George Segal left us last week, and reading through all the tributes that followed we realized that he is scandalously underrepresented in these pages. This oversight is, perhaps, all too common. In drawing up lists of the iconic male actors of the New Hollywood, names like Hackman, Hoffman and Nicholson immediately leap to mind (as well they should), and a half dozen others quickly follow from there—but Segal might easily go unmentioned. This is probably because of his apparently effortless affability and the deceptive lightness of his touch—you don’t picture George Segal going all method, driving cabs into the night with De Niro, or gloriously chewing the scenery alongside Pacino. But it would be a mistake to underestimate his acting chops simply because they reflect less visibly on the surface of his performances. And a proper look reveals that Segal made two dozen films from 1966 to 1977, most of which are good, many excellent, and several essential. And over the course of that run the directors he worked with included Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, Roger Corman, Carl Reiner, Paul Mazursky and Robert Altman. He was, indeed, one of the essential New Hollywood players.
The thirty year old Segal garnered some attention with two screen performances in 1965. But our story begins in 1966, with Nichols’ landmark Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, an outstanding film that had no small hand in shattering the censorship of the production code, and was a harbinger of the New Hollywood. The picture belonged to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (and Nichols and cinematographer Haskell Wexler), but Segal and Sandy Dennis were both recognized with Academy Award nominations for their supporting roles (Dennis won). That same year Segal, in the effective spy thriller The Quiller Memorandum (written by Harold Pinter), headlined and held his own with a cast that included Max von Sydow, Alec Guinness and George Sanders, which, as they say, is not too shabby.
The prolific actor continued to work regularly, with hits and misses along the way. Some of them have eluded us, including the surely featherweight and forgettable but irresistible sounding The Southern Star (how can you not want to see George with Orson Welles, Ursula Andress and Michel Constantin in an utterly ridiculous caper flic?) With the new decade, however, a series of impressive and important films followed in rapid succession. Loving – directed by Irvin Kershner, shot by seventies virtuoso Gordon Willis, and co-starring Eva Marie Saint and the always great Sterling Hayden – remains underappreciated to this day; it is an early and notable seventies film. As Andrew Sarris observed, Segal’s performance here hits so close to home that it “should make many members of his generation uncomfortable if not utterly uptight.” The actor also starred in two comedies in 1970, including the Barbara Streisand vehicle The Owl and the Pussycat, written by Buck Henry.
As Woody Allen once lamented, however, comedies will not get you a seat at the grown-ups table—and Segal is often associated with his light (but usually entertaining) comedies of the late 1970s, and his subsequent work on TV sitcoms. But if a facility with intense drama and existential crisis are requisite for admission to the Hall of Fame, then track down (if you can – good prints are almost impossible to find) Ivan Passer’s first American film, Born to Win. Here Segal, opposite Karen Black, Paula Prentiss and exquisite New York City locations, carries this gritty gem of a seventies film. Watch the final, restrained scene and dare tell me that George Segal is not a great actor.
The virtual blizzard of movies that followed (and I have skipped over several that others cherish) included two additional New Hollywood landmarks: Blume in Love (Mazursky, 1973) and California Split (Altman, 1974). Mazursky’s film has its flaws. These were always noticeable – it is glaringly, gratingly and at one point even shockingly anti-feminist in its philosophy, which is unexpected from a director known for his sensitivity about such matters – and I personally took this film to the woodshed on these grounds in Hollywood’s Last Golden Age. But now that the world is increasingly Maoist in its insistence that we castigate and renounce those artistic expressions that might transgress, let’s rehabilitate this one. Segal, Susan Anspach, and Kris Kristofferson are all excellent; the film is very well-executed, often funny, with much to say about many things, and even comes with a seal of approval from none other than Molly Haskell.
California Split was Segal’s last great seventies film. Essentially a two-hander with another luminary of the era, Elliot Gould, Split is situated in the midst of Altman’s most spectacular streak—and is probably the movie closest in autobiographical spirit that the director ever made. If not peak Altman for us, it remains indispensable, and the comradery among its participants is palpable. Released the day before Nixon resigned, consider that moment when Segal walks away from the table for the last time, in what should be his moment of ultimate triumph, and witness what the New Hollywood was all about.
