And they were meant to just blend into the background and never dare be obtrusive, know their places, theirs was the rhythm section, the flower girl, the inventory in the back of the shop. Show up and get the job done. Nothing more, and nothing less. In no way were they to overstep those seemingly more important heads of staff - the leads. And that would be a matter of principle. Call them defiant if you will, say they went rogue for stepping up to the plate and shining where they had no right to do so.
And somebody who more than did so was Val Avery, an American actor of Armenian descent born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1924. A soldier in the second world war; one of the first things he did when he got back to the place he once belonged was resume his study of drama, after a broach with the craft in his teenage years.
 |
| What the Falk? |
And though Avery performed in some four hundred film and television productions, if you asked that random person sitting next to you in the coffee shoppe right now if they happened to remember him, I will personally find you and give you a ten thousand dollar check if they say 'course I do.
 |
| The Avery archetype, mafia boss |
It takes a certain kind of special - to be in the same room with Gena Rowlands and all eyes be on you - and that was precisely how it went down in 1969's Faces ,the Cassavetes ensemble piece that also featured brother in character actor arms, John Marley, who may have had a more substantial role in the film, but you see , Mr Avery wasn't going anywhere, anytime soon. More critics had an affinity to only deconstruct those craggy features of his and tried to chalk him up or grind him down as being a usually cast 'heavy.' And though it was true he was cast just about that way for decades and though it may be a touch hard to forget him as the finger-cutting consigliere in Pope of Greenwich Village or mafia madman Socks Parelli in the 1971 paranoiac potboiler The Anderson Tapes which also starred Sean Connery but Avery always did much more than was said on the label.