The Heartbreak Kid

 Charles Grodin. You know. That guy. 

If you are of a certain age, you can match up the face with a dozen or more appearances on screen. Mister Grodin stood next to some of the biggest stars of the last fifty years, delivering performances that were instantly memorable but always in the service of making whoever was in the room with him look better. Not that he wasn't good looking in an anxious nebbish sort of way. In 1972, he was the romantic lead in The Heartbreak Kid. It's hard to imagine anyone else playing the young newlywed who falls for another girl on his honeymoon. And if that sounds like an awkward situation, you owe it to yourself to cringe your way through the original, before Ben Stiller got hold of it. Nobody did awkward better than Charles Grodin. 

Nowhere was this quality more effectively displayed than in his role as a doctor of veterinary medicine in Albert Brooks' Real Life. While Albert ran about manically, as himself directing a film about "real life," Charles played Warren Yeager, the head of the expressly normal clan chosen by Mister Brooks to star in his cinema vérité opus. No one could believe how oppressively normal a family could be. Unless you watched the Yeagers live through this precursor to every reality TV show made. Completely scripted and completely hysterical. If you don't mind that whole cringing thing.

Which is pretty much the way you make your way through the collected work of Charles Grodin. At the instant that you might start to feel some empathy for his character, he will slip down just a notch or two down the scale to make you wonder how you ever imagined feeling bad for this cad. I believe this is an art, one that he was the chief practitioner of for decades. Whether he was in a scene with Goldie Hawn or Warren Beatty, he was happy to be the schlub. Not that he appeared that way. He spent his entire career looking uncomfortable in his own skin. Or making others feel that way.

The role that I will always remember him for, among so many, would be his portrayal of Fred Wilson, the oil executive whose bright idea it was to bring King Kong to New York to sell gasoline. So much of the 1976 remake was wrong or out of compliance, but Charles Grodin was the height of boorishness. The only person to completely earn being trampled underfoot by a forty foot tall gorilla. 

Because Kong truly stomped on the Terra, and Charles Grodin. Charles Grodin just made the Terra just a little more droll. Aloha, Chuck. You will be missed.