You couldn't lump him in with that crowd of distinct yet still relatively anonymous tough guys, the Barton MacLanes and the Lee Van Cleefs. Mind you, there were long stretches where he made it tempting - some as long as the lanky frame that, combined with the pug nose, helped to bring him at least some acclaim. It was no fault of his; the better roles just stopped coming, so much so that when he won the Oscar at the age of 73, for parodying himself in the hit comedy City Slickers, his post Oscar press musings were laments that it was a case of too little too late, that getting his hands on the hardware at an earlier stage in his career might have brought him more vehicles like Sudden Fear and The Big Knife, and less of the stuff like Outlaw of Gor and Cyborg 2.
As a result, it's the book ends he'll be remembered by, the films at the both the front and end of his career: the villainous Jack Wilson in Shane, and the hysterically tough Curly in the aforementioned Slickers; the same character, you could argue, the evil in him simply aged to the point where his bark is worse than his bite.
While we're in the realm of argument, one could also make a case that Palance revolutionized onscreen villainy, a hitherto intellectual affair; think of all of those mad geniuses who loved to go on about the caliber of their schemes, or all of those or slick con men with their endless witticisms in the films of the thirties and forties. Jack did it just as memorably by simply standing tall and uttering barely a page. Aha! But what about all those laconic, black-hatted bad guys in the Westerns, you ask. Wasn't Palance just an extension of them? No. Jack adopted the same form but added another dimension to it; a base, chilling humanity, straight from the internalist school of acting. He was, long before the appearance of Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven, the first Stanislavskian Western bad guy, and later, in Slickers, a variation on the theme: the first Stanislavskian Western comic bad guy.
Yep, ol' Jack brought the Actor's Studio to the ol' West, and a veritable posse followed him: Paul Newman in The Left Handed Gun, Wallach in Seven, then Brando and Malden in One Eyed Jacks (there had been Montgomery Clift in Red River some time before, but that, for whatever reasons, blazed no trail.) It was a genre that belonged strictly to the older generation - the Fondas and the Stewarts and the Glenn Fords - before he showed up. After that brief but memorable appearance in Shane, the saloon doors were flung open to the torn t-shirt set. The Actors Studio methodology, hitherto a very urban animal, found a home among the sagebrush and the cacti.
Let him go down like that. It's a damn sight prettier than the way his characters went down in Shane and Slickers, and more credit than, sadly, Hollywood ever truly afforded him.
