According to the master calendar that makes this blog happen, there are numerous new people I could be writing about on this Fat Tuesday — but I find I want to talk some more about George Segal (1934-2021). For a variety of reasons. My previous post from a decade ago, was really a bait and switch; I used the occasion to discuss the Dixieland revival of the ’50s and ’60s of which Segal was a part (that being closer to my original vaudeville mission). But he passed away a couple of years ago, and I never did an obit or a proper career assessment at that time. Plus he grew up in Great Neck. And I liked him, having grown up watching his movies.
Those who know Segal primarily from playing alter kaker grandpas over the last few decades may be shocked to learn that for a good long stretch he had been a major Hollywood leading man. In the ’70s, guys like him, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, Alan Arkin, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Woody Allen were carrying movies. Segal was better looking and more “traditional” than many of them, but his sense of humor remained central to his appeal. To me, somebody like Segal is vastly more entertaining to watch then a stiff like Robert Redford, whom the former replaced in the role of Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Mike Nichols had directed Segal in The Knack Off-Broadway three years earlier. And the following year he made a star out of Hoffman, so he’s an obvious key player in this pop cultural phenomenon. And you’re wondering why I didn’t say the J word yet. Well, because Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, and uncountable others were all Jewish and had starred in films, of course. So this was something else, something extra. This generation of Jewish heroes tended to play sensitive, thoughtful, cerebral characters. They, um, dared to appear intelligent in a culture that had come to devalue that quality? Most of these guys cannot play characters dumber than themselves if they tried. (I mean it: watch Hoffman in Straight Time, Allen in Small Time Crooks, Elliott Gould in the Oceans 11 films). (Brief digression: Segal had played Biff to Cobb’s Willy Loman in a tv production of Death of a Salesman. It was like a passing of the torch).
Early in his career, Segal had been tried in some dumb gangster roles. In 1967 he was in Roger Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and a TV remake of The Desperate Hours. He’d also been in war stories like The Longest Day (1962), King Rat (1965) and Lost Command (1966). It wasn’t the stretch it sounds. Segal had actually served in the Korean War, in between his stretches at Columbia University and the Actor’s Studio. But perhaps he clicked better with a stethoscope around his neck in things like The Young Doctors (1961) and The New Interns (1964), or as an artist in Stanley Kramer’s Ship of Fools (1965).
Segal, as we came to think of him, emerged in 1968, when in the same year he starred as the title character in Sidney Lumet’s Bye Bye Braverman, and played the New York detective who foils Rod Steiger’s demented serial killer in No Way to Treat a Lady. Then came that amazing hot stretch, lasting about a decade. Some favorites include Carl Reiner’s black comedy Where’s Poppa? (1970) opposite Ruth Gordon; Buck Henry’s romcom The Owl and the Pussycat (1970) opposite Barbra Streisand (Segal had been in a company improv troupe called The Premise several years earlier); the cheeky caper film The Hot Rock (1972) with Redford, which I’ve always cherished on account of the centrality of my beloved Brooklyn Museum and some clear shots of the original World Trade Center; followed by Paul Mazurky’s inscrutable Blume in Love (1973).
Melvin Frank cast him opposite Glenda Jackson in A Touch of Class (1973) and Lost and Found (1979), and in the comedy western The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox with Goldie Hawn (1976). In Michael Crichton’s unsettling sci-fi thriller The Terminal Man (1974) he disturbs us by going on a murderous rampage, subverting our usual image of the actor. California Split (1974) with Gould often falls through the cracks of discussions of Robert Altman’s great films, situated as it was between The Long Goodbye and Nashville, but is definitely a high point for both the director and the actors. I am also a huge fan his two Ted Kotcheff comedies Fun with Dick and Jane (1977) with Jane Fonda, and Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? (1978) with Jacqueline Bisset, and the nutty mystery/disaster film mashup Rollercoaster (1977).
In 1979, Segal made the disastrous move of pulling out of Blake Edwards‘ 10, which was a huge hit that year. Not only did Edwards sue him for breach of contract, but…that was his last such offer. As we wrote here, the 1980s were a boorish time at the cinema for the most part. Segal’s style of hero and the kinds of films he starred in were suddenly over. Ted Kotcheff, who we just mentioned? His next hits were First Blood (1982) with Sylvester Stallone and the ensemble action picture Uncommon Valor (1983). THAT’s the tone of the lamentable 1980s. Segal starred in just a few other pictures, none of which did well: The Last Married Couple in America (1980) with Natalie Wood, Carbon Copy (1981) with a very young Denzel Washington, and Killing ’em Softly (1981) with Irene Cara, which went straight to video. Like Wood, he began starring in TV movies. (The Zany Adventures of Robin Hood, 1984, a guilty favorite). He was tried in two unsuccessful sitcoms, Take Five (1987), and Murphy’s Law (1988). Neither lasted a full season.
At this stage, Segal became a supporting actor, and fared very well with that reinvention ’til the end of his days. His films from period included Amy Heckerling’s Look Who’s Talking (1989), Mark Rydell’s For the Boys (1991) with Bette Midler and James Caan, Ben Stiller’s The Cable Guy and Flirting with Disaster (both 1996), Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), and Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009 — another guilty favorite!). He played Martin Beck in a 1998 TV movie about Houdini, of obvious interest here. And we save what are probably his best known contemporary credits for last: he was a regular on the hit sitcoms Just Shoot Me (1997-2003) with David Spade, and The Goldbergs (2013-2021) with Jeff Garlin.
It’s Mardi Gras as I type this so we return you now to that original theme, for we know that Segal is playing his banjo in the great Dixieland Band in the sky.
(Travalanche) 
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