welcome to my stephen mchattie film festival

When I was fourteen and got the reading list for my English class, James Michener's Centennial was on it, and it looked like a load of wank. As luck and the gods would have it, someone was making a miniseries, and it was due out just in time for me to get the gist without wading through a lot of bollocks about how the rock formed under the Rockies. The miniseries was a brand new form at the time; there had been Roots a few years earlier, but mostly only Brits had used it for Masterpiece Theatre. Certainly it hadn't become the precision form of entertainment it is now: Centennial is, in fact, twelve two-hour episodes long. Ponderous, to say the least. Even I, its great fan, I who own it on VHS, have never watched the whole thing. I get up to the episode where Cliff De Young finds redemption for his father's sins by driving cattle across the plains with Dennis Weaver and I'm done for every time despite every good intention. Then again, by the time those beeves get to walking Jake Pasquinel is already dead, and that might have something to do with my loss of interest.

Every now and then, a character not only steps off the pages (or off the screen) and into your imagination, but wraps itself in archetypal clothes and seems rather to step from your own psyche and manifest before your eyes. Jake Pasquinel was such a one for me. He first appeared (in his Stephen McHattie, grown-up form) at the end of the second episode, and in those few scenes, I was electrified. In retrospect I call him my first major shadow animus projection, but that's just blather when you're fourteen and fall in love. In fact, I was so felled by the stroke of this character that I made an unprecedented decision: a conscious choice never to know the name of the actor who played him. You have to have known me as a kid to know how crazy that is. I grew up in a theatre town, poring over season programs, fascinated by the arcs and shifts actors made in successive performances. This is the one and only time I ever decided the purity of a character as it existed in my mind was far too important to risk its devitalization by watching its actor exist separately.

Eight years later: I'm sitting in the Varsity watching Belizaire the Cajun and enjoying it very much, but an actor is driving me nuts. I KNOW this guy, I keep thinking. I KNOW his FACE; who is it? The penny drops during Armand Assante's long scene as Belizaire on the gallows, a great scene, in which he taunts the man who has falsely accused him. It comes to me, just like that: Jake Pasquinel. Look at that face. How could it not stick in your memory, even when he's no longer paint-darkened to look like a half-breed Arapaho renegade? (Ah, the political incorrectness of the '70s. At the theatre in my hometown, a world-class place, white men played Othello all the way until 1973.)

And so when I discovered Stephen McHattie, he'd already been lurking around in my subconscious for several years. Even without that kind of introduction, it's hard to imagine spending life as a filmgazer without noticing him. He's one of those actors who, particularly in his salad days when he was unspoilt by cynicism, makes the kinds of choices that indicate the very best of theatre training and probably some youthful tutelage by Stella Adler or her cohorts. He's the kind of actor who can take a piece of crap and elevate it a little or a lot, depending on his role, or possibly on his mood. A few particular shining moments spring immediately to mind: as a cop in the misconceived Melanie Mayron/Helen Slater comic vehicle Sticky Fingers emerging from a public toilet in drag or later when he says, "He's got great hands." In his episode of the sadly disappointing and short-lived Magnificent Seven series when his Cletus Fowler walks defiantly into the fire. As James Dean, picking up a one-legged woman or reciting from the Little Prince. The way he says "milk" in his throwaway role in the Ultimate Warrior.

He's got a bucketful of dross splashed across his resume, to be sure. He hit the streets running back in the days when an actor chose between the big screen and the small; you couldn't do both. If you did TV, you didn't graduate to movies. Not during the seventies. It could be done in the '50s, a crossover, or the '60s, then again in the '80s when all your faves got their chops down on soaps and sitcoms (Demi Moore! Meg Ryan! Robin Williams! Tom Hanks!), but there was some weird Berlin Wall that crept silently up in the earliest part of the "me" decade and ne'er the twain would meet, not for several years, during which my boy Stephen was caught on the wrong side. He made TV movies, back in the days when you looked up the word "crap" in the dictionary and it said "noun: tv movie." Even so, he belonged to an elite and amorphous category back then, young actors of whom much was expected; they were gonna be stars, if only on the small screen. They had the looks, the charisma, the ambition and the skills. Most of those guys turned into character actors instead, if they survived at all. McHattie is without question one of the best, and with his powerhouse role in David Cronenberg's 2005 masterwork A History of Violence, it is just possible that he's poised for a renaissance. Over the next few weeks I'll be writing about some of his best and worst. If you're really lucky, I'll let you sit in while I watch his old Starsky and Hutch and Walker, Texas Ranger episodes.