Good night, Cliff

Cliff Robertson in The Best Man

Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson in Days of Wine and Roses

I have been waiting a while to offer any kind of tribute to Cliff Robertson for a number of reasons. I have always held it against him (unfairly, perhaps, because it was not really his fault) that he won the best actor Oscar for Charly in 1968 when the award should have gone to Peter O’Toole for A Lion in Winter. For another, I have spent the last couple of days searching for a clip of what is really Robertson’s finest performance on film, but now I have given up.

Most of the tributes to Robertson in the last couple of days have focused on Charly, because he won the Oscar for it; P.T. 109, because it was his first starring film role and because, as legend has it, he was personally picked for the part by President Kennedy; and the Spider-Man films, because they were his final screen appearances after an extended absence from films.

But, to me, Robertson’s finest big screen performance was as Joe Cantrell, the opportunist presidential candidate — a combination of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, with a Kennedy veneer — in the 1964 film The Best Man.

His second best performance came on television, in Playhouse 90's version of Days and Wine and Roses (1958). I know some may consider this heresy, but Robertson actually did a better job of portraying Joe Clay than Jack Lemmon did in the later screen adaptation. Unfortunately I could not find a clip of that one either.

So I guess I'll just have to go with the above photos.