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(1909–1971). British actor.
Yet science fiction critics have a powerful incentive to
overlook Rennie, because they cannot devote all their time to discussing The
Day the Earth Stood Still, but must also deal with the rest of his career,
which astonishingly offers almost nothing else to praise. Indeed, a Michael
Rennie film festival would be, after The Day the Earth Stood Still, a
lengthy ordeal of perfunctory and listless performances in generally wretched
films. Among other nightmares, there is his bland piety as Peter in The Robe;
a lethargic Lord Roxton who cannot be bothered to display too much concern
about blown-up images of lizards in Irwin
ALLEN's terrible version of The
Lost World; a hapless effort to revisit old glories in Cyborg 2087;
a minor role in Byron HASKIN's
overpraised The Power; and a final embarrassment as an alien brilliantly
seeking to conquer Earth by reviving Dracula and Frankenstein in the
unwatchable Assignment: Terror. And then there was that time in the
mid-1960s when Rennie went to Hollywood and instructed his agent to find him
the worst possible parts in the most terrible television series on the
air—which is what one would have to conclude after observing his rapid-fire series
of appearances in Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, The Invaders,
and Batman. If a critic contemplates this mess, and if the kindest thing
he can say is that, well, I guess Rennie's turn as a Bat-villain named the
Sandman was not entirely awful, that indeed might drive him to discuss other
actors instead.
How, then, can one explain such a miserable record of
underachievement? Certainly, it is hard to detect any evidence of grand
ambition in the career of a failed factory worker and car salesman who drifted
into an acting career after a chance encounter. If he contrived to garner
larger and larger roles, that may simply be because he was reasonably handsome,
and because chain-smoking kept him appealingly thin when other actors of his
generation were putting on pounds; in addition, his regular employment in
Hollywood might be attributed solely to the allure of his British accent. One might wish
to imagine that being forced into one lousy part after another made him into an
actor who didn't care about his work, but it seems more likely to me that he
happily accepted all of those lousy parts because he already didn't care. As
for his unusual success in The Day the Earth Stood Still, that might
have resulted from some fortuitous combination of the excitement of his first
starring role in a major film, the manifest richness of the role, and the
prodding of director Wise and capable co-star Patricia Neal, all pushing Rennie
to work harder at his craft than he had ever worked before, or would ever work
again.
In lieu of more idle speculation, then, I will leave it to others to
account for the puzzlingly rare ups, and innumerable downs, of his acting
career. Still, it is perhaps only fitting that science fiction film's most
impressive alien should be the work of an actor who, decades after his death, still
remains a mystery.
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