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David Warner fits both categories of cult figure: 1) a familiar sound and image in forgettable A and B movies; 2) a focal point of films now remembered as lifepath-changing events by some viewers. The fact that some of his vehicles can be sorted into either category, depending upon the viewer, only cements this reputation.
Warner's appeal is mysterious only to those who prefer the aggressively bland Tom Hanks or Kevin Costner; the happily foolhardy Mel Gibson; perhaps that studied antihero Bruce Willis, whose sense of irony is only skin-deep. It is Warner's blessing/curse that he does not blend. His contemporary Michael Caine by contrast is always the schlub, or conman, or secret agent who hides in plain sight. Warner is never any of these; though a colorless personality is not beyond his power - witness his Eugene in Office Party.
Critics have described his performances as often with the word "vulnerable" as with "intimidating," sometimes in the same review. Certain directors have exploited this paradox - Pekinpah being the master at it. Others have paid for ignoring it. Their comeuppance is brought in a disarmingly paternal moment, some passing gestures that bear the impact of a plot development, in The Island or Waxwork for example. Indeed the actor's "heavies" have been interspersed with benign or aloof papas (in Hansel & Gretel or A Christmas Carol) and avenging fathers (in Tripwire and Wild Palms). His equally sweet-tempered, unselfconscious dads in the real and dream worlds of The Company of Wolves counterweigh his more antagonistic roles. All his characters play up or against an intimidation factor, some more ingeniously or subtly than others.
Warner has certainly been typecast; not as the villain, surprisingly, but as a quasi-feral being. A character in the Star Trek: The Next Generation sixth season episodes "Chain of Command" parts 1 and 2 describes Cardassians as "timber wolves." Such a characterization apparently inspired the casting of men with long snouts, wide trunks and thin extremities in speaking parts, Warner chief among them.
The actor has likely recognized this tendency towards defining him as more or less than human. When Warner appears in the courtroom scene of Providence, he says the line "he was turning into an animal" with a catch in his voice, as if he knows that fate and wouldn't wish it on anyone. Like an animal, he is prone to abuse and neglect by the uncaring or uneducated. Like an animal, he is sometimes exploited as an almost 3D shock effect. Watch his body unfold at the camera like a pouncing cheetah in a nature film, in Tron or Time After Time.
To preserve his ability to startle, directors and publicists have refused to show his full smile except at calculatedly inappropriate moments, to deliberately ruin its otherwise unalloyed charm. This is also true for another rangy actor with a brilliant smile often thrown away on serial killer roles: Tom Noonan.
Ultimately the best treatments of Warner abstract his physical qualities, rather than just exaggerating them. In Time Bandits he's less a member of Terry Gilliam's parade of cameos than one of the animator/director's cutouts sprung to life. In Tron he triplicates the usual doppelganger as Dillinger, Sark and the MCP. The insistent mirroring and inversion of his face and voice becomes a chilling experience in itself, as if one is watching a fractal grow teeth, then speak.
Comparing David Warner's current international film career with his earliest British experiences is difficult for anyone who wasn't part of mod London in those days. News archives don't help much. His introduction as a working class anti-matinee idol was only one of many steps towards a curious democratization of British culture, one that has led to politically correct knighthoods (like Ian McKellen's) and cockney Iagos (like Bob Hoskins'). Photographs suggest he "skewed old" in his youth, so that contemporary epithet of a "teen idol" Hamlet - the John Lennon of the RSC - doesn't hold in retrospect. Jacobi's is the rebel without a cause, who toys with others' best intentions, or their disingenuous posturing as the case may be, with indiscriminate perversity. Warner's was apparently by turns a "noble mind" and aspiring savage, set apart from yet torn by political intrigues.
This sort of actor who inspires mixed feelings is most appropriate to characters with mixed or hidden motives, as in Morgan. The contrast between Warner and cinematic debutante Vanessa Redgrave extended beyond the usual beauty/beast dichotomy. It was welcomed by some critics as though deploying Warner's presence qualified as a political act and not just a dramatic contrivance. Morgan sits, gently flipping bathwater at his ex with a couple of fingertips. His one gesture is comprised of equal parts come-on, put-on and putdown. Morgan's implied capacity to inflict violence feels more disturbing than the character's overt threats, because they hint at his frustrated potential as a human being, not just as a rejected suitor. The fact that Morgan cannot successfully do anything he sets his mind to is commented on insightfully by his mother (Irene Handl). She calls him a "class traitor," but not merely because he's thrown himself at a rich woman. To her, the boy's tragedy involves the perversion of his intelligence for the sake of a clearly fruitless enterprise.
Warner was later allowed breathing room in that most unexpected corner of the world - commercial Hollywood. Nicholas Meyer hired him to portray one of the iconic bad guys of the Western World, that quasi-mythic creature Jack The Ripper. At the same time, if only out of sheer naivete, the director allowed the actor to enact a point of view about his character. Warner's skew of The Ripper as a misty-eyed and defeated outsider is portrayal and commentary combined: a dramatic editorial on Meyer's Freudian monstrosity of a sadistic doctor. Warner's John is not a poor sap at heart, though, but an untenable life. In the end he grants permission to the hero to allow him to commit suicide, so as not to compromise Wells' nonviolent stance. This is introduced with a nod, by his own (the actor's and subsequently the character's) choice. It is a self-destructively singular act of goodwill, on the part of one who cannot afford to let another befriend him in return. The typically thrifty denouement of an action film at that moment becomes shrouded in regret.
Unfortunately, it will continue to be easier for filmmakers to wield David Warner like a weapon instead of collaborating with him on a more adroit strategy, even as he settles into middle age. Titanic, for example, is the quintessential movie dependent upon the casting of character actors as a sort of human-scale shorthand. Lovejoy is not just another Jeeves in James Cameron's sketchy microcosm of America's Euro-derived class distinctions. He's a trophy butler - a feudal agent who sets off to dispatch his boss' romantic competitor as simply as if putting away master's topcoat. The actor is in that way neatly woven into the social commentary of the film. Yet the scope and heft of the film's subject results in a lack of detail. Warner's now most visible role - by dint of the film's sheer worldwide popularity - finally renders him as a thin gray blob with a firearm.
(This essay was originally written by Jennifer Kramer in 1999, prior to the revival of the actor's stage career, and posted in 2001.)
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