Oh God, Cliff. No.

I didn't like Alan Arkin the first time I saw him on screen, or at least the first time I remember seeing him.

The Rocketeer (1991) was not my first Arkin movie, since he was in Edward Scissorhands the year before in 1990, and I loved that. But I don't remember him in it. Given the quality of the majority of performances he's given, I'm sure he was good.

But he wasn't good in The Rocketeer. In fact, he was so not good that my friends and I took to quoting a particularly awkward line of his dialogue from the movie, which I still think about almost every time I think about Arkin. 

I haven't seen that movie in the 32 years since, so I couldn't tell you what was actually happening in the plot. But some bit of bad luck, some sort of tragedy, had befallen lead character Cliff, played by Billy Campbell. 

The response of Arkin's character, who was named -- this is true, I just looked it up -- Peevy?

"Oh God, Cliff. No."

Doesn't sound that funny in isolation, but the delivery was botched so completely that the whole room burst out laughing. When five or six 17-year-olds find the exact same line of dialogue so poorly executed that their instant and simultaneous response is to devolve into guffaws, it has to be bad.

I never had that feeling about Alan Arkin again. 

If I had with any sort of regularity, I wouldn't be writing a remembrance piece like this one. But I didn't have it even once.

The next year I saw him in Glengarry Glen Ross, and the rest is history.

Now, sadly, so is Arkin. He died at age 89 on Thursday after years of heart problems -- heart problems which, in retrospect, make it seem unlikely he'd have appeared in both of the first two seasons of The Kominsky Method, and fully explain his absence from the third and final one.

In all I've ended up seeing 26 films in Arkin's illustrious career, which dates all the way back to 1957 -- though only three that were released before Edward Scissorhands (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Wait Until Dark and The Last Unicorn, in which he provides a voice). The good news is, that means I have a lot more yet to enjoy.

When thinking of Arkin, I naturally think of Glengarry Glen Ross, as it is my favorite film he appeared in, ranked 54th on my Flickchart. (And used to be a lot higher.) But he added a generous helping of the loveable curmudgeon in every film he touched. It won him an Oscar in Little Miss Sunshine. 

But that was not the only version of Arkin we got. It seems hard to imagine that he was considered the right person to play one of the menacing intruders who means Audrey Hepburn harm in Wait Until Dark. And yet I remember him being menacing indeed.

He was the rare actor to really become a household name in his later years. If Glengarry Glen Ross was 31 years ago and we can think of that as a useful jumping off point for when his career started to really take off -- which may be a flawed way of viewing a career I am largely unfamiliar with prior to 1990 -- then he was already 58 in that movie. He had 56 more credits after this.

I have particularly appreciated him in the last decade of his career, when he's played characters whose primary defining feature is that they are old and cantankerous. But they are also simultaneously acerbic and warm, a tricky balance that only someone of Arkin's unique skill set could pull off. I'm thinking of movies like Stand Up Guys and Going In Style -- not great movies by any of stretch of the imagination, but infinitely better than they would have been without him. I feel like he should have been in Last Vegas, but that was his Kominsky Method co-star, Michael Douglas, who is actually 11 years younger. (As are the others in that film, Robert De Niro, Kevin Kline and Morgan Freeman. Actually, Freeman is 86, so I might be writing one of these for him sooner rather than later.)

No one expects an actor to be in only great movies -- I'm sure The Jerky Boys is terrible, and he was in the infamous Rob Reiner flop North. Then of course there was The Rocketeer, which many people like but I think is actively bad.

With the possible exception of that last, though, Alan Arkin made every movie he was in better -- and that is the mark of an actor with true staying power, who was working essentially up until the end.

Which, even at 89 years old, came too soon. 

Last night I watched Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time in 12 years as an appreciation. That acting master class is really the Al Pacino-Jack Lemmon show, with the greatest individual scene belonging to Alec Baldwin.

But guess who plays the only character -- or at least the only salesman -- you actually like?

Rest in peace.