8/22/06: RightWingTrashMan: Don Galloway
You can’t get
Ironside on DVD, and that’s no great loss. It was the kind of egghead TV crime drama that you’d expect to be launched in 1967. A lot of the episodes had this weird moral relativity where you couldn’t trust anybody. That didn’t include Don Galloway, though. In his role as Det. Sgt. Ed Brown, Galloway spent eight seasons as the straightest arrow in San Francisco. See if you can pick him out in the cast photo above.
More impressively, Galloway would turn the subsequent typecasting into unforgettable cinema. Writer/director Lawrence Kasdan—easily one of the most rational Democrats in Hollywood—wisely cast him as the sole voice of reason amongst the navel-gazing lost Lefties of 1983’s
The Big Chill.
It’s not a glamorous role. As ad executive Roger Bowens, Galloway’s character is supposed to be one of those losers who didn’t think to have fun in the ’60s. Now he’s the square husband of unhappy housewife JoBeth Williams—starring as one of the old college friends who’ve reunited after the suicide of an idealistic pal.
Bowens has a late night talk with Sam Weber and Nick Carlton—played by Tom Berenger and William Hurt as, respectively, a TV actor and a pill-popping psychiatrist. Bowens begins by announcing that he’s been thinking about the death of their friend. He then discusses how life’s full of compromises, and there’s an obligation to “try and minimize that stuff, and be the best person you can be. But you set your priorities, and that’s the way life is. I wonder if your friend Alex knew that. One thing’s for sure, he couldn’t live with it.”
In a nice touch, the former hippies look more uncomfortable than angry. Bowens then defuses all the good feelings in what many still remember as a feel-good film: “I know I shouldn’t talk. You guys knew him. But the thing is, nobody said it was going to be fun. At least, nobody said it to me.”
Bowens leaves town the next day, and his wife ends up having sex with the actor. You don't have to feel sorry for the guy. His unseen presence—and the illicit lovers’ innate shallowness—allows Bowens the last laugh. He ends up with a guilt-ridden, recovering-hippie wife, and that’s gotta be some kind of fun.
Galloway himself probably had lots of fun as both
Ironside’s detective and
The Big Chill’s conscience. He currently works as a newspaper columnist—among other things—and frequently expresses opinions ranging from conservative to libertarian.
Here’s a fannish tribute page that goes into some detail. It’s certainly inspiring to see that Galloway made it through his acting career while keeping it real right-wing. He even got to
play the director of
Black Sunday.
Make him your own: We’ve already covered the best part of
The Big Chill. It’s more fun to see Galloway in weirder productions. Hipster gay filmmaker Gregg Araki followed Kasdan’s lead by casting Galloway as an FBI agent in
The Doom Generation (1995), and there’s lots of sinful sleaze in his turn as a Southern Senator in
Two Moon Junction (1988). And everybody should try to get a bootleg of
Satan's Mistress (1982)—although Galloway’s not the main reason.
