14: The Impotent Rage of Mr. Bumstead
Scene heading number 20 in The Hudsucker Proxy’s shooting script consists of a few short lines. It contains one setting descriptor and one line of dialogue. The setting descriptor is as follows: “BUMSTEAD, a short, fat, heavily perspiring executive, is screaming at an O.S. secretary. He holds a pot of coffee in one hand and a copy of Boy's Life in the other.” The one line of dialogue is spoken by the same Bumstead: “No magazine. No coffee. Mussburger! I wanna see Mussburger! Or did he jump out a window too?!” This is all we see of Mr. Bumstead, but that one line spoken by character actor Jon Polito is delivered so perfectly that we need no more to understand Mr. Bumstead deeply.
The late Jon Polito is another one of those amazing character actors who got a lot of work in his career but rarely in substantial parts. Among those of us old enough to remember (or just well versed enough on David Simon projects) he is best known for having had a 2 season run on Homicide: Life On The Street as detective Crosetti. He had bit parts on proper blockbuster TV shows like Seinfeld, Modern Family, and Gilmore Girls as well less well known shows such as The Lyon’s Den and Bunheads. As with most character actors he had a type, and his type was short, sweaty, bald, and likely angry. He rarely appeared on screen without wearing facial hair, and his straight, thin mustache cuts a striking line through the middle of his round, bald, head. Polito was 5’ 8”, a mere 2 inches shorter than the average American male, but he projected a kind of shortness on the screen due to his barrel shaped frame being played against slightly taller and slightly slimmer actors. A common refrain upon meeting heroes of film and television in person is that they seemed taller on screen than they were in person. One gets the impression that someone who met Polito might exclaim that he seemed shorter than he was. The most striking aspect of Polito though was his voice. His natural speaking voice was raspy and breathy, with an almost comical exaggeration of a 20th century Italian-American Brooklyn accent. Every time Polito spoke he sounded like he was one sentence away from telling us how good the capicola (pronounced “gabbagool”) is, and should we disagree, waving away our opinions with a loud “fuggedaboutit”.
Polito also was a staple in the films of the Coen Brothers, appearing in five of their feature films*. When he appears in their films though, they do not merely rely on his sweaty and angry energy. Each of Polito’s roles in the Coens’ films depicts someone sensitive. His roles are as outsiders who are upset to be on the outside and envious of those on the inside. They each have a kind of desperation that is expressed in a not-so-quiet way.
Certainly the most well known Coens film that Polito appears in is The Big Lebowski (1998), a cult favorite and late night cable tv staple that has spawned a somewhat obsessive fan following since its release. No other Coens film inspires people to make bootleg bumper stickers quite like Lebowski does, but it’s understandable, the Dude does abide after all. Polito plays DaFino, a private detective who has spent a great deal of the run time of the film following Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski in an old Volkswagen Beetle for unknown reasons until The Dude confronts him late in the film where it turns out he has been hired to find Fawn Knudsen — better known to the rest of the characters as Bunny Lebowski — in an attempt to get her to return to the family farm outside of Moorhead, Minnesota. Polito is a masterful comic actor but sadly the funniest line in the scene goes to Jeff Bridges’s Dude: “How you gonna keep ‘em on the farm once they’ve seen Karl Hungus?”. Lebowski is largely a take on the detective stories of Raymond Chandler, Joel Coen having said “We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story — how it moves episodically and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery as well as a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant”. In Chandler’s books, his detective Philip Marlowe goes from place to place in Los Angeles, meeting colorful characters that further expose the seedy underbelly of the City of Angels while solving a crime. So too does The Dude do the same thing but kind of by accident**. As DaFino is introduced on camera for the first time the soundtrack changes from its usual staples of Bob Dylan and Creedence Clearwater Revival to a jazzy swinging number called “Dick On A Case”, one of the few original pieces created for the film by composer Carter Burwell. DaFino himself seems to emerge out of another time and place than the early 1990s in which the film is set. He’s driving a Volkswagen Bug, a car that was discontinued in 1979, and is wearing a disheveled looking suit which somehow still looks cheap even when his scene partner is wearing a stained hoodie and chef pants. He uses the incredibly obscure term “brother shamus” to mean “fellow private detective” (itself probably gleaned from its use in a Chandler book)***. It’s not so much that DaFino is a Philip Marlowe analogue as he seems to want to be Philip Marlowe while being unable to grasp that Philip Marlowe’s time is past. As soon as the Dude gets him out of the car DaFino’s mood is all contrition and supplication. He desperately wants to work with the Dude and share knowledge and notes. He is clearly out of his element in his search for Fawn Knudsen given that his best idea of what to do to find her is following a stoner around town who has an incredibly tentative connection to her. Nonetheless he still wants to do a good job and write back to the Knudsens with his head held high that he did his job and did his job well. He wants to be accepted, he wants to be taken seriously, and not even the unemployed stoner will give him that.
Polito’s biggest role in a Coens film and potentially his biggest overall is as gangster Johnny Caspar in Miller’s Crossing (1990). Caspar desperately wants to run the unnamed prohibition-era city’s criminal enterprise network, however the position seems to be on lockdown, held by Albert Finney’s character Leo. Johnny Caspar as a character is defined by his own perceived lack of respect. He constantly goes off on how people are trying to give him the high hat (in this instance a synonym for guff or another kind of lack of respect rather than a kind of cymbal). He both feels like an outsider for being an Italian-American criminal in a city dominated by Irish-American criminals, and as an outsider in his own Italian-American community for preferring not to speak Italian. He’s constantly afraid that someone is getting one over on him, and is at his happiest when he feels like he’s getting one over on someone else. He thinks it’s only fair that once he runs the city’s criminal enterprises that he should be allowed to put his relatives in cushy jobs on the government take, and erupts into righteous rage when the mayor tells him that both of his cousins can’t simultaneously be head of the assessor's office. Johnny Caspar doesn’t so much desire respect as he loathes disrespect. He demands to be taken seriously, and if lives need to be lost to make it happen, so be it.
In Barton Fink (1991), Polito appears as simpering yes-man Lou Breeze. Celebrated New York playwright Barton Fink has been flown out to Los Angeles to write for the pictures, and his experiences with the LA studio system exist at two extremes. On one is studio boss Jack Lipnick, a boisterous blowhard who is determined to inflate both his own ego and Fink’s by telling him that he only makes the best pictures, and therefore he wants something with that real Barton Fink feel to it, despite clearly having no idea what Fink’s work is like. Once Lipnick is done talking a lot and saying nothing, Fink is passed on to the other extreme: Polito’s character Lou Breeze who needs to do the actual handling and assigning and tracking of Fink’s work. Lou Breeze is flop sweat personified. He knows he needs to keep Lipnick happy and keep the studio’s projects running but he also needs to act as a wall of disinformation to both his creatives as he tells them that Lipnick and the studio really care about their work (they don’t), and to Lipnick himself as he assures him that the projects they’re working on are running smoothly (they’re not). Breeze as with all of Polito’s characters is balding, but this was taken to a new level by Fink costume designer Richard Hornung who had a combover hairpiece built to create a character who was sadder and sleazier. Breeze knows he’s a clown of a man, constantly being dressed down by his boss and not being taken seriously by his subordinates, but he also knows deep down that the studio would fall apart without him, so his character is built around a kind of quiet rage. The lack of respect of Polito as Breeze goes even further, in that Polito desperately didn’t want to play Breeze despite the part basically being written for him. He personally thought he’d be perfect as blowhard boss Lipnick, but it took Frances McDormand sitting him down and talking him into the role to make him take it. Breeze gets so much guff that Polito didn’t even want to pretend to be him.
The Coens role Polito gave the most depth in however was in 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There. The film centers around barber Ed Crane whose life changes when a stranger named Creighton Tolliver played by Polito comes to his small northern California town and gets his hair cut by Crane. Tolliver is a profoundly sad character. His first scene in the barber shop he swindles his way into a haircut despite the shop being closed and then seems to think he’s fooling anyone with his absurd toupée. He projects a kind of false bravado that he uses to mask his own insecurity and desperation in an attempt to find an investor in his crackpot scheme. He’s all smiles and confidence, but for the fact that he constantly is letting the mask slip during his brief time on screen. Every sentence of every line he delivers has a tacit “do you believe me? Do you trust me? Could you love me?” tacked on the end. This outward bravado and inward insecurity is only amplified once we learn that Tolliver is gay. He’s so desperate for affection that he makes a pass at Crane, a man fundamentally so incapable of expressing emotion that his story is called “The Man Who Wasn’t There”. The great irony of course is that time would end up vindicating Tolliver, both his sexuality which would only become more mainstream in the 60 years from when the film was set, and that his “crackpot scheme” is of course dry cleaning, which, while it’s not the hula hoop, is far from crackpot. Tolliver sees the world and its inhabitants gaining money and success and love and asks “why not me?” even though he knows in his heart that it probably will never happen.
In all of his roles with the Coens Polito plays characters with deep exasperation and a deep sense that they’ve drawn the short straw in the game of life. They’re broadly competent, but the world refuses to believe in them, and so they express their frustration in whatever limited ways that they can. DaFino chases the stoner who might just know something in his cheap suit and ancient car. Johnny Caspar has people killed who might be giving him the high hat. Breeze holds a studio together with sheer force of will. Tolliver tries every avenue he can to find love or at least a solid investor, and Bumstead shouts his impotent rage. “No magazine. No coffee. Mussburger! I wanna see Mussburger! Or did he jump out a window too?!”. He exists on screen for all of ten seconds, but Jon Polito’s presence in the role tells us all we need to know about him. Bumstead is tired of being given the high hat. Bumstead has been treading water without finding meaningful success for his entire life. Bumstead is desperate to finally land this deal that will turn things around for him, even if it means dealing with someone like Sidney Mussburger. No one but Jon Polito could have delivered that line and made it mean what it meant.
*Polito appeared in 5 Coens films. The only more frequent actor appearances in their films are Joel Coen’s wife Frances McDormand, who has appeared in 8 of the Coens’ 18 films released to date, and Steve Buscemi and John Goodman, who have each appeared in 6. Other frequent acting collaborators John Turturro, Stephen Root, and George Clooney have only been in 4.
**A good deal of the Coens filmography is in fact the subversion of the film noir detective story into different settings and with different characters. Lebowski is 90s stoner LA noir. Fargo (1996) is Minnesota noir. Blood Simple (1984) and No Country For Old Men (2007) are west Texas noir. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) is normcore noir. Miller’s Crossing (1990) is straight noir, and Burn After Reading (2008) is modern Washington DC noir.
**The term “shamus” for “detective” in Lebowski itself has a strange and circuitous history. The word comes from a yiddish term “שמשׂ” or “shammes”, which when pronounced does not sound like how Polito pronounces “shamus” but rather rhyming with “thomas”. A shammes was a synagogue beadle, a minor functionary in the religious lives of Ashkenazi Jews. Among other things, anytime there were midnight services at the shul it was the shammes’s job to know where every congregant lived to wake them up for the services, to know the name of each Jew’s name with their father’s name in a given community so that they might be called properly to the Torah, and to know about individual families’ economic situation so that he could do an accurate accounting of how much of a contribution to the Shul to expect in order to keep a good budget. A shammes was literally in everybody’s business and knew many details about their lives. The term then bled out from the jewish communities in New York City as a synonym for a snoop or a busybody, ultimately landing on a definition as a private detective (as a person who know what everyone is up to) in the early 20th century and being anglicized as “shamus” and commonly pronounced like the Irish name Seamus. Chandler then used the term in his book The Big Sleep, where when it was adapted for the screen by screenwriter William Faulkner (yes, that William Faulkner) and director Howard Hawks and spoken by Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, likely the widest broadcast the word had, which is likely where young Minnesotan Jews Joel and Ethan Coen first heard the term meaning a detective, and remembered it decades later while putting Lewbowski together.