When Bernard Hill died just lately, I wrote concerning the distinctive feeling accompanying the real-life dying of an actor when that actor has been particularly related to a dramatic dying scene onscreen. That feeling is barely magnified when it’s been a really very long time for the reason that actor carried out the demise in query. Juanita Moore, together with her character’s funeral in 1959’s “Imitation of Life” being the grandest of any within the films, solely dying in actual life in 2013 is an instance.
Some of the excessive of those has simply occurred, a dying that additionally represents the severing of one other important hyperlink to Previous Hollywood. Darryl Hickman died this previous Wednesday, Might 22, on the age of 92. He was a baby actor in “The Prisoner of Zenda” and John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” who, upon exiting his teenage years, determined he wished to turn into a monk. He entered a Passionist monastery in 1951, however returned to Hollywood a number of weeks later. He’d proceed appearing within the years forward, assembly his first spouse Pamela Lincoln whereas appearing collectively on William Fort’s iconic horror film “The Tingler.” Later in life, he’d turn into an government at CBS, and even had a bit half in Sidney Lumet’s “Community.”
Hickman’s final credit score was in 1986, however he continued to offer interviews all through the years, together with on the 2016 TCM Basic Movie Pageant, the place he stated on the pink carpet that his favourite movie he acted in was in actual fact “The Grapes of Wrath,” the place he performed Henry Fonda’s child brother. He advised Behind the Lens On-line that Fonda wrote in his autograph ebook, “‘For Darryl, proud I’m to be your large brother, Hank Fonda’ — I’ve saved all of it my life.”
The factor is, whilst a child, Hickman (whose youthful brother Dwayne Hickman would star within the TV sequence “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”) had vary. Considered one of his extra shifting portrayals is as a child with a studying incapacity in 1943’s “The Human Comedy,” who needs terribly to learn to learn however can’t — his character, Lionel, takes one other child with him into the city library simply to have a look at the books and marvel at their many sizes and colours though he can’t really learn them.
Noir followers, although, will particularly keep in mind Hickman from John M. Stahl’s extraordinary Technicolor noir “Depart Her to Heaven” (1945). In that slow-simmering home thriller, Hickman, simply 13 on the time, delivered some of the memorable dying scenes in all of cinema. A lovely however deranged younger girl (Gene Tierney) has simply married his character Danny’s older brother (Cornel Wilde).
Tierney’s character needs her new husband all to herself, and is prepared to homicide to make that occur. So she takes Danny out swimming on a lake — he’s had issue strolling ever since he had polio, so swimming is the type of train he prefers. Tierney’s character sits again in a rowboat whereas goading Danny to maintain swimming simply slightly bit extra. Ultimately, exhaustion overcomes him and he sinks beneath the floor. It’s the quietest homicide scene conceivable: Tierney, staring on the water the place he simply was, takes off her sun shades however in any other case doesn’t transfer a muscle. She lets him drown.
In case you see this scene as soon as, you’ll always remember it. It couldn’t be a extra stunning time out on the lake (California’s Bass Lake, all evergreen timber and crisp air), the solar is shining, the floor of the water is like glass. All is peaceable and quiet and picturesque. And the darkest homicide is afoot.
The magical factor is that that poor murdered little one would actually dwell one other 79 years, till this previous week. He had a protracted, wealthy life till his dying in Montecito, California Might 22, wrote books about appearing, and even took up portray in his final years.
However that’s the facility of films, of those photographs that inform lies 24 frames a second, that almost all noir followers will all the time affiliate Darryl Hickman along with his onscreen drowning in 1945. Thank goodness that wasn’t actual. And thank goodness we nonetheless have “Depart Her to Heaven,” and the opposite films the place Hickman left such an indelible mark, that we are able to all the time return to eternally.