I always remember him in "The heart is a lonely hunter"--as an adaptation, it wasn't perfect, but the quiet dignity he gave to John Singer absolutely was.
I haven't seen him in that role! I'll look for it. As we were volleying quotations from his movies back and forth, I was thinking that one of his most irreplaceable talents as an actor was his ability to play the screwloose or the straight man with equal conviction, the national sensation of a delusional messiah from the Crab Nebula or a mild-mannered dentist sucked into Central American CIA shenanigans; he could be the one sane person in the room or an engine of chaos and the narrative had better hang on to its hat either way.
Or a terrifying sociopath in Wait Until Dark. Kes and I re-watched this recently, and it struck me how Arkin's character in that is in some ways a direct ancestor of Michael Myers.
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I haven't seen him in that role! I'll look for it. As we were volleying quotations from his movies back and forth, I was thinking that one of his most irreplaceable talents as an actor was his ability to play the screwloose or the straight man with equal conviction, the national sensation of a delusional messiah from the Crab Nebula or a mild-mannered dentist sucked into Central American CIA shenanigans; he could be the one sane person in the room or an engine of chaos and the narrative had better hang on to its hat either way.
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That would have been the second place I saw him. (The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) was the first.)