Total Recall: David Morse's Best Movies

We count down the best-reviewed work of the Drive Angry star.

He may not be a household name, but David Morse is one of America's most recognizable actors, thanks to a 30-year career that has taken him from the stage (including an Obie-winning performance in How I Learned to Drive) to the TV screen (where his r?sum? includes a six-year run on St. Elsewhere) and more than 40 films. This weekend, Morse will appear as Nicolas Cage's shotgun-toting buddy in Drive Angry, which naturally got us thinking about the many highlights in one of Hollywood's preeminent "that guy" filmographies. From supporting roles to starring turns, here's the best of David Morse!

Offering a modern spin on Rear Window, D.J. Caruso's Disturbia traces the fallout after a high school student with a chip on his shoulder (Shia LaBeouf) attacks one of his teachers, is sentenced to house arrest -- and develops a suspicion that his creepy neighbor is secretly a serial killer. More than capable of playing sympathetic characters, but just as comfortable exuding an air of effortless menace, Morse was the perfect guy to play the darkly ambiguous Robert Turner -- and Disturbia made for a perfectly entertaining spring thriller according to critics like Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote, "Caruso, a very visual director, serves up some surprises and scares, and he's paced his movie briskly. You're out of this disturbing suburbia before you know it, shaken and even stirred."

Renny Harlin movies aren't exactly known for their character development, and 1996's Shane Black-scripted The Long Kiss Goodnight is no different -- in a movie this obsessed with rapid-fire quips, explosions, and piled-up corpses, you root for the good guys and cheer for the disposal of cartoon villains. Case in point: David Morse's Luke, a.k.a. Daedalus, an arms-dealing heavy who makes things difficult for the amnesiac CIA assassin played by Geena Davis -- first he's nasty, then he's dead. But if Goodnight isn't exactly thoughtful, or even particularly memorable, plenty of critics thought it was good, dumb fun -- like Michael Dequina of The Movie Report, who asked, "Who can resist the sight of Davis tossing her daughter from a hole in her house into the nearby treehouse or chasing after a car... while ice skating?"

Sean Penn marked his directorial debut with this 1991 drama, which he was inspired to write by Bruce Springsteen's "Highway Patrolman." Like the song -- and the album it's from, 1982's Nebraska -- it tells a tale of hard times and hard choices, strained family obligations and fraternal betrayal, and the seemingly arbitrary way life can erode even the noblest hearts and best intentions. At its center is the conflict between an upstanding deputy sheriff (David Morse) and his ne'er-do-well brother (Viggo Mortensen), recently returned to town to wreak havoc on the lives of his loved ones. It's familiar stuff, to be sure, and some critics felt Penn's undisciplined approach prevented The Indian Runner from achieving its full potential -- but Roger Ebert was among the majority when he wrote, "It's impressive, how thoughtfully Penn handles this material. The good brother isn't a straight arrow, and the bad brother isn't romanticized as a rebel without a cause, and there are no easy solutions or neat little happy endings for this story. It's as intractable as life itself."

Whenever you see David Morse on the screen, you know you're in good hands, but he'd probably be among the first to admit that a lot of his film roles haven't given him a chance to display much of his range. It was all the more gratifying, then, to see Morse in The Slaughter Rule, a Sundance-approved drama about a troubled high school football player (Ryan Gosling) whose friendship with a semi-pro coach (Morse) forces both men to deal with suppressed emotions -- not to mention the whispers of small-town life. "The film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads," wrote the AV Club's Scott Tobias, adding "especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands."

Written and directed by Sean Penn, The Crossing Guard gave Morse one of his meatier film roles: John Booth, a drunk driver who comes home from prison to find that even though he's done his time, he still has to face the grief-consumed Freddy Gale (Jack Nicholson), whose daughter he killed behind the wheel. Unsurprisingly, Freddy wants to murder John; what lends Crossing unexpected poignancy is the fact that John wants him to. It's obviously a very dark, sad film, and a number of critics felt that Penn didn't bring enough sensitivity to the material -- but most critics' thoughts echoed those of Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, who admitted it was a "self-conscious anthem to macho despair" while praising Penn's handling of the cast: "He coaxes a soul-torn grief out of Nicholson that's shocking to behold, and Morse, who suggests a burlier version of Jon Voight, has a gentle-giant melancholy that borders on grace."

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David F. Friedman: 1923-2011

The cause was heart failure, said Mica Brook Everett, a relative who was also his caretaker. Mr. Friedman had lost his hearing and his eyesight about 10 years ago, she said.

Part carnival barker, part adman, part good-natured, dirty-minded adolescent, Mr. Friedman plumbed the low-rent depths of the movie business with a sense of boldness and a sense of fun. In the early 1960s he and a partner, the director Herschell Gordon Lewis, made a handful of films in a genre known as “nudie-cuties,” in which young women would perform ordinary household tasks or cavort in sun-dappled settings half-dressed or entirely undressed. (Some of the films were shot at Florida nudist colonies.) These movies were not openly erotic — there was no sex — but in their deadpan presentation of public nudity, they delivered a naughty, subversive wink at censorship standards.

In 1963, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis made the gleefully gore-soaked “Blood Feast,” considered by many to be a groundbreaking film in the horror genre, the first so-called splatter film. It tells the story of a murderous Egyptian caterer in Miami who is especially fond of decapitating women. To promote the film, Mr. Friedman warned viewers that it might be sickening and supplied theaters with airline vomit bags to distribute to customers. Made for $24,500, the film reportedly earned millions.

Mr. Friedman and Mr. Lewis followed “Blood Feast” with two other gore fests that are exemplars of their ilk: “Two Thousand Maniacs!,” which takes place in a Southern town during a Civil War centennial celebration in which the townspeople take their revenge for losing the war on visiting Yankees; and “Color Me Blood Red,” about a painter who gets his distinctive reds from the blood of his murder victims.

Mr. Friedman made films in the soft-porn vein — they had titles like “Trader Hornee” and “The Erotic Adventures of Zorro” — and eventually, while serving as chairman of the Adult Film Association, made a handful of hard-core movies as well. Perhaps his most famous title was “Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.,” about a sadistic and insatiable female Nazi prison guard, generally considered a campy classic of sexploitation.

David Frank Friedman was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 24, 1923. His father worked for The Birmingham News; his mother was a musician. After his parents divorced, she moved to Anniston, and young Dave — “Don’t say David, he hated David, it was always Dave,” Mica Everett said — often unsupervised, became interested in carnivals, card games and scams.

Mr. Friedman started college at Cornell — “He sat next to Kurt Vonnegut in a calculus class,” Ms. Everett said — and worked for a time as a film booker and projectionist in Buffalo before serving in the Army during World War II. It was in Army signal school that he was taught the technical basics of movie making. Eventually he went to work for Kroger Babb, a producer and a bit of a huckster whose best-known film, “Mom and Dad,” was a 1940s sensation, using medical footage of actual births and walking a line between sex education and sexploitation.

Mr. Friedman’s wife, Carol Virginia Everett, whom he met when they were both children in Anniston, died in 2001. Aside from Mica Everett and other members of his wife’s family, he leaves no survivors. Over the past 20 years, since his films started to reappear on video, Mr. Friedman enjoyed a bit of cult celebrity, appearing frequently at conferences and film festivals.

“He partied like an animal,” said Mike Vraney, whose company, Something Weird Video, distributed Mr. Friedman’s films. “He ate huge meals, drank and smoked enormous cigars. He lived with gusto.”

Mr. Friedman was proud of his work, in a manner of speaking.

“ ‘Blood Feast’ is probably the most maligned motion picture American critics have ever ripped asunder,” he wrote boastfully in his 1990 autobiography, “A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.” He went on to quote the review in Variety:

“Incredibly crude and unprofessional from start to finish, ‘Blood Feast’ is an insult even to the most puerile and salacious audiences. The very fact that it is taking itself seriously makes the David F. Friedman production all the more ludicrous. It was a fiasco in all departments.”

Mr. Friedman then wrote: “Herschell and I have often wondered who told the Variety scribe we were taking ourselves seriously.”

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David F. Friedman: 1923-2011

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