Malden's craft helped make great movies

While wading through Michael Jackson stories to find something about Karl Malden, the bulbous-nosed character actor who died last week at 97, I found it interesting that so many of the write-ups said Malden was best known as the senior detective on the television series "The Streets of San Francisco," the '70s police procedural in which he co-starred with young up-and-comer Michael Douglas.

Really?

It's easier to believe that most people — of a certain generation anyway — remember Malden best from his TV commercials for American Express Travelers Cheques. After all, for more than two decades, we saw him repeatedly pitch the line, "Don't leave home without them."

And it's sad but true that certain generations remember Laurence Olivier as an aged huckster for Polaroid cameras and Groucho Marx as an old guy who did a TV game show and Charlie Chaplin as a cartoon figure impersonated by others.

Sometimes, television doesn't keep a performer alive so much as distort his image.

Hey, it doesn't take a lot of work to discover that Olivier was one of the greatest actors of his generation, that Marx made a string of hilarious movies with his brothers or that Chaplin was a comic genius of silent cinema.

And if Malden isn't so well-remembered for his many and varied movie roles, perhaps it's because he so fully developed his performances that the actor disappeared while the characters remained.

He was a confident performer who excelled at authoritarian figures, whether cops, judges, priests or hardened criminals, but he could also play naive fools when called upon to do so. He even took on a role in "Gypsy" that required him to sing and dance.

Most of Malden's characters were in support of the stars, but he helped make each ensemble better, back in an age when movies were about stories.

After his death last week, it dawned on me that I've been watching Malden in quite a few films over the past few months.

In February, I reviewed the DVD releases of "Parrish" (in the "Romance Classics Collection"), with Malden as a conniving tobacco mogul, and "Bombers B-52" (in the "Natalie Wood Collection"), in which he plays Wood's overprotective father.

And in the past few months, my wife and I have watched "How the West Was Won," in which Malden plays the religious but stern patriarch of an immigrant family; "The Cincinnati Kid," with Malden as a respected but weak-willed card dealer; and "Nevada Smith," in which Malden is the ringleader of ruthless killers being tracked by Steve McQueen.

We also saw the new-to-home-video "Time Limit," a taut thriller starring Richard Widmark, which is the only film Malden directed (he also plays a small, uncredited role). And a few episodes of "The Streets of San Francisco."