching the wreck, and there’s this spherical object a restin’ in the highway. And it’s not a piece of the car.” If you know the film, you can hear him savoring the word “spherical” like a dog working on a piece of taffy. If you know it, you know he punctuates his punchline with that maniacal laugh. It almost doesn’t matter what he’s saying as much as it’s immediately clear how soul-sucking H.I.’s job is, how he is surrounded by blowhards and social misfits for a paycheck that couldn’t possibly begin to compensate him for being saddled by this chortling, good times Ancient Mariner.

That was Walsh’s gift, the indescribable, irreplaceable thing of him. Effortlessly, immediately, he could create a setting. Like a William Carlos Williams poem, he provides by the contrast of him how every other character is through the comparison. We immediately root for everyone in Blood Simple who is not him; we understand Deckard’s job in Blade Runner as unsavory at best and very possibly homicidal at worst just because Walsh’s character is the one suggesting it. We didn’t really need the voiceover, Ford was right, but because Walsh by his presence is all the information you need. When he shows up in Knives Out as the worlds oldest security expert, he provides by his strange confidence and nostalgia for the good ol’ days when security guards needed to rely on their guns and intuition instead of “all this technology” – the comic tension required of a scene in which a prehistoric VHS tape on its weakest setting might hold the secret of an old man’s murder. Like the tape, he’s awfully frail but there’s a good chance he’s not nearly so doddering as he appears. He embodies the vibe of the entire film: strange, tense, funny. I wonder in a chicken/egg kind of way if it’s Walsh who brings that with him or the films dialed into that frequency that seek him out. Does Ulu Grosbard’s extraordinary Straight Time (1978) even work without Walsh’s corrupt parole officer? I mean, probably because it’s such a strong film, but I can’t imagine a single actor that would have been better as the foil for Dustin Hoffman’s long-time loser. Walsh is a shark. “My friend, I see that you’re going to force me to deal with you,” he says, his eyes black and flat from behind his wire-framed, round glasses and under a $5 haircut and the power dynamics of their relationship is electrified and jumpy, the prime mover for every minute of the film Walsh isn’t on-screen. The threat of him lurking there like a monster from the deep whenever Hoffman makes a mistake is how we know Hoffman isn’t getting out of this one.

Too easy to dismiss as just weird, then, locate him as an unlikely amalgam of Charles Laughton and Crispin Glover: the one part certainly peculiar and off-putting, maybe to the point of being prone to sudden violence; but the other part is oddly touching. He’s something spry trapped in an oversized body, smarter than you want to think he is and aware that maybe you’re laughing at him and in the laughing, underestimating him. Remember him as sports columnist Dickie Dunn in Slap Shot (1977)? Manipulated by grizzled Reg (Paul Newman) into providing some positive press for a horrific fifth-place local team, he’s touching for his apparent guilelessness but watch the scene where Reg embarrasses Dickie by reading his prose out loud at a raucous bar. “Now, that’s good writin’ Dickie,” he says and Dickie, who’s been sucking down a beer nervously in a series of quick sips – a fawn at the teat – says “aw, I was just trying to capture the spirit of the thing, Reg,” which is not only charming for his pleasure at being praised by a bruiser of a man he admires, but indicates that maybe he knows it’s a grift and he’s not a patsy but a confederate playing along with the “spirit of the thing.” Walsh made every line reading a thread you could pull for a multitude of unravelings. He opens Glen Gordon Caron’s Clean and Sober (1988) with a different kind of monologue, standing in front of a room full of addicts, talking about trying to identify his drug dealer at night by the shape of his headlights. His description of how desperation manifests itself in quotidian ways gives form to the rest of the picture. 

And how about his swim coach in Ordinary People (1980), a small role in a film full of legendary performances who, desperate to help deeply depressed kid Conrad (Timothy Hutton), steals a moment when he all but begs his charge to tell him what he can do to help him. When Conrad insists on quitting the team, the play of emotions on Walsh’s face is devastating, heartbreaking. “Bright kid like you, everything going for him. I don’t get it. Why do you want to keep messing up your life?” He’s jealous. He’s hurt. He sees a beautiful boy with all the advantages he wishes he had and he perceives Conrad’s quitting as a betrayal of all the sacrifices he feels like he’s made selflessly on his behalf. “Actions have consequences. I’m not taking you back. Remember that.” He plays it like a lover being broken up with by a partner he’s always suspected was too good for him.

It’s easy to praise a guy who’s always the best part of mediocre movies, but what do we do with a “character” actor who’s always the best part of masterpieces? In minutes and seconds, but rarely in hours, M. Emmet Walsh provided the most vital information in the films he was in, summarized the emotional undercurrents, clarified the complexities of otherwise familiar situations, brought everyone else to more vivid life who had the extraordinary luck to share a scene with him. We call people “character actors” in “supporting roles” without really taking time with the words and what they’re supposed to describe. Walsh died on March 20, 2024 and he leaves behind one of the great modern legacies in film. Movies that need him now will never be as good as they could have been. His loss in film is a wound that will never heal. How’s that for a legacy?

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.