Ben died 19 years ago today. Here's a short but beautiful essay about him by Belgian film journalist Luc Honorez, published in the April 10, 1996 edition of Le Soir. Ben's Belgian fan Christine let me know about it a while back and she and Eric (who is French) helped with the translation.
You can read it in the original French here:
http://archives.lesoir.be/ben-johnson-l ... 0AY5D.html
Here's the translation:
Today we note the 19th anniversary of Ben's passing. Here is a short essay by Belgian film journalist Luc Honorez published in Le Soir on April 10, 1996. You can read the original French essay HERE. Thank you to Christine for bringing the essay to my attention and to Christine and Eric for helping with the translation.
Ben Johnson, Father on Horseback
by Luc Honorez
A phantom horse gallops in Monument Valley and goes from tomb to tomb -- they are not visible, except on the movie screen of our memory: that of John Ford, John Wayne, Ward Bond and, today, the late Ben Johnson,who died like one of his screen characters, a good guy who was visiting his mother in a retirement community in a suburb of Phoenix where he collapsed, at age 77, victim of a heart attack.
In May 1995, at the Cannes Film Festival, accompanied by Claire Trevor and Duke’s son Patrick Wayne, Ben Johnson paid homage to his mentor John Ford, who noticed him in 1948 while he was still only a stuntman, during the filming of Fort Apache. John Wayne needed a double, Ben Johnson was that man.
For six years, Ben Johnson was an actor in Ford’s Westerns: Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, Wagon Master, etc. He never had the leading role but, with his face weathered beyond his years, his quiet, unsentimental manner, his air of authenticity (he was the son of a roping champion and horse trainer), Ben Johnson, born in Oklahoma, spanned almost 60 years of American film, most frequently on the trails of the Old West. And, without much fuss, he became a mythical performer, whose figure you looked for in films that took place on the plains and in the mountains.
All the westerners -- that is, filmmakers seduced by the myth of the West -- would use him as a lucky charm, as his natural reticence would then highlight the charisma of the genre’s stars. He played in George Stevens’ Shane, in One-Eyed Jacks, directed by and starring Marlon Brando, and above all, he was the travelling companion of Sam Peckinpah, with whom he roamed the rampaging, desperate roads of the end of an era in Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, Junior Bonner, and The Getaway. And Clint Eastwood wanted him as a co-star in his return to the American western in Ted Post’s Hang ‘Em High.
Ben Johnson became a paternal figure in American cinema -- Spielberg hired him for his second film, The Sugarland Express -- and the nostalgic reminder of a time when the American continent still had no borders and was conquered by everyday men. Johnson was fabulous beside Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman in Richard Brooks’ Bite the Bullet (1974), an account of old cowboys whom time has passed by, who want to win a horse race: the scene where Johnson died, still filled with dreams even though he’s nothing more than the living dead in a time that wants nothing more of him, is unforgettable.
Ben Johnson himself became, in 1971, the father of all film lovers in playing the old Texan proprietor of a local movie theater that is about to close down in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a film that marked an entire generation with its nostalgic tinge and which won an Oscar for Ben.
Dying while visiting his mother, the actor seemed to play a scene from one of his films, something like “The Last Ben Johnson Show.” This extraordinary second fiddle will keep playing in our imagination long after he’s gone.