Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
One of McDonald's greatest roles is in Carl Reiner's "Fatal Instinct" (1993), a broad parody of erotic thrillers like "Body Heat." McDonald plays a scumbag auto mechanic on the make, and Reiner really let him off the leash to romp: He gets to roll around naked with a rich lawyer's wife and make sarcastic-sounding sex grunts (McDonald is in especially pretty shape, here, ladies). He gets to snarl sexily and chomp a proffered cigarette out of the pack; he pretends he's smoking a cigarette that obviously isn't lit (his sexy William Hurt blowin' smoke rings before leaning over for the kiss is outstanding); he acts an entire scene in Yiddish and generally looks as deadpan as a Zen pond whilst seething with lust and other giddy criminal impulses. He finally gets to zoom around in his supercharged theatrical background -- there's a moment of Three Stooges-y comic mayhem when he tries to escape his paramour's bedroom without waking her husband, emitting high-pitched muffled shrieks and bumbling around haplessly, tripping backward over stuff in his underpants. You can see that this is a guy who has made an art of Dumb Human Tricks -- flipping a 1940s gangster hat onto his head with a Gene Kelly/Sinatra kind of finger roll, putting his hands behind his head and making his biceps dance. He might be an unrelenting smartass, but McDonald is clearly a boy who loves the theater.
I first noticed McDonald in 1995 when a friend of mine was composing the score for an unsuccessful little clunker originally titled "Learning Curves," which eventually blorted straight onto video shelves as "My Teacher's Wife." We were obsessed with one particular thing McDonald did: He plays an evil high school math teacher whose hot wife (Tia Carrere ... woooo) ends up having an affair with his most detested student. When McDonald catches them, he tilts his head and his red lips spread into a chillingly sweet smile. "You fucked up," he says to the student. But it was the hand gesture: "You (pointing right index finger at student) fucked (his pointing finger retracts; up goes the middle finger) up (the middle finger goes down, the thumb goes up, Fonzie-style)." It was a fast little flamenco hand dance that only took as long as he took to say the throwaway line, but he had clearly practiced this gesture, and it was fluid, surprising and totally funny. Anybody we showed the tape to spent 20 minutes trying to imitate it.
In the generally stupid "Celtic Pride" (1996) we get a hybrid McDonald role: He plays the apoplectically macho, sweaty and abusive coach of the Utah Jazz basketball team, stalking the parquet floor with a Pat Reilly viscosity of hair mousse and screaming showers of saliva. In an outstanding moment of signature McDonald insincerity, a key player shows up late to the important game, and he starts clapping like a stoned groupie. "Oh, look, it's Lewis. Hi, Lewis! Hi," he mews, with scorching hatred, before laying into him.
It's a terrible thing to say about an actor you love, but McDonald's best film is pretty much "Happy Gilmore" (1996), in which he plays the arch rival to Adam Sandler's Happy -- a smug, fatuous, elitist golf bastard named Shooter McGavin, who has a loathsome habit, after he sinks a ball, of shooting at the holes with his finger-gun and blowing on it.
"Damn you people. Go back to your shanties," he snarls at the Great Unwashed losers who are Happy Gilmore's fans.
Sandler feeds him a couple of great snack bits:
"I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast," Shooter growls in snide threat.
"You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?" asks Happy.
Shooter, stumped, wind knocked out of his brain: "..................NO....! Ah..."
He can't think of a comeback. It's beautiful.
Sandler must have really grooved on McDonald -- he got cast, after all -- but I've noticed that there were no future Adam Sandler films with Mr. McDonald, which I can only chalk up to rank jealousy -- McDonald is funnier than Adam Sandler, and Sandler must have realized it.
During the late '90s, McDonald seemed to be on a mission to accept the worst scripts ever penned by captive chimps in the bowels of the big studios, e.g., the execrable "Leave It to Beaver" (1997), wherein McDonald plays Ward Cleaver. McDonald can't save this big fat ball of stupid, even with a heroically tongue-in-cheek, '50s TV acting style -- the "script writers" decided to make Ward Cleaver a real asshole, for some reason. Ward has a temper problem, and his frustrated sports ambitions and general impotence make him subject The Beaver to various football humiliations, and subject wife June to retrograde sexual mores. "You're vacuuming in pearls. You know what that does to me," he pants. McDonald tries to make it funny, but the script is so dead in the water that it just weighs down and drowns anyone who attempts to save it.
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