



Almost nothing at all is known about writer/actor/producer Larry Tucker’s private life. At least not publicly. Although it’s said he was married twice, the identities of his wives remain murky at best, and it’s unclear if he had any children. What we do know for certain is that he was born in Philadelphia and, after suffering for years from an unpleasant combination of cancer and multiple sclerosis, died in Los Angeles in 2001 at age 67. All we have left to remember him by is the work, but even that it must be admitted has mostly been forgotten, in many cases for the best.

As a comedian and writer, Larry Tucker got his start in the late ’50s working with Mort Sahl at San Francisco’s The Hungry I. By the early ’60s he’d moved to Los Angeles and into television, writing a couple episodes for the popular Danny Kaye Show. In 1966 he teamed with Paul Mazursky to develop the groundbreaking and influential Monkees TV series, for which Tucker wrote the pilot. As a collaborative team, the pair took the massive success of that show and leapt into features, with Tucker co-writing and producing Mazursky’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas and Alex in Wonderland. In 1969 Tucker and Mazirsky were nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for the wife-swapping comedy Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice. After that, through the ‘70s and into the mid-’80s Tucker returned to the stability of network television, creating, writing and producing a number of utterly forgettable short-lived sitcoms like Mr. Merlin and Jennifer Slept Here.

So Tucker did okay for himself, he kept busy and earned a decent living. But as a writer and producer, even after all his work with Mazirsky and that Oscar nod, Tucker is as forgotten today as most all of those crappy sitcoms.

As an actor, though, Tucker is hard to forget. Between 1961 and 1971, he only appeared onscreen a handful of times, half of them being uncredited cameos in the Mazursky films. But when he was allowed to speak, when he was allowed to do something, he cemented himself as one of the most memorable and charismatic screen presences of the era.

Part of it had to do with the fact those few films in which he was allowed to do something were made by Otto Preminger, Sam Fuller, Jonathan Demme and Alan Baron. The other thing was that Tucker, with his baby face and scruffy beard, weighed close to 400 pounds.

It’s unclear what precisely led novice filmmaker Allen Baron to cast the untested and grossly obese Tucker in his dark and nihilistic 1961 noir Blast of Silence, but he was the perfect choice. Tucker was a naturalistic actor, relaxed and utterly believable no matter what role he took on. As the black market gun dealer Fat Ralph, he is sympathetic and sleazy, menacing, child-like, and sad. His wheezy and phlegmy voice is nevertheless soft and lilting, at times bordering on the whiny. He lives in a dank and filthy apartment, constantly cooing over his dozens of pet rats as he haggles with Baron’s hit man over the price of a snub-nosed .38.

It could have been a throwaway scene, a standard issue, necessary but forgettable plot point, same as we’ve seen in a hundred other crime films, but in Tucker’s hands it becomes something else. The rats certainly help, as does his cooing, but I think what makes it such a memorable turn is Fat Ralph’s clear loneliness, his desperate plea for friendship as he begs Baron’s Frank Bono to stay a while, have a drink and talk over old times. When he’s rebuffed, however (as Frank himself would be later in the film), his pathos shifts to quiet menace. Even as he threatens and attempts to blackmail Frank in a nightclub bathroom, his pain is clear up to the point Frank beats him to death.

In his four most notable screen appearances, Tucker seemed to fall quite easily into playing a spectrum of eccentrics who blend that air of gentle pathos and threat.

That his next role the following year would turn out to be much smaller, even after such a bravura turn in Blast of Silence, is not that surprising when you consider the rest of the cast included Henry Fonda, Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Burgess Meredith, and Peter Lawford. In Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger’s political drama about the back room maneuverings surrounding the approval of a new Secretary of State, Tucker only appears toward film’s end and only for a single brief scene, but holds his own amid all that star power.

As Manuel, the one man who can put a panicky U.S. Senator in touch with the central figure in a blackmail scheme, Tucker plays a gentle, soft-spoken, fey and immense gay man living in the West Village. At that time and in other hands, the role likely would have been played flaming, flouncing, and over the top, but Tucker plays it low-key and straight (so to speak) and once again fully realized. He also plays it with an air of quiet menace and mystery, divulging little as he hints around how and where the senator might find the man he’s looking for. In many ways his Manuel parallels Fat Ralph. Both characters are necessary go-betweens who try to be as courteous as possible while dealing with a very anxious type who just wants something and wants it now, and both busy themselves with other things while discussing business. While Ralph tended to his rats, Manuel, despite his massive girth, flows smoothly about the apartment preparing a cup of tea as he calmly explains the set-up to the senator, including the fee involved. But while Ralph was deeply hurt by Frank’s rejection of his hospitality, Manuel seems to accept it as a matter of course. It’s a quick but memorable scene, and even that late in the film, a pivotal one.

The following year he was cast in Sam Fuller’s cartoonish asylum drama Shock Corridor. Tucker’s Pagliacci seems to be there mostly as comic relief, the obese mental patient who insists on constantly and loudly singing opera badly, but there too Tucker elevates what could have easily been a one-dimensional role.

In and amongst the other ridiculous and fanciful loons who populate Fuller’s madhouse—the black Klansman and the kid who’s convinced he’s a Confederate soldier still fighting the Civil War—Tucker’s Pagliacci is in many ways more believable and true than the film’s protagonist. It isn’t merely his sheer corporeal presence that engulfs the screen, but a series of small gestures and verbal tics that are all Tucker’s own. (What feels like an improvised scene involving chewing gum is simply genius). While as per usual his introduction is both comic and frightening, tingling with the threat his buffoonery could at any moment slip over into extreme violence, the more we see of Pagliacci, the more sympathetic he becomes and the more we stop caring about Peter Breck’s asshole undercover reporter.

One scene in particular is both comic and heartbreaking, and tells us more about the world in which Pagliacci lives than any psychiatrist ever could. Johnny Barrett (Breck) is sitting on his bunk in the ward as Pagliacci towers over him, eyes closed, singing a Puccini overture at the top of his lungs, and singing it badly. Every few bars as he pauses to take a rattling breath, he opens his eyes for an instant and wheezily insists Barrett sing along. Again like Fat Ralph (which would remain his most definitive role), he’s a man completely isolated, desperate for some kind of human contact on his own level, even if it only means having someone sing along with him. Then his eyes close for good, and the camera stays on him as he sings and conducts for the next several moments as the soundtrack fades back and forth between Pagliacci’s flat bellow and the actual glorious and inescapable music he’s hearing in his head every moment of every day. On the one hand it’s devastating, fully understanding how deeply trapped he is and that his only path back to “sanity” would involve killing the music. On the other hand, there are far worse things to have in your head all the time, and it’s clear that if the shrinks took the music away, Pagliacci might well have no recourse but to grab the knife.

After that came a smattering of usually uncredited cameos on TV’s Route 66 and The Monkees as well as in the Mazursky films. His final screen role of any significance (and it wasn’t very significant at that) came eight years after Shock Corridor, when he appeared in AIP’s 1971 biker film, Angels Hard as They Come. Produced by Roger Corman, written by first-time screenwriter Jonathan Demme, and directed by first-time director Joe Viola, the film is strictly standard issue in genre terms, a cookie-cutter pastiche of already tired biker film clichés. So you get a drunken biker party at a hippie commune, fist fights, drag races, naked hippie chicks, drug use, and a lot of talk about “freedom” and “the road.” Demme claimed the film was an updated adaptation of Rashomon, but if that’s the case so are 90 percent of Corman’s other biker films.

Worst of all, Tucker is completely wasted here, and not in the typical biker sense. He appears in the films opening scene, playing Lucifer, a biker from a rival gang who burns the Angels on a drug deal. He speaks three short lines that don’t afford much by way of characterization, then rides away and is never seen again. It’s unclear why Tucker specifically was chosen for the role, given it could’ve been played just as effectively by any obese slob with a beard. Maybe he still had some lingering hipster cred for helping create The Monkees, or maybe Demme was a big Mazursky fan, or maybe Corman liked the idea of having an Oscar nominee in one of his films. Whatever the case, it’s his one credited role that is all but completely forgettable.

After that, he settled quietly back into writing bad sitcoms, and never stepped in front of the cameras again.

by Jim Knipfel

