Fredo and Pat’s 1970s adventure

Some directors’ filmographies are unimaginable without a stock company of such actors. Think of Preston Sturges, John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman. One of the things that makes Jason Reitman stand out today is his having just such a mini-troupe (Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Sam Elliott). Have Coen brothers movies ever recovered from the departure of John Goodman?

Blockbusters and stars are terms by which we define movie history. But think of how much the recurrence of certain otherwise-unheralded faces contributes to the texture and flavor of movie evolution. Hollywood in the ’30s would be a very different proposition without the invariably satisfying presence of an Edward Everett Horton or Beulah Bondi; in the ’40s without a Sydney Greenstreet or Agnes Moorehead; in the ’50s without an Arthur O’Connell or Thelma Ritter (the Mother Courage of character actors).

One of the things that made the ’60s so unusual onscreen wasn’t just a new frankness as regarded sex, violence, and language. It was the violating of another movie taboo, the emergence of stars who at heart really were character actors, such as Lee Marvin and Michael Caine (that accent!).

With the end of the ’60s, Hollywood entered its Silver Age. As with the Golden Age of the Studio Era, a tribe of stellar supporting players helped define it. Ned Beatty made his debut in “Deliverance’’ (1970), ordered at gunpoint to “squeal like a pig.’’ Harry Dean Stanton, playing just about the saddest-looking cowboy you’ll ever see, runs afoul of Marlon Brando in “The Missouri Breaks’’ (1976). Ben Johnson, who had been a John Ford mainstay, provided a kind of moral conscience for the decade in movies like “The Last Picture Show’’ (1971) and “The Sugarland Express’’ (1974). John Marley went from having Ali MacGraw for a daughter in “Love Story’’ (1970), to having a horse’s head in his bed in “The Godfather’’ (1972). Where to begin to describe the impact of Madeline Kahn, equally beloved by Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, other than to say “and Teri Garr makes two’’?