Heaven Can No Longer Wait

Benjamin Braddock approaches the desk in the Taft Hotel, and is greeted by a smiling desk clerk. Nervously, Ben begins the check in process, taking the card that he had begun writing on and shoving it in his pocket, starting fresh on another. "Is there a problem?" asks the clerk. "No. No problem," replies Ben as he nervously finishes scribbling on his second try at checking in. The clerk glances quickly at the card and asks, "Do you have any luggage Mister Gladstone?" After a beat or two of confusion, Ben tells him that he has some in his car, to which the clerk responds, "Very good, I'll get a porter to help you bring it in." He rings the bell sharply once but before he can do it again, Ben has slipped his hand over to silence the bell, leaving the clerk to come down again with some force on Ben's hand.
This is the kind of quiet comedy constructed by Buck Henry. He played the desk clerk in The Graduate. He wrote it, too. Not just that scene. The whole movie. And if he had only played the clerk, that would have been a happy bit of comedy history, but he wrote one of the great films. If you don't believe me, believe the American Film Institute. Mister Henry was also part of one of the longest steadicam shot in American cinema, as he pitches a sequel to his 1967 masterpiece in The Player. He also directed, along with his good friend Warren Beatty, Heaven Can Wait. That film did not make the top one hundred, but includes some of the same inspired bits of lunacy that can be found throughout Buck Henry's work. Like Catch-22. Or co-creating the TV series Get Smart with his pal Mel Brooks.
And if you missed all that, then maybe you caught one or more of his ten appearances as host of Saturday Night Live. A friend of mine wrote me that he never felt like he really "got" Buck when he showed up on that show. Which I think is a fair appraisal, first of all because we were teenagers when they first ran, and also because there was something about Buck that asked us all to keep a safe distance. He looked calm enough on the outside, but just below the surface was where we would find Uncle Roy.
And ultimately, Buck Henry was a gift from the Gods of Comedy. Though he went on to join the writing staff up above, he left us with a wealth of his genius in which we can all splash about for generations to come. Buck stomped on the Terra, and made us all laugh hard enough to do a little more stomping. He gets double points for that. Aloha, Mister Henry. You will be missed.