I said I wasn't going to memorialize my mother again on this blog, but I never said memories of her wouldn't creep into other posts accidentally. (Besides, grieving is an unpredictable thing ... you probably should not make too many rules.)I wasn't going to write a proper "in memoriam" post for Ian Holm, either, maybe especially on the heels of remembering my mother on this blog. The first return to fondly remembering another deceased cinematic luminary needed to be someone really important to me, not someone more on the margins like Holm.
But then the movie in which I first met him entered my head, and pushed its way past the other candidates for a Saturday night viewing.
Many people who have been remembering Ian Holm in the past day or so, since his death at age 88 was announced, have been focused on what are considered his signature roles in major contributions to the zeitgeist, like Alien and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In fact, he is so fondly remembered as Bilbo Baggins that you almost forget, for a moment, that he never played this character as the star of his own movie. When it was time to tell Bilbo's story, Martin Freeman was the choice, which makes sense, given that Holm was in his late 70s.
For me, though, Ian Holm was first and foremost Napoleon Bonaparte in Time Bandits, a role with only about ten minutes of screen time -- which, I guess, is something it has in common with Bilbo.
Like The Cable Guy, which I wrote about yesterday, Time Bandits is also in an extremely elevated position on my Flickchart, all the way up at #25 overall. Like The Cable Guy, I had only once previously tagged it on this blog. Though in a way that's even stranger than only writing about The Cable Guy once, as Time Bandits has been around for 15 years longer and was one of the movies I wore out on VHS when I was growing up. I'm sure that's due in large part to the fact that before this viewing, I hadn't watched it since 2007, which was two years before this blog existed.
If you aren't familiar with the basic set-up of Terry Gilliam's best film, well, you have some homework to do. But I'll nutshell it here for you. It involves a group of little people who steal a map from the Supreme Being, for whom they worked in helping create the world. The map shows the time holes that were left when they had to create the whole earth in only seven days, and they can travel through these portals to other periods of history, where they can steal the riches of famous people and then vanish into thin air, quite literally. (Well, it actually involves running through a cool black door-sized portal that opens and stays open for about a minute.) Along the way they acquire our protagonist, 11-year-old Kevin, after ending up in his bedroom in modern-day England.
As they select their targets, their first stop is to make off with Napoleon's riches. The whole sequence is masterfully absurd. The famous diminutive military leader is in the process of sacking an Italian city during the Napoleonic Wars, and he has basically driven the local population into total submission. However, instead of ordering a halt to the attacks, and accepting the surrender of the locals -- a measure his two trusted advisers urge him to make post haste -- he wants to watch a Punch and Judy show featuring two puppets smacking each other with sticks. Any attempt to divert him from this diversion is met with great anger and frustration. When the puppeteer is shot and killed, the desperate stage manager hustles the band of robbers on stage, as an alternative to shooting himself in the head. It's an accidental masterstroke, as the size-obsessed dictator professes to like "Little things, hitting each other!"
The bulk of Holm's time on screen involves snapping at his generals and laughing like a loon at the entertainment options proffered for him. But then there's also the following scene where a pickled Napoleon lists a succession of former great military and political leaders who were shorter than he is. He passes out and the little people, made generals in the stead of their disappointing precursors, steal a bunch of paintings, jewelry and gold goblets that happen to be piled up in the very banquet hall where Napoleon loses consciousness.
It would be a stretch to say that Holm plays any significant role in making Time Bandits as great as it is, at least not in comparison to any of the other stars who have about the same amount of screen time as he does (among them Sean Connery). But it's always the first role that comes to mind for me for a great actor whose presence on screen always portended good things.
It wasn't Holm's contributions to the film -- which are over by the 20-minute mark -- that comprised the largest share of my takeaway from Time Bandits on this viewing. In fact, as I was watching, I kept on being reminded how much my mother loved this movie, especially the parts that made her laugh.
I don't ever remember sitting down to watch Time Bandits with my mother on VHS. As a parent now, I am only too aware how important it is to get stuff done during the precious time when the TV is keeping your children engaged. But my mom would have definitely been with us when we saw it in the theater, and I have a memory now of her lingering by the TV to watch certain key moments -- as I also now do when my children are watching a movie I love.
Specifically, I remember her reacting so enthusiastically to the moments involving Gilliam's fellow Monty Pythons, John Cleese and Michael Palin. Which is kind of a mind-blowing revelation, in fact, because I'd always thought my love for Monty Python came more from my dad than from my mom. My dad and I have actually performed Monty Python skits live together, but the evidence of Time Bandits shows that my mom was equally tickled by Python's antics. I guess it was something they had in common.
In fact, had my mother lingered at just the right time -- as she did on multiple occasions, I would guess -- she would have gotten to see both moments that I specifically remember making her laugh. The first of these is when the bandits are arriving in the Middle Ages, and they land on a carriage being pulled by horses and containing Palin and Shelley Duvall. Palin, a real dandy and a poor sample of masculinity, and Duvall, a goofy and frivolous woman, are talking about their future together, and the conversation turns to Palin's embarrassing "personal problem." What this problem is, exactly, is never unveiled, but we are meant to assume it relates either to his sexual stamina, or to incontinence. I remember my mother loved this particular exchange:
Duvall: "So you don't still have to wear the special --?"
Palin: "No, I don't have to wear the -- special -- anymore."
The delivery of Palin's line always made my mother guffaw, as it contains the perfect awkward pause as Palin leaves out the key word in the sentence, which neither of them dare speak. (Humorously, the two actors return later, on the Titanic, I guess suggesting that silly prats and their silly would-be fiancees are an ever-recurring dynamic throughout time.)
A few minutes after a fleeing Palin and Duvall are robbed and tied to a tree -- "The problem! THE PROBLEM!" he cries -- the bandits come across Robin Hood, played by Cleese. This Robin Hood is a cheery, charming fellow who talks the bandits into donating their early 19th century treasures to the poor merely by power of suggestion -- or, also, the implication that his goons and ruffians will beat the robbers senseless should they refuse. (We see an example of this as one particularly rough character insists on punching each poor person after gifting them with a shiny object.)
As the bandits are making off with at least their lives if not their loot, Hood (as he introduces himself) waves at them and says "Thank you very much. Thank you very, very, very, very, very much." When he's sure they're out of earshot, he says under his breath "What awful people."
That always got my mom, too.
As I looked in on the last time I wrote about Time Bandits in 2010, I noticed the film was mentioned in the context of me talking about movies I had requested from my family for Christmas that year. And in that post I wrote this:
"I chose Time Bandits as the art for this post because that's the one I'm most likely to get. In her response to my email, my mom said she was glad that Time Bandits still held such a place in my heart all these years later. I wore out our VHS copy of it back in the 1980s, and though I don't remember watching it with her very often, neither does it surprise me that she loved it too."
Aww.
I suppose there is one last person -- or rather, group of people -- who I want to memorialize in this post. And that is the bandits themselves.
Now, many adults who appeared in a movie that came out in 1981, nearly 40 years ago, could be dead now for any number of reasons. When the adult in question has dwarfism, though, that is far more likely of an outcome. And as I was watching Time Bandits on this occasion, it occurred to me that not only could all the bandits have passed on, it was by far the most likely outcome.
When the film ended, I decided to look it up.
Randall, the leader of the bandits (even though they agreed no leader, according to Strutter), was played by David Rappaport. Rappaport died only nine years after Time Bandits, and his death was not related to his condition -- at least not directly. He suffered from depression, and ended up killing himself in 1990, at only age 38. Very sad. During this viewing, I made note of what a good actor I thought Rappaport was. They're all good, really -- it shouldn't be assumed that someone with dwarfism is somehow limited in their acting skills -- but as the bandit with the most screen time, he carries more of the acting burden than the others. And carries it wonderfully.
Kenny Baker, who played Fidgit (and of course, also, R2D2), lived a good long life for a person with dwarfism, surviving until age 81 at his death in 2016. Wikipedia just says he had a "brief illness." It's heartening that he at least received a proper send-off when he passed four years ago, even though it was a bit hard to quantify his contribution to R2D2 because his face was never seen on screen. I was always affected by his performance here since he's the only bandit who "dies" in the movie. (Which of course the Supreme Being ultimately reverses.)
Jack Purvis, who played Wally, lived until age 60. He actually managed to live six more years after becoming a quadriplegic during a car repair accident in 1991. I just now learned that it was the death of Rappaport and the incapacitation of Purvis that caused Gilliam to shelve a Time Bandits sequel. Probably best that we never got that sequel for other reasons, but it's sad that these were the actual reasons.
Malcolm Dixon, the actor who played Strutter, might be the most interesting case of all. Wikipedia does not have a birth date for Dixon, but it does have a death date, and that date is only just two months ago on April 9, 2020. Considering that Strutter always struck me as the oldest-looking bandit, and that he has credits as long ago as the 1960s, he might have been even older than Baker when he died. The cause of death had not been released when the article was written. Jeez, it might have been COVID.
Tiny Ross, who played the omnivore Vermin, is the only actor among the bandits who does not have his own Wikipedia page. But looking on google tells me he died in 1994. IMDB tells me he filmed the climactic scene of Time Bandits with a broken arm he sustained during filming. The sling is hidden by the knight riding the horse on which he's also riding. Good on him.That leaves only one more bandit, Og, played by Mike Edmonds.
And you know what?
Mike Edmonds is still alive.
He's 76. And here's what he looked like in 2014, when he was 70:
Thank heavens for small favors -- and for the ability to end this "in memoriam" piece on a positive note.
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