The Borg

When I heard the Borg was dead, the call went out. Not to my wife, who is the one who cared about The Next Generation of Star Trek, but to my buddy out in NYC. This was not a Picard-related issue. This was the Borg: Ernest Borgnine. The guy who beat Frank Sinatra to death in "From Here To Eternity." The guy who battled Ethel Merman to a standstill in their six-week marriage. And yes, the guy who killed Socrates. I'm guessing Willard would have gone much easier on Ernie if that wouldn't have happened. Alas, some things just can't be undone.
Like the passing of the Borg. He lived just five years short of a century, won an Academy Award, and always got the best of ol' Leadbottom. I spent my youngest days watching a nearly uninterrupted loop of "McHale's Navy" reruns, always relating more to Ensign Charles Parker than the burly, conniving Commander Quentin McHale, but still respecting and admiring the work this slab of a man put in. That's why it was such a revelation to discover that Ernest Borgnine had been a very busy man when he wasn't racing about the Pacific on the PT-73. More than two hundred film and television credits, including his Oscar-winning performance in the title role of "Marty." It should be noted that in this film, he beat no one to death, man or rat.
But that's not the reason I e-mailed my pal in Manhattan. It was our shared fascination with another of his less celebrated roles: Jonathan Corbis. Yes, that's him giving some mild credibility to a cast that included Eddie Albert and William Shatner. The guy in the man-goat makeup. It's a pretty scary movie. Or at least it was back when we saw it at a drive-in in 1975. For a thirteen-year-old, man-goat trumps Academy Award just about every time. A few years later, he showed up as "Cabbie" in John Carpenter's "Escape From New York," mostly so people could say, "Hey! Is that Ernest Borgnine?" It was almost enough to make you forget that the guy behind the eye patch was the computer that wore tennis shoes.
Ernest Borgnine was the guy who, for us, originated the "boxed credit." You know, where everybody else was listed in order, but he was listed at the end, with a box around his name. Like John Lithgow in "Footloose," only way before that. The sadistic sheriff in "Convoy?" Ernie with a box around his name, and we started to refer to him as "The Borg." Long before Jean-Luc and his crew began to quake in fear of being assimilated, we knew resistance was futile. Aloha, Ernie.