Cinema’s only flawless acting performance, according to Burt Reynolds: “I can’t find anything wrong”
Despite being one of the biggest stars of his era, nobody took Burt Reynolds particularly seriously as an actor, and that included Burt Reynolds.
He grew too comfortable in his position as the moustachioed beacon of all-American machismo who only had to appear in a movie to guarantee it would do decent business at the box office, which ultimately became his undoing when he slipped from his perch and fell straight into the abyss.
Once his five-year run as the biggest draw in America had come to an end, that was basically it for Reynolds as a top-level concern. Boogie Nights proved to be an anomaly, and he ended up shooting himself in the foot all over again, with his A-list days being definitively over by the early 1980s.
He maintained that his finest hour in front of the cameras came in John Boorman’s Deliverance, and he was probably right. However, the fact that the backwoods thriller was released in 1972 and Reynolds continued acting for another 45 years would suggest that he peaked far too early.
Was he underrated? Not really. Was he overrated? That’s more complicated, but what can’t be denied is that he was very good at what he did. Did he deserve the Academy Award for Paul Thomas Anderson’s classic? Maybe, but as soon as Good Will Hunting was released, it was Robin Williams’ to lose.
Just because someone isn’t viewed as an elite thespian, it doesn’t mean they can’t comment on how good or bad any performance is. Ironically, the two names Reynolds singled out weren’t usually touted as cinema’s ultimate dramatists, but he was adamant that they were responsible for two of Hollywood’s most titanic turns.
“When I look at John Wayne in The Quiet Man, I say, ‘You can’t get any better than that,'” Reynolds mused, before immediately contradicting himself by pointing out another iconic outing from another ‘Golden Age’ icon that he couldn’t find so much as a single flaw in.
“Or I look at Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, and I can’t find anything wrong with that performance,” he explained. “Everybody else in that movie won awards; he didn’t win a thing.” He’s technically right, since Gable’s ‘Best Actor’ was the only one of the three categories the film didn’t succeed in.
If you want to split hairs, though, Hattie McDaniel beat co-star Olivia de Havilland to ‘Best Supporting Actress’, but you see the point he’s making. Spencer Tracy may have been his favourite actor of all time, but Gable gave the best acting performance that Reynolds had ever seen.
