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While trying to see if I could Google up any interviews with Simon Oakland (I couldn't, although I found an amusing anecdote concerning his Outer Limits guest-spot), I found a mini-biography someone wrote of him in which they called Lieutenant Schrank an out-and-out villain. They also called him bigoted and couldn't get his rank right. They called him Officer Schrank.
I've already expounded my thoughts on the character, including that it's not conclusive from movie canon that he is bigoted. (Book canon is something else, according to Ladyamberjo. But the book really seems to be a different version of everything anyway.) He makes equally terrible comments to members of both gangs. However, that alone certainly does not make him an out-and-out villain (or any kind of villain). I like and agree with what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pleasant_valley said, that pretty much all the characters are flawed in some way. To decide that Schrank (or really, any one character) is the villain in West Side Story is, I think, missing the whole point of the story in the first place.
And I can't get away from his guilt and shame over what he said, and his telling comment to Doc, "You try keeping a bunch of hoodlums in line and see what it does to you!" That doesn't sound like an out-and-out villain to me.
I think I finally finished a project I've been working on. I posted it at the Kolchak comm. And I'm hoping I won't decide later that it's not done after all. This is the second edition; the first is stuck in queue at the essay comm I signed up for. While waiting for it to go up, I realized it wasn't done and started tinkering with it again.
And I must see lots of Car 54, Where Are You?, a hysterical police comedy from the early sixties! It's another series I've carried a casual interest in for years, but previously had no access to. I tracked down the episode Simon Oakland guest-stars in, Hail to the Chief, and it's absolutely priceless. He plays a Secret Service agent trying to evaluate whether the two nutty main characters are fit to transport the President of the United States from the airport to the UN building. Nonsense ensues! I haven't laughed so hard all the way through a show in a while. Simon's character has his trademark reactions to the sheer goofiness around him, and at the end, after others are finally convinced that the officers are not fit for the task, he holds them at gunpoint in his office until the President can be safely delivered back to the White House by other police. It was so satisfying to see that Simon's character was finally believed, and from his expression in that last scene, I think he felt the same.
It's the first time I've seen Simon in a sitcom where he plays a scene for deliberate humor (with his frantic and comic attempt to get others to believe him that something is wrong). But there's also plenty of him being the straightman, too. And he wears a fedora for most of the episode, as he did in West Side Story. Yessss. I love fedoras in general, and he looks so good in them.
I've already expounded my thoughts on the character, including that it's not conclusive from movie canon that he is bigoted. (Book canon is something else, according to Ladyamberjo. But the book really seems to be a different version of everything anyway.) He makes equally terrible comments to members of both gangs. However, that alone certainly does not make him an out-and-out villain (or any kind of villain). I like and agree with what
pleasant_valley said, that pretty much all the characters are flawed in some way. To decide that Schrank (or really, any one character) is the villain in West Side Story is, I think, missing the whole point of the story in the first place.And I can't get away from his guilt and shame over what he said, and his telling comment to Doc, "You try keeping a bunch of hoodlums in line and see what it does to you!" That doesn't sound like an out-and-out villain to me.
I think I finally finished a project I've been working on. I posted it at the Kolchak comm. And I'm hoping I won't decide later that it's not done after all. This is the second edition; the first is stuck in queue at the essay comm I signed up for. While waiting for it to go up, I realized it wasn't done and started tinkering with it again.
And I must see lots of Car 54, Where Are You?, a hysterical police comedy from the early sixties! It's another series I've carried a casual interest in for years, but previously had no access to. I tracked down the episode Simon Oakland guest-stars in, Hail to the Chief, and it's absolutely priceless. He plays a Secret Service agent trying to evaluate whether the two nutty main characters are fit to transport the President of the United States from the airport to the UN building. Nonsense ensues! I haven't laughed so hard all the way through a show in a while. Simon's character has his trademark reactions to the sheer goofiness around him, and at the end, after others are finally convinced that the officers are not fit for the task, he holds them at gunpoint in his office until the President can be safely delivered back to the White House by other police. It was so satisfying to see that Simon's character was finally believed, and from his expression in that last scene, I think he felt the same.
It's the first time I've seen Simon in a sitcom where he plays a scene for deliberate humor (with his frantic and comic attempt to get others to believe him that something is wrong). But there's also plenty of him being the straightman, too. And he wears a fedora for most of the episode, as he did in West Side Story. Yessss. I love fedoras in general, and he looks so good in them.
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