Anyone familiar with Walter’s career knows that the murderous, psychopathic fan she played in Play Misty for Me 50 years ago, was her breakthrough role.
Misty was the first picture Eastwood ever directed, based on a Jo Heims and Dean Riesner script, off a Heims story.
Without “Evelyn,” there would have been no Arrested Development or Archer, because Walter would have either been forced to find a full-time job to pay the rent, say real estate, and would have ended up marrying someone other than Ron Leibman the second time around, or she would have remained an obscure character actress and ultimately bit player.
I use FireFox as my go-to browser. Whenever you open a new tab in FF, it shows you a page displaying fake journalism “things” from Pocket.com, that my journalistic hero George S. Schuyler used to call, “moron fodder.” Schuyler was speaking of the Sunday newspaper feature inserts he was once hired to oversee. Today, moron fodder tends to be stuff posted online for mostly White racial socialists who think they’re educated, and who have the loan debt, to prove it.
Moron fodder will typically be the diametric opposite of truth and decency, and be written by “experts.” For instance, Pocket has in its rotation a “thing” by a black affirmative action writer, Brentin Mock, on blacks in a Detroit area, celebrating their refusal to be helped by liberal Whites, who had offered to pay to plant trees in their neighborhoods. The black refuseniks were simply racist to the bone, to the point of harming themselves, just to stick it to The Man. But to the racist imbecile who wrote the “thing,” they were heroes. The whole exercise in double-think was paid for by Mike Bloomberg, and google is promoting it like crazy.
Which brings us back to Jessica Walter.
An Alison Herman wrote a “thing” entitled, “The Enduring Allure of Jessica Walter,” for a racial socialist outlet called The Ringer, which appears to be geared towards White sports fans who hate White people, à la Gawker’s Deadspin.
“When an older actor [sic] passes away, the response often leans closer to fond nostalgia than acute shock….”
That was Herman’s lede.
According to Herman, for younger fans Walter is famous based on roles she played as bitchy women on two long-running cable sitcoms, Arrested Development and Archer. Older viewers know her from “her early performances in films like Grand Prix or series like the original Mission: Impossible…”
Very few people from my generation remember Walter for those two performances.
“In a true rarity for a woman in Hollywood, Walter’s most iconic work arguably came in the final decades of her career.”
There’s that word. It’s one of the trademarks of the hack writer. Gene Hackman, Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis did iconic work. Jessica Walter was not on that level.
Walter’s performance as murderous fan Evelyn is significant on three levels: First, because it made her career; Second, because it established a new genre, the “fan film”; and third, because it was the primary inspiration of the most infamous female movie stalker role, “Alex” (Glenn Close) in Adrian Lyne’s 1987 movie, Fatal Attraction.
In the fan film, an admirer of a famous person takes things way too far, and wants to take over the star’s life.
One such movie was the Martin Scorsese dud, The King of Comedy (1982), in which loser Robert de Niro turns his basement into a miniature mockup of The Tonight Show set, and kidnaps Jerry Lewis (Johnny Carson wisely rejected the role), who plays the King of Late Night.
Another case was Tony Scott’s The Fan (1996), in which Robert de Niro (again!) becomes obsessed with baseball superstar Wesley Snipes.
The best fan film I’m familiar with was Misery (1990), Rob Reiner's film adaptation of Steven King's novel, which won Kathy Bates the Oscar for Best Actress as the murderous reader of James Caan’s bestselling author. The fan saves the writer from a car accident in a blizzard, smashes his knee to incapacitate him, and forces him to re-write his newest manuscript, in order to save the heroine (“Misery”) he had just killed off in the manuscript he was on his way to deliver to his publisher. (If memory serves after 30 years, the crazed fan read and destroyed the manuscript.)
(I had assumed that the proximate inspiration of Fatal Attraction was Long Island schoolteacher Carolyn Warmus’ murder of Betty Jeanne Solomon, the wife of her colleague and lover, Paul Solomon. However, Warmus didn’t commit that crime until 1989, two years after the picture’s release. Thus, her crime was called “the Fatal Attraction murder,” after the film; the movie was not named after the crime. Life imitated art.)
Finally, Alison Herman wildly exaggerated the significance of an incident in which actor Jeffrey Tambor screamed at Walter on a set for a TV series.
Feminists insist on portraying every even semi-successful woman as a victim of “sexual harassment.”
“[Her role in Sidney Lumet’s The Group (1966)] seemed to set the tone for her next screen personae as bitchy, difficult or even dangerously vindictive women. Certainly the most memorable of these characters was her obsessive Evelyn in Clint Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), which earned Jessica a much deserved Golden Globe nomination.”
By writing feminist replacement history, and eliminating the real significance of Jessica Walter’s career, Alison Herman made Walter a much less interesting and significant figure. But that’s the way feminism works.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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