Breaking Down Bruce Dern

Have no fear, I have no intention of taking down or running down the idiosyncratic genius of Bruce MacLeish Dern (b. 1936). The title refers to the fact that this post will divide aspects of his life and career into categories for the purposes of analysis, for there are many themes that run throughout.

I associate Dern especially with psychopath roles, especially characters who seem to have crawled out of the backwoods. As Tom in The Great Gatsby (1974), I long thought he was miscast, but when you plunge into his background, it turns out that in that part he was typecast. If the beady, vacant, too-close-together eyes, high-sloping forehead, rat-like nose, and unsettling, crooked grin suggest inbreeding to you, it turns out that it’s more like the King Charles kind. His two principal great-grandfathers were self-made, wealthy men (John Dern was the President of a gold mine; Andrew MacLeish was director of a major department store and co-founder of the University of Chicago). The poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish was Dern’s great uncle. His grandfather George Dern was U.S. Secretary of War and Governor of Utah. His father, John Dern was a law partner of Adlai Stevenson; Stevenson was Bruce Dern’s Godfather. Dern grew up in the tony suburbs of Chicago and was a track star at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dern went on to study at the Actor’s Studio with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, becoming a particular protege of the latter. Kazan directed him on Broadway in the original 1959 production of Sweet Bird of Youth and the 1960 movie Wild River. Other early significant stage work included the 1958 Philadelphia premiere of Waiting for Godot (as Estragon) and a 1958 Broadway revival of Shadow of a Gunman. Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always included him in a possibly unfair mental category of “Method Acting Crazies”, actors who push psychological barriers to their outer limits and take real risks, people like Brando, Rod Steiger, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and many another, both then and now. His performance in Tattoo (1981) especially conjures Steiger, being a kind of mash-up of things like No Way to Treat a Lady (1968) and The Illustrated Man (1969). Dern often played characters who were a terrifying combination of dumb and cowardly, the kind of petty animals who will sink to anything, shoot a man in the back, mistreat women and children. I am of just the right age to have been deeply affected by his devastating role in Mark Rydell’s coming of age movie The Cowboys (1972). How could anyone be hunky-dory with humankind after experiencing the truth of that daring performance? For it falls within the limits of known and recognizable human behavior.

Another outgrowth of Dern’s Method training, I believe (and it’s hard to know the extent the degree to which he controls it), is his tendency to convert all of his dialogue into his own words. Frequent collaborator Jack Nicholson dubbed these improvised alterations “Dernsies”. His own speech patterns are really quirky and easy to identify. Those who have heard the real guy speak in interviews have surely observed that he customarily retrofits his movie lines into his own voice.

Starting in the early ’60s Dern worked a lot in dramatic TV series, playing the kinds of drifters and creeps that became his stock in trade. The arc of his future career was set in things like a 1964 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour where he plays a wanderer named Jesse who terrorizes a farm couple played by Teresa Wright and Pat Buttram. Hitchcock also gave him a small but important role as a drunken, rapey sailor in Marnie that same year. Hitchcock clearly relished Dern’s offbeat qualities. Hitch cast him opposite Barbara Harris as a lead in his very last film The Family Plot (1976, pictured above). In that one, Dern went against type and it’s very fun to watch as he is clearly making an attempt to echo the long-chain of Hitchcock’s humorous double-chase heroes dating all the way back to the director’s British films. All the business with the pipe, for example, reminds me in particular of Michael Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes (1938).

That same eventful year of 1964, Dern was also in the Hitchcockesque Robert Aldrich film Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, one of the numerous popular movies of the day that owed a lot stylistically to Psycho. Surprisingly there are relatively few horror films per se in Dern’s body of work, and what there is came much later, when he did things like the 1999 remake of The Haunting, as well as Swamp Devil (2008), The Hole (2009), Twixt (2011), Coffin Baby (2013), and Bloodline Killer (2024). Instead, to my mind, Dern’s niche seems to consist of bringing the horror to other genres. His two primary associations in terms of genre are: 1) Vietnam era/counterculture/low budget exploitation; and 2) westerns.

In 1966 Dern began his association with AIP, leading to many collaborations with Roger Corman, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and by extension Fonda’s sister Jane. This side of his career gives us things like The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967), The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), Psych-Out (1968), The Cycle Savages (1969), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Bloody Mama (1970), The Rebel Rousers (1970), The Thing With Two Heads (1971), Drive He Said (1971), and The King of Marvin Gardens (1972). Later, he would play men damaged by the Vietnam War in things like John Frankenheimer’s Bloody Sunday (1977) and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978). Not long ago I watched a talk show interview with Dern that was recorded not long after the latter film, where he seemed to be under the misapprehension that his Oscar nominated performance would elevate him to the status of a leading man. But of course the leading man in that movie was Jon Voigt. Dern’s attempt to be one (opposite Ann-Margret) in Middle Age Crazy (1980) was widely panned. His next movie? Was Tattoo.

Even before he started making those biker movies though, Dern had begun his association with the western. Initially he guest starred on TV series like Wagon Train, The Virginian, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza, and The Big Valley. This led to films like The War Wagon (1967), Waterhole No. 3 (1967), Will Penny (1967), Hang ‘Em High (1968), Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), The Cowboys (1972), Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973), Posse (1975), Harry Tracy: The Last of the Wild Bunch (1982), Wild Bill (1995) and dozens of others.

Some of Dern’s best known roles though have been unicorn-like. In Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), a follow-up of sorts to the special effects breakthroughs of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he carried an entire movie in a virtual solo turn, a kind of rare tour de force of the sort few actors get to attempt. Other examples include Michael Ritchie’s beauty pageant satire Smile (1975), Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), and Jason Miller’s sports drama That Championship Season (1982).

The ’80s were a relatively fallow period for Dern, while during the same decade, his daughter Laura became a star. Towards the end of the decade he began to get cast more smartly again, often in roles that recalled the first phase of his career. He also began to be seen regularly again in major films, although often in smaller roles. Some from this period include 1969 (1988), The ‘Burbs (1989), After Dark My Sweet (1990), Mulholland Falls (1996), All the Pretty Horses (2000) and Monster (2003). From 2006 through 2011 he had a plum recurring role on the HBO series Big Love. Quentin Tarantino employed him in Django Unchained (2012), The Hateful Eight (2015) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), stunt casting him as George Spahn in the latter.

In 2013 Alexander Payne, who had directed Dern’s daughter Laura in Citizen Ruth (1996) and his old cohort Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (2002), cast him as lead in Nebraska, earning him a Best Actor Oscar after over 50 years in the business. (He had previously been nominated for Best Supporting in Coming Home). I found an amusing (because true) quote from Dern on the subject of Peter Fonda:  “I’m sorry, man, he just can’t act. He never bothered to sit and learn. He never studied…Now I don’t begrudge the fact that he has talent. But he’s not an actor, by any stretch of the imagination.” Right on the money. But even so, it seems to me that Nebraska has much in common with at least two Fonda vehicles, Wanda Nevada (1979) and Ulee’s Gold (1997). And for that matter, Easy Rider (1969)! Loveable wackos on Quixotic American road trips!

Dern has played dozens of subsequent roles over the past decade. 2017 was a particularly interesting year, one in which his movies included the western bio-pic Hickok, The Lears (in which he played a sit-com version of King Lear opposite Anthony Michael Hall and Sean Astin), and Chappaquidick, in which he played Joe Kennedy. At present, he can be seen in a recurring role on the Apple TV+ series Palm Royale, starring his daughter Laura, Kristen Wiig, Josh Lucas, Allison Janney, Carol Burnett et al.

Over 200 screen credits and still going! Crazy like a fox!