A Pulse, Don’t Leave Home Without It

Or

A Hearse Named Desire

Karl Malden, who spent 20 years admonishing Americans against using cash, has died at the age of 97. One of Hollywood’s lazier actors, Malden won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1951 for A Streetcar Named Desire, doing the same thing he had already done on stage, and then coasted for 50 years. His crooked, bulbous, twice-broken nose kept him out of leading roles, and he channeled the bitterness into character roles where he slapped around Hollywood stars. He played the angry priest that slapped Terry Malloy into shape in On the Waterfront, as Gen. Omar Bradley, he got to order George C. Scott around in Patton, he kept Burt Lancaster in line as the warden in The Birdman of Alcatraz, screamed at Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out, and dragged Sean Connery into saving the earth from Meteor. He found a new audience starring with a pre-insufferable Michael Douglas in the TV detective show The Streets of San Francisco. His next attempt at TV was less successful, starring in Skag, a feel-good romp about a Pittsburgh steel mill foreman partially disabled by a stroke. Although critically lauded, the show didn’t attract much of an audience, and a save the show campaign of mailing steel ingots to NBC started by a fan named Sekulovich was unsuccessful. Other roles included the bartender friend of Gregory Peck’s The Gunfighter, Barbra Streisand’s stepfather in Nuts, Herb Brooks in Miracle on Ice (including Steve Guttenberg as Jim Craig – the sacrilege), and Leon Klinghoffer, the American Jew murdered in The Hijacking of the Achille Lauro. His last screen appearance was as Jed Bartlett’s parish priest who hears the president’s confession in a first season episode of The West Wing, using the same Bible he had used in On the Waterfront.