On The Cusp

 Not everybody is going to flinch when they hear that Frederic Forrest died. If you grew up in the seventies and eighties, it's probably a little more likely, but this wasn't a leading man. Mister Forrest was more of what you would call a "character actor." He showed up for me way back in 1972 in a little picture called When The Legends Die. He played a Native American who gets pulled into the rodeo circuit by a drunken Richard Widmark. Not your typical western. But it was a start.

Several years later, I took in all his repressed rage against the war machine in Apocalypse Now. Frederic played Chef, a member of the crew that gets assigned to ferry Captain Willard up the river, into the heart of darkness. He left me with this bit of wisdom: Never get off the boat. It was this same year, 1979 that he appeared opposite Bette Midler in The Rose. Bette was the star and the voice and the glitter and the gaze, but Frederic Forrest as the limo driver who ends up as the unlikely last love of this doomed siren is the heart. 

A few years later, he appeared in the teen comedy, Valley Girl. Forrest made the most out of his dad role, giving us one of the first "Woodstock parent" tropes. He and his wife try and figure out how their little girl could be so fascinated by shopping and slumber parties when there was the important business of running a health food store to keep in mind. Again, you'd probably come for the Nic Cage, but I would recommend staying for the Frederic Forrest. 

 It was around this time that I discovered Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, the story of a surveillance expert played by Gene Hackman who is worried that the couple that he has been watching will be murdered. The couple was played by Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams. This is when I began formulating a corollary to Roger Ebert's Stanton-Walsh rule, which stated "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad." I'll just go ahead and say that it should be expanded to the Forrest-Stanton-Walsh Rule. 

Frederic Forrest may not have stomped on the Terra, except in the background while making it possible for those big stars to have their moment. He will be missed.