Last night, I channel surfed onto Lawrence Tierney's first starring role in the movie, Dillinger. He went on to be a film noir stalwart in movies like, Born to Kill, Shakedown, The Hoodlum and the homicidal hitchhiker in The Devil Thumbs a Ride. I wonder if John Waters would have written his latest book, Carsick, if he had seen this before sticking his thumb out in Baltimore heading to San Francisco.Normally, catching a movie with one of my "that guys" would not be impetus for a musing. But in the intro to the movie, Robert Osborne mentioned that Tierney got himself into as much trouble off-the-screen as his characters did on-the-screen.
The tough son of an Irish-American New York cop, Tierney enjoyed his libations, frequented seedy bars and didn't take any guff. In the 40s and 50s, he was arrested numerous times for brawls. So much so, that his career suffered because studios didn't want the bad publicity that hounded him. This behavior continued well into his 50s, after his career had waned. In 1973 at 54, he was stabbed during a fight in a Manhattan bar. Two years later he was questioned by the New York police after a 24-year-old woman's apparent suicide. He told the cops he..."had just got there, and she just went out the window."Intrigued, I began some research of my own. Amazingly, I found out that his career continued later in life. His look had changed with age. Despite being listed as Lawrence Tierney in the credits, I never make the connection with the film noir actor. For the Tarantino fans, he is the master mind, Joe, who put the gang together in Reservoir Dogs. For Sienfeld fans, he played Elaine's father.
That is the kind of trivia that become encoded into my cerebral matter. As ever - BB
"All right ramblers, let's get rambling!" - Lawrence Tierney as Joe Cabot in Reservoir Dogs
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