Christopher Walken as child actor in strange 1953 TV appearance

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Though Christopher Walken insists he had a swell childhood, it looks as if he endured some nasty treatment as a child actor. Here Jerry Lewis acts like the asshole he is, shaking and shoving poor Chris (then known as Ronnie) in a way which I HOPE would not be tolerated today.

Christopher Walken's FIRST movie role!

Most of my videos get, like, 27 views if I'm lucky (they're a "success" if they break ten), but this one is fast approaching 100,000. If you're a Walken fan, you  may enjoy this curiosity, in which he out-performs everyone else in this rather silly movie.

Compare and contrast. . . I made this slideshow as a tribute to his delightful weirdness. 

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: People are strange

FINALLY, at long bloody last, this has posted, and I think it's OK. It was totally mangled by YouTube. When  it had been up for 2 years, to my horror, I discovered that all the edits had "come off" and all I had was raw footage, with the soundtrack in the wrong place (ending 30 seconds before the end!). YT would not allow me any further edits and indicated the soundtrack had been muted, which it hadn't. All I could do to salvage it was film it off my monitor with my ancient camcorder, then delete the original, which gave it a second-generation look. But maybe that's OK. Walken has that, too. 

The Amazing Disappearing/Reappearing Christopher Walken Dance Video

This is a version of what I call the Amazing Disappearing/Reappearing Christopher Walken Dance Video. It has popped up in various guises, including a shorter, more tightly-edited version set to the neo-disco classic Dance Now. I preferred the music on that one to the various other versions, but it was taken down not once but twice on copyright grounds (for the music or the video, I don't know, because other versions of it still exist on YouTube). 

The music here doesn't have that funky hip-hoppish madness to it, is more laid-back and even somewhat sexy, which Walken both is and isn't. I can't even figure out what I think about him, how I feel, if I feel anything. It's more of a fascination. I can't stop reading about Meghan and Harry, either, and I definitely cannot stand them.

Some of his roles have been jaw-droppingly sociopathic, though he has gone on record to say he won't play anyone who doesn't live up to his moral standards (or something). Either he can't stop working, or can't stop needing the paycheque (he lives not in a house but a mansion, on an estate somewhere in Connecticut, with staff). 

He lives like a movie star, in other words, and as we all know, character actors have much longer careers because it doesn't matter if they get old and ugly. He has not aged well, AT ALL, has let his hair get frizzed and wears dumb old man glasses and ratty sweaters and has this annoying whistle when he talks.

In short, he now seems bent on making himself look as hideous as possible, like some Galapagos turtle on an island somewhere far away, WAY far, the last turtle of his kind. Anyway, as a dancer he is eccentric but capable of some nice moves, though his work in Communion was execrable and consisted mainly of spinning his arms around. 

The low point of this whatever-it-is I keep returning to, the one I am really embarrassed about, is the Walken 101 podcast, which is without a doubt the worst scummy excuse for a podcast I have ever listened to, yet I keep listening to it. It's just these two guys who claim to be filmmakers and actors (unemployed!) sitting around in a rec room complaining that they hate Christopher Walken. Meanwhile the whole purpose of the podcast is to watch every single movie, TV show or anything else Walken has ever done, in chronological order, and comment on them all. So far, they hate everything. I got started listening to this thing after they made four really funny initial YouTube videos about Walken, then stopped and did this thing instead.

At any rate, if you just want to see him dance and don't care about the music, this one is OK. I can find a nice visual version AND a separate audio of the music I like, but my God, why go to all this (or ANY) trouble about someone I don't particularly like, or at least can't make my mind up about?

Dead man Walken

Seven Psychocats!

This is a very strange "cat version" of a Christopher Walken movie, Seven Psychopaths, which (like almost all of his other movies) I've never seen. But I've seen previews, and that's what this is, a CAT version of the preview. Probably better than the original. This is a work of genius, as far as I am concerned.

Christopher Walken: bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it's free
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love)

I want your drama
The touch of your hand
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I want your love
Love-love-love
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love)

You know that I want you
And you know that I need you
I want it bad, your bad romance

I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
(Oh-oh-oh--oh-oh!)
I want your love and
All your lover's revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

I want your horror
I want your design
‘Cause you're a criminal
As long as you're mine
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love-uuhh)

I want your psycho
Your vertigo shtick
Want you in my rear window
Baby you're sick
I want your love
Love-love-love
I want your love
(Love-love-love I want your love)

You know that I want you
('Cause I'm a free bitch baby!)
And you know that I need you
I want it bad, bad romance

I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
(Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!)
I want your love and
All your lover's revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Caught in a bad romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

Walk, walk fashion baby
Work it
Move that bitch crazy

Walk, walk fashion baby
Work it
Move that bitch crazy

Walk, walk fashion baby
Work it
Move that bitch crazy

Walk, walk passion baby
Work it
I'm a free bitch, baby

I want your love and
I want your revenge
I want your love
I don't wanna be friends

Je veux ton amour
Et je veux ta revanche
Je veux ton amour
I don't wanna be friends
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
I don't wanna be friends
(Caught in a bad romance)
I don't wanna be friends
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
Want your bad romance
(Caught in a bad romance)
Want your bad romance!

I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh!
I want your love and
All your lover's revenge
You and me could write a bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Want your bad romance
(Caught in a bad romance)
Want your bad romance

Oh-oh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oooh-oh-oh-oh-oh!
Want your bad romance
(Caught in a bad romance)

Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah!
Roma-roma-mamaa!
Ga-ga-ooh-la-la!
Want your bad romance

Christopher Walken's FIRST movie role!

I found this little oddity through a strange podcast called Walken 101, which purports to discuss each and every film/TV role Christopher Walken ever did in his (long, long) lifetime to date. He's been in over 150 of such, so obviously I can't get through too many of them. The podcast consists of an hour of two millennial stoners rambling on and on about their lives, and other inane subjects, sniggering and snorting at people they mention by name and asking for money. But once in a while, something on-topic and even intriguing comes up.

I'm going through a "thing" about Walken, even though I have very mixed feelings about him. I usually go through these things for a while, then come out the other side. I don't consciously choose them. Walken is a strange bird indeed: a blonde Dennis-the Menace-style child actor practically from birth, an androgynous-looking young dancer who was good enough to be in the first touring company of West Side Story, an androgynous-looking young actor who showed up in artsy films and TV shows, then. . . his "breakout" role in the Vietnam horror-drama The Deer Hunter, for which he won an  Oscar. Then a slow maturing into something less and less androgynous, until reaching the somewhat macabre, leathery, Galapagos-like appearance he exhibits today. At 76, this man isn't old, folks, he is OLD-old. 

The rest has been. . . I don't know. There has only been a handful of really memorable performances. The guys in the podcast generally suffer through his stuff, in which Walken appears for 5 minutes or less. When interviewed, he says (robotically, almost)  the same things over and over and over again. He never leaves the house. He's afraid of airports (and a long list of other things: elevators, horses, etc.). He was a lion tamer in his teens (though in other versions, he merely PLAYS a lion tamer in a play). He has no hobbies and no children, though he has been married 50 years to a woman who seems more like a mother to him.  But above all, he "likes to work" (i. e. takes everything that is offered to him with no apparent filtering/discernment process at all). He has an ENORMOUS fan base, but has become a sort of caricature of himself, and he knows it, but keeps on working. He has even said he'd like to drop in harness on a movie set. His last role, shot in Winnipeg, was as a beleaguered Saskatchewan canola farmer up against Monsanto (Big Pharma for agriculture). A FARMER?? Mr. Urban Dialect, Mr. Astorian Bugs Bunny, Mr. Gangster/Hit Man/file-toothed Supernatural Being? 

This just seems like too much of a stretch, but who knows. He will have to somehow-or-other lose his often-quite-prominent Queens accent, which, when out of character is (as the British say) "broad". His mother was Scottish, and he will likely try to summon up  some version of that, and he's right in that some Canadians (SOME Canadians) have a bit of Scots-Irish inflection in their vowel sounds, but if it's overdone it sounds ridiculous. "Doing voices" has never been his strong suit, and when he recites Poe's The Raven (even though he does a good job of it), Astoria somehow seems to get in the way.

Meantime, this short little thing, this obscure film shot by a woman animator experimenting with live action for the first time, is THE FIRST time little Ronnie appeared on-screen, and admittedly he's good, not overplaying the role. He's tall, too, taller than most of the women, and just on the other side of puberty. The voice he does is channeling Roddy McDowell, though I think it works in a film where everyone speaks in an artificial, pretentious manner. The very best part is the last few seconds, which I've captured in another video:

I will admit I'm the one who posted the short movie. It wasn't anywhere on YouTube, and the podcast guys insisted it was terribly obscure and not available anywhere, though I found it in about 2 seconds. So far YouTube hasn't killed me for doing this, maybe because no one cares very much. It has only received a handful of views, but if I start getting concerned with views, I get very depressed. The internet is just a horse race, where more lose than win, and the winners are often qualitatively the worst of the lot.

So here it is, and you can judge for yourself.  Little Ronnie's first appearance - but it wouldn't be his last. 

Four takes on a head shake

Playing with the speed on a nanosecond-long clip of Christopher Walken doing an incredibly sexy head-shake.

Can a movie be so bad that it's IMMORAL?

There's something intensely gratifying about listening to a reviewer who becomes so incensed at how abysmally rotten a movie is that he literally begins screaming. This review had all the beauty and sincerity that the movie (apparently - I didn't see it, and won't) lacked. The thing is, everyone constantly says "don't  be negative!" and "find the good in things!" But if a movie is an absolute insult to the buying public, if it's so poorly, slap-dashedly made, if the actors are so ill-motivated that they aren't even phoning it in, and - worst of all - if CATS are being exploited (even if they're artificially-generated, not-real cats), then a critic ought to let rip with every bit of vocal protest he can muster.

This guy, I can tell, knows cats, "has" cats (meaning he is possessed by them), gets them, and thus finds it utterly offensive that this moviemaker has allowed them to be portrayed in such a horrendously disrespectful fashion. Of course Christopher Walken is in this movie playing the Magic Cat Man, or whatever he is, and tons of people praised his performance even if he seemed somewhat "cat"-a-tonic in it (I have a theory his brain battery is slowly running down, perhaps from too much smoking). I am learning there are those who praise EVERYTHING Christopher Walken does, and it confuses me. He seems to inspire a die-hard loyalty that has nothing to do with the quality of his performances.

Meantime, this critic, this wonderful man, absolutely lets go with great shouts of protest over this badly-made and nonsensical thing. The premise of it - hard-nosed businessman magically changes bodies with a house cat in order to learn an Important Life Lesson - sounds like something out of the '90s, if not the mid '80s. And it's Kevin Spacey, people - by all that is rotten, it's Kevin Spacey.

Now that we know a little bit more about Kevin Spacey (you know, the guy who was accused of molesting an adolescent boy and tweeted in response, "Gee, too bad about that, if it happened I mean, but I was too drunk to remember", then went on and on about his wonderful new gay lifestyle, as if anyone was surprised), which no one did back in 2016, it only lends the production ever more abysmal depths of wretchedness. It sinks to the level of immorality, which for a lighthearted family comedy is perhaps a first.

I don't know why this is, but Kevin Spacey reminds me of a pair of navy blue polyester pants from 1970 that someone has worn every day for the past six years without washing them. Ever. His personality stinks in just that rancid, unavoidable, inexcusable, unforgiveably embarrassing way. He is contesting the assault charges and smirking around and happily finding his weaselly, rancid way back into the public's good graces. No doubt he'll win, but as far as I am concerned, the damage has been done. He will always be stinking pants to me.

And Walken. I'm not sure. I've been sort of dissecting him as a subject lately, just because that's what I do on this blog, I sort of get stuck on one subject until I go on to the next one. It's interesting to go on YouTube and see ten-minute chunks of his movies from the past forty (!) years, because he seems to leap from age to age, until he is somehow every age at once. He's not. He's an old man now and mighty saggy, and his  brain seems to be in a fog. 

When he played Captain Hook, he put no energy into the part at all. His singing was even more wobbly and unmusical than usual. I watched just a snippet of Cyril Ritchard, the original Broadway Hook, and could not fail to notice the roistering, heel-clicking glee of his performance, the ripping good time he was having up there, and the spooky old-school ability to touch his audience, visible even on an old TV kinescope from 1953. Ritchard founded the subversive notion of pirate as King of Camp, glamourous eyes, long curly wig, beauty mark and all - an image endlessly replicated in movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. Walken merely looks as if he has been given a temporary face-lift, rendering his face tight, immobile, and queerly Asian (and with the worst painted-on eyebrows in stage history).

So what's my point? It's late, I don't have one, I'm rambling. It's all about cats, bad movies, Walken, pirates, and people who have run out of  steam. But not this guy! I've watched his rant several times, and it's a good antidote to apathy and frustration. Just blows it out of the ball park. I think I will watch it again.

Peter Pan Live! Christopher Walken as Captain Hook: WTF?

                 
                          WTF was that - ???

Christopher Walken with cats

Some Cats Know. . ., take two. . .

The old prospector's nose for gold 

The sailor who can read the sky 

The gamblers sense of when to fold 

The trick to making apple pie

These mysteries one can not explain 

This old black art, so queer and quaint 

Like making love or making rain 

Either you got it or you ain't

Some cats know 

You can tell by the touchin'

They don't come on a-huffin' and a-puffin' 

And a-grabbin' and a-clutchin' 

Some cats know 

How to take it nice and slow 

But if a cat don't know, a cat don't know

Some cats know 

How to stir up the feelin'

They keep foolin' 'round 'til you're halfway to the ceilin'

Some cats know 

How to make the honey flow 

But if a cat don't know, a cat don't know

Some cats know just where it's at 

They are not like some others 

I would rather one like that 

If I had my druthers

Some cats know 

How to play nice and pretty 

Nice and soft and soon you're off to Good Time City

Some cats know
How to take it nice and slow

But if a cat don't know, a cat don't know 

He just

don't

know

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

Googly eyes

Googly eyes.

Maid of Orleans/Cool Cat from Queens

This is my montage of early Christopher Walken/Joan of Arc gifs, the latter taken from the 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Of course I do not mean to suggest they look alike, but there is something about the intensity, the luminous stare, the cheekbones. . . especially the cheekbones. 

These are the cheekbones of a saint.

Similarly, his Deer Hunter suicide scene with its implication of self-immolation/self-annihilation is Joan-like as he sacrifices himself to the dark forces all around him. I couldn't use later Walken, because later Walken is a whole different man. He looks like his own grandfather now, and it's kind of disappointing to me to see such a supernatural fox turn so weary-looking. Only the flashbulb smile with that searchlight sweep of the room is the same as before. But you don't see it often, and his face is so saggy and lacking in tone that he looks almost depressed. Most distressingly of all, he has developed a whistle in his speech, one of the most irritating things in existence. I have seriously wondered about him, since someone recently made a comment on one of his YouTube videos about how "the Alzheimer's is affecting him". He played a musician with Parkinson's a few years ago, and the nearly-expressionless, masked look of his once-expressive face made me wonder.

But perhaps we expect too much, expect a Dorian Grey-like supernatural beauty that lasts forever. This is, after all, a 75-year-old man who has given his whole life to performing. Perhaps it has cost him more than we realize. It amazes me how little vanity he has, how little sense of self-importance or entitlement (and he's refreshingly un-crazy for a child star). I remember the old-style stage performers of the past, Jack Benny and Ed Wynn and all those down-to-earth guys who'd come on Ed Sullivan, and he seems to belong to that old-fashioned era, just here to do his job, and always grounded by a sense of his own (human) limitations.

That said, early Walken is supernaturally beautiful, and so charismatic he leaps off the screen at you like a predatory animal. You simply cannot ignore or forget him.

I still feel that we are looking at two men, but that can't be true! I've read somewhere that Walken smokes, and that could account for the haggardness, which is surprising in light of his extreme early fox-hood. Hey, William Shatner is still a good-looking man (if a tad rotund - but who's complaining?) and surprisingly un-wrinkled at nearly age 88. And his energy, speech, and mobility (not to mention his unquenchable enthusiasm) belong to a much younger man. Maybe it's just a trick of genes, though Walken should have this advantage as well. He has gone on record to say his parents lived to be nearly a hundred. Who knows, maybe he's a living Dorian Grey, with his old self taking on all the slings and arrows his face never revealed when he was young.

POST-BLOG OBSERVATIONS. Because of the weird phenomenon of YouTube, with its vast bulletin board/everything-coming-at-you-at-once quality, it's possible to see Walken at every age, moment-by-moment or even second-by-second as you click from one movie excerpt or interview or hosting gig to another. There are some shocking entries, like this 1962 clip from the TV crime drama Naked City, and in some places he's even younger, not quite grown to his full foxhood because of his boyish softness of face. Here he looks as if he's not even shaving yet. This pastiche/jigsaw effect is relatively new, and in the past we had to go and see a whole movie at a time, or watch a whole TV interview, without this capacity to jump around. I LIKE jumping around, myself, because it satisfies my curiosity and lets the detective in me work fast. But it shocks me to think that I've seldom seen a Walken movie all the way through. I think Communion was one of the only ones, and I only stayed with it because I could not quite believe how bizarre it was.

POST-POST. I began to feel a bit guilty about Christopher Walken. Not that I know the man, or ever will, but I think I was a bit hard on the fact he has let his looks go as stringy and baggy as nature intended. I had thought of assembling a before-and-after of wretched plastic surgery among male celebrities, but ended up compiling this horrendous assortment of short gifs. You know who they are anyway, so I won't bother labelling them. A freakier lot you never saw, though they once all looked like human beings. I don't know who butchers these people, celebs who have all the money in the world to get it done right. Facial muscles get pulled so tight that as the person ages, everything starts to pull in the wrong direction. The face begins to fight itself and squirms weirdly as the person talks. Fixed noses shrivel and cave in, or go oddly sideways. Cheek implants threaten to explode, pushing out so aggressively that they show through the skin. Mouths slash horizontally across the face and look Muppet-like, and eyes sink right into the head.

It ain't working, folks. We're not buying it. You're old, and we know you're old. 

Christopher Walken, meanwhile, is jarring in another way, because in the past couple of years he seems to have aged about twenty. I didn't watch him as Captain Hook in Peter Pan Live (and a more miscast Hook never walkened the earth), but apparently he kept forgetting his lines, letting his Walken-ish pauses drag on forever. And that was five years ago.

Why should I worry at all about a celebrity? Who knows. They're like popcorn. We consume them, they amuse us for a little while, until we go on to the next one. That's just how it is. And they must always keep their shiny side out, the only side we can ever see. 

(Unless you're Alec Baldwin. Then you get to punch people.)

Christopher Walken's cat

This really is Christopher Walken's cat. It appears at the end of a classic Walken video called Chicken with Pears. The gif has been slightly edited for length and speed.

SPECIAL BONUS VIDEO! Christopher Walken makes Chicken with Pears. Again.

The Passion of Christopher Walken

Another Separated at Birth. I have always thought that these soulful photos from the 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc (starring Renee Jeanne Falconetti) resemble a young Christopher Walken, doe eyes, eerie gaze, great cheekbones and all. The fact that Walken looked almost feminine seems ironic in light of the fact that he aged into something more like deeply weathered shoe leather. 

I've seen people claim that the very young Walken (who is plastered all over the internet, being a child star from birth) looks like Scarlett Johansson, and it's somewhat true: the bow-shaped lips and Scandinavian-looking facial structure are congruent. I've also seen him compared to Jon Voight, and that one I can get on-board with because I have mistaken him for Voight more than once. They've aged similarly, the way a peach ages. When the juice goes out, the skin shrivels. Blonde men are thin-skinned like women, and are more likely to suffer this fate. But his twinkly ironic smile still flashes like a searchlight, igniting his enigmatic face most delightfully.

I don't know if there is a Walken biography out there - no doubt if there is, it would be inadequate to cover the incredible breadth and depth of his career, which he is so deceptively nonchalant about. He talks as if it fell into his lap. Well, maybe it did, but he'd be the first. 

I'm re-reading a massive bio of Marlon Brando by Peter Manso - well over 900 pages, and this was written before Brando died! Another couple hundred could have been added, and maybe was. This is the sort of book where the binding falls apart, where it makes a welt in your lap when you read it.

We need that sort of book on Walken, because his career is vastly more varied and detailed than Brando's, without being derailed by chasing after social issues which always looked a little like publicity stunts. Sacheen Littlefeather, indeed. A time and a place.

I don't know, however. He is a chameleon and seems to skate over things, perhaps for self-protection. I have seen only one picture of him with his wife, a tiny woman who barely comes up to his shoulder, and his pose with her is so protective he seems to enfold her. He takes any old work now, just takes it because it's all he has, seemingly. He gives the same interviews over and over again, same questions, same answers. Though he is a crack dancer and has had moments of brilliance in this long and wide career, this huge map spreading out in every direction, he has also been in some turkeys - quite a lot of them - just for something to do. I winced a bit to see him in a Superbowl ad for some kind of car, in which he did a blatant parody of himself. This, when he despises scriptwriters who try to "Walkenize" his part.

But at least he didn't self-destruct like all those other child stars did, which is pretty amazing. He got married just once when he was very young, stayed that way, and doesn't talk about it. This is a definite sign of sanity. And no drastic visions, so he isn't likely to be hitched to a pole and set on fire any time soon.