At a young age, I watched my mother star in a local production of Dial M for Murder, (At the cast party I wasn’t too nice to the actor I’d just seen try to kill her.) Around then, Robert Duvall co-starred in a professional production (1956).
Duvall’s first film role was Boo Radley in the marvelous To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). I was a wiseass kid watching it at prep school. Along with having black friends and rooting for Jackie Robinson, maybe the film helped me develop a loathing for racism. (Three years later, I was a civil rights activist.)
By 1972, I’d graduated from film school at NMSU, and was making small-time free-lance movies, so I watched The Godfather as a great example of what could be done. By the time Duval played a major role in Network (1976 ), a great indictment of the vacuity of our news system, I’d taken a role as a journalist too, covering Las Cruces for the El Paso Times. I loved my little job, but when Howard Beale (not Duvall) gets a nation of citizens to holler out the window, “I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" I was feeling it too.
A college prof could teach a “Late 20th Century” history class just through Duvall’s movies. MASH, technically set in the Korean War but about the absurdity of war, a rapidly spreading concept in 1970; Apocalypse Now (1979), with Duvall’s Lt. Colonel Kilgore exulting, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" in was a fitting epitaph to the stupid Viet Nam War, I’d spent years protesting; despite that, I loved him as the hard-boiled Marine Lt. Col. "Bull" Meechum Santini in The Great Santini (1979).
His disillusioned sportswriter in The Natural (1984), is all of us, in a way, after Viet Nam and Watergate. It was a time most everyone got jaded. His loneliness, mixed with guilt and lost love, as the drunken country& western singer in Tender Mercies (1983) also seemed pretty familiar. His role as big-firm trial lawyer in A Civil Action reflected the big environmental lawsuits of the time. (I was a trial lawyer at a big firm, too, but, fortunately, was able to avoid working on those cases.)
I acted a bit in my youth, and I’m awed by the sheer range of those portrayals. He so completely inhabited all those very different characters that Tess Harper, his co-star in Tender Mercies, said she never got to know Duvall, but just Mac Sledge. But Duvall didn’t just act. He’d gotten serious about riding, appalled by how foolish the western stars looked once their horses started galloping, and prepared for Lonesome Dove (1989) by seeking further horsemanship lessons with well-respected U.S. show jumper Rodney Jenkins, learning so well that he fired the stunt double they’d hired. And in Tender Mercies, which I loved, he insisted the contract include that he’d sing all the songs himself. He couldn’t see the point, otherwise. (I’m pretty sure they’re not going to tell me next that he actually flew the plane as Meechum.)
In Lonesome Dove (1989), his Gus combined grit and sentiment, like the funny but tough friend whose loyalty we’ve prized, while laughing at his throwaway lines.
Duvall was, a great actor, with an everyman quality and deep capacity for hard work on his craft and whatever a film needed.
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[The above column appeared Sunday, 22 February 2026, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and on KRWG’s website (under Local Viewpoints). A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version of this Sunday column will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM / http://www.lccommunityradio.org/). ]
[Sorry not to post this Sunday, as I usually do – and sorry it’ s not a better column, too. I started with the idea of honoring both Duvall and Jesse Jackson, and interweaving both with stages in my own life. But to do that at all well would have required more than the 570 words the newspaper allows me. So the concept change. I feel as if maybe the result doesn’t live up to the standard of quality I try to maintain. Ironically, when I condensed and rewrote it for radio, it necessarily shortened itself and focused better. I like the resulting radio commentary better than many I’ve done. So, ]
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