au revoir, Peter Boyle

Updated: Wings For Wheels has a nice rememberance of him too.

Peter Boyle, who played the tap-dancing monster in "Young Frankenstein" and the curmudgeonly father in the long-running sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond," has died.

I'm remembering his turn as the racist old father in "Monster's Ball," and his good work in "The Candidate," still one of the best and most acute political movies ever made. I'm also kind of fond of his work in "The Dream Team" as the former ad exec with a Messiah complex.

Coincidentally I have been watching "Everybody Loves Raymond" a little more recently because I read producer Philip Rosenthal's book. By and large I can either take it or leave it.

But I've seen enough to get a sense that Boyle's role on that show was to be a little one-note. But that one note he played, he played exceedingly well.

I'm also remembering a charming movie he made back in 1973 called "Steelyard Blues." I don't know how well-known it is today. I only know it because in the book "Harlan Ellison's Watching" there's a rave review Ellison wrote of it at the time. Along with what he called "A Sort Of An Interview With Peter Boyle," so named because he didn't feel he was able to spend enough time with the actor.

Rather touchingly, Ellison admits in the piece that one reason for doing the (sort of) interview was that he wanted to meet and possibly become friends with Boyle. I was gratified to see them together on a talk show (I think it was "Politically Incorrect") years later, and get the sense that it had happened.

But like most people, I suppose, I do think of him first in "Young Frankenstein"-Mel Brooks' best film, I've always thought. Everybody remembers the dancing, but with the repeat viewings to which the film holds up, you realize that Boyle's performance contains a note of pathos that is the soul of the film.

Pathos usually defeats comedians, most of whom have to be kept away from their Chaplin shit with a whip and a chair (think Robin Williams). But although he could be extraordinarily funny, Boyle was an actor through-and-through first.

As fortune would have it, "Young Frankenstein" is currently availible in the cable On-Demand section. I shall almost certainly be watching it later.

"If you're blue, and you don't know where to go to, why don't you go where fashion sits..."