The one movie Robert Duvall called better than anything to come out of Hollywood
Having been around so long that he debuted when the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood was in its final throes, Robert Duvall has gone on to work with some of the biggest names cinema has ever seen, not to mention pulling his weight in a number of the greatest movies ever made.
Starting as he meant to go on, Duvall’s first film was Robert Mulligan’s adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird with Gregory Peck on imperious and Academy Award-winning form as Atticus Finch. By the end of the 1960s, he’d already added Marlon Brando’s The Chase, Frank Sinatra’s The Detective, Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, and John Wayne’s True Grit to his filmography.
The best was still to come, though, after the ’70s surrounded Duvall with greatness. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, the first two chapters in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, the filmmaker’s wartime epic Apocalypse Now, George Lucas’ THX-1138, and Sidney Lumet’s Network continued the actor’s habit of working with either the most prominent names in the business or capturing future icons at an early stage.
If there’s an indelible star or legendary auteur, there’s a high chance they’ve crossed paths with Duvall at one stage or another. Robert Redford, Tony Scott, Tom Cruise, Michael Caine, Christian Bale, Gene Hackman, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nicolas Cage, Denzel Washington, Kevin Costner, and the other Steve McQueen; the list of actors and filmmakers he’s partnered up with borders on the preposterous.
With that in mind, when Duvall named one picture as being better than anything that’s ever been made in Hollywood, it’s worth listening to. There may have been a hint of bias, considering they’d made 1995’s dramedy Something to Talk About, but for the Oscar-winning veteran’s money, Lasse Hallström had blown all of his American counterparts out of the water.
“You name me one movie in the history of Hollywood that was as good as My Life as a Dog,” Duvall adamantly stated to Neil Young in 2003. “Beautiful.” The tear-jerking coming-of-age story immediately took its place as the actor’s favourite movie of all time, and he was so invested in Hallström’s ongoing success that he voiced entirely accurate reservations about his then-current company.
“He’s now working with Harvey Weinstein,” Duvall mused on An Unfinished Life. “I don’t know if that’s good for Lasse Hallström. I saw him the other day. He didn’t say much, but I think maybe he needs to escape from that situation.” They turned out to be prophetic words, with Duvall concerned the mastermind behind the greatest film he’d ever seen was in danger of being chewed up and spat out by the infamously overbearing producer.
He was clearly speaking from a place of experience, seeing as Duvall has quite literally been in at least a handful of the best movies in Hollywood history, but in his estimation, nothing tops My Life as a Dog.
