Lawrence.com

In his new movie "The Majestic," veteran character actor Martin Landau delivers a stirring soliloquy about the joys of seeing vintage films and their deified stars in an opulent theater worthy of the content. It's a powerful experience he can recall from his own life.

"We grew up in the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y., during the hot summer days," he fondly recalls from a hotel room in his native New York. "I'd walk in on a Saturday into one of these ornate, elaborate, rather unusual rococo places. I would see a cartoon, a short, a newsreel, a serial, and for nickel, I could get a Mr. Goodbar candy bar as big as my body."

In the film, Landau plays Harry Trimble, the owner of a defunct small-town cinema palace whose life turns around when an amnesiac (Jim Carrey) wanders into the burg. Harry is convinced that the nameless stranger is really his son Luke, a World War II hero who disappeared after the end of the conflict, nine and a half years earlier.

"Harry is dead when the movie begins. He's lost his wife; he's lost his son; he's lost the theater he loves," Landau explains. "He's waiting to die, and Bingo! � this guy walks in, and everything is resurrected.

"You know what it's like? It's like a month after Sept. 11, a fireman comes out of the rubble, one of those guys who went in there at the last minute. Do you realize what impact that would have on New York City? No, forget about New York City. Think about the entire country. What that person would symbolize for everybody would be mind boggling. He'd represent all those thousands and thousands who died. That's what this movie's about. Ironically, it resonates with some of that."

Hard look back

While the 1950s setting for "The Majestic" might incline a viewer to think of the current flick as an exercise in nostalgia, the decade was difficult on the film industry as well as theater owners like Harry. His once-grand cinema, The Majestic, sits abandoned because of changes in the viewing habits during the decade.

"People were beginning to stay at home and watch TV, and it was creating a bit of a problem," remembers Landau. "(Twentieth Century) Fox came out with 'The Robe' in Cinemascope, and they were doing things to beef up movies to get people interested. There was momentarily a fear and revolution going on."

"The Majestic" also deals with another painful reality of the period: the blacklist. During the late 1940s and most of the 1950s, many filmmakers were denied work or screen credit because they had been accused of being Communists. Carrey's character, Peter Appleton, is actually a blacklisted screenwriter who loses his memory after trying to drink away the sorrow of losing his girlfriend and his career.

According to Landau, Appleton's story is not mere fiction.

"My first acting teacher was Curt Conway. He was a young director at that time, 1951-52, at CBS, and he was directing live shows there. He had signed the Willie McGee petition. There was a young black man called Willie McGee who was wrongly accused of raping a white woman in the South. They were going to hang him. So petitions went out in order to get him a fair trial. A lot of people signed that petition, but they didn't pay attention to the name of the organization that was endorsing those petitions. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who signed weren't Communists at all. By signing that piece of paper, they were attached to this conceivably left wing and possibly Communistic organization. Many of (the signers) were blacklisted. (Conway) walked into CBS one day and was told he was out of a job with no explanation given other than 'We're sorry we can't use your services anymore.'

"He could not get employment as an actor or a director, and he started teaching. What was a blessing for me was I guess a curse for him. He was a wonderful teacher. Because of my training with him, I auditioned for the Actors Studio and passed (Landau and another young, then-unknown actor named Steve McQueen beat out 2,000 fellow applicants) and worked with (Actors Studio founder) Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. He died at a fairly young age, really of a broken heart because he wasn't able to ply his trade anymore � and he was never a Communist."

When asked if the experiences recalled in "The Majestic" serve as a warning to younger generations, Landau states, "There's a timeliness to that subject, but I think there always is. There'll always be attacks on civil liberties. The great thing about living in this country is that people can speak up. I've traveled the world over, and just speaking out in some places can be life-threatening. It's wonderful that we're able to do that."

Many faces

The fatherly Harry is an enormous contrast to the first film role that brought Landau to prominence. In Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 thriller "North by Northwest," Landau played James Mason's intimidatingly lethal henchman Leonard. Surprisingly, the difference between portraying the characters is not as extreme as one might imagine.

"It's not a question of good guys and bad guys," Landau explains. "Bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Their beats are what make them bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany."

Playing Leonard also gave Landau and Hitchcock a chance to break some screen taboos.

"(The role) was written as a henchman," Landau recalls. "I felt there was no reason for him to be in the movie if he was just there doing James Mason's work. When I read the script, I said, my goodness, he certainly wants to get rid of Eva Marie Saint. I played him as a gay guy, but I played it subtly. Well, interesting choice. Now you've got to remember this was the '50s, and people didn't do things like this. A lot of my friends said, 'You're crazy. Play a gay in your first movie!.' I said, 'It's very logical. If he was gay and he had some kind of relationship with Mason's character, he would want to get rid of Eva Marie Saint.'

"Now, I don't think James Mason liked my choice, but Hitchcock did. And (screenwriter) Ernie Lehman added a line ("Call it my women's intuition, if you will.") for what I was doing that wasn't in the original script."

Landau's versatility was demonstrated when playing disguise expert Rollin Hand in the TV series "Mission: Impossible" from 1966 to 1969.

"It was like an actor's dream," he recalls. "I was a one-man rep company. I was putting on as much make up as Laurence Olivier was. It was fun. I had all kinds of hair, all kinds of dialects. I was blond, younger, older. (Landau's voice takes on a Teutonic sound) I'd do all kinds of German accents."

In the blood

With accents in mind, it's fitting that Landau won a 1994 Oscar for playing faded "Dracula" star Bela Lugosi in "Ed Wood." Among the challenges for the role was mastering a convincing Hungarian drawl.

Landau says, "(Hungarian) is not like any other accent in the world. The only other two languages that are anything like it are Turkish and Finnish because of those conquests and the way history evolved. It's very hard to lose a Hungarian accent. They can't say W's for the life of them. (Hungarians) who've been here for years sound like they just got off the boat."

In addition to capturing Lugosi's distinctive voice, Landau also tried to give his fellow thespian a proper sense of dignity.

"Lugosi was a terrific actor," Landau says. "He worked with the Hungarian national theater. He saw himself always as a romantic leading man. When he came here to do 'Dracula' on Broadway in 1927, women were literally fainting and having orgasms. He always wanted to do romantic parts, and he thought of Dracula as a romantic part."

Show business would seem to be in Landau's bloodline because last week he was awarded the 2,187th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His daughter Juliet plays the recurring character of Drusilla on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel." His other daughter, Susan, is a producer ("An Ideal Husband."). Surprisingly, Landau started out as a cartoonist for The New York Daily News.

"I did theatrical caricatures," he recalls. "Right now I'm doodling as I talk to you. There are certain times in your life when you can do things. One day, I looked around, and the kind of drawing I like doing, I can do at home, and this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. I left a good paying job. My family thought I was NUTS. If I was married and had certain obligations, I wouldn't have been able to do that. Sometimes windows of opportunity occur, and you have to recognize them, and you dive head first into that window that's going to shut any second."