Lee Marvin’s Place in the History of Philosophy

By Nicholas Stix

Lee Marvin (1924-1987) was, for my money, the greatest heavy of them all. That’s saying a mouthful, considering that in crime movies and Westerns, the heavy is often the best role.

If you watch Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953), Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from Now (1956), and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), you’ll see what I mean.

Marvin’s heavy roles were so famous that in 1965, he was the secret star of a Western comedy nominally headlined by Jane Fonda, Cat Ballou, in which he played a double good guy-bad guy role, in which the good guy was a parody of his heavy role in Liberty Valance. (Jeff Bridges would imitate Marvin’s good guy performance from Liberty Valance in the failed, 2010 Coen Brothers remake of the Henry Hathaway-Marguerite Roberts-John Wayne masterpiece, True Grit.)

Marvin was such a gifted actor that he made the transition, on the strength of his heavy roles, to leading man. He was the anti-Brando, with exquisitely clear diction. He played men capable of sudden, vicious violence, like throwing a pot of scalding hot coffee in a pretty girl’s face.

(Marvin was also excellent in all sorts of non-heavy roles, as well, but I’m not concerned with them here.)

Unfortunately, Marvin couldn’t cope with his newfound stardom, and though he worked on a regular basis, he became increasingly unreliable, due to his alcoholism. In some interviews he gave not long before his death, although he was at most 63, he looked and sounded more like 83.

The character actor Hector Elizondo recounts of when he was going to work with Marvin, and asked him how one goes about playing a bad guy.

Marvin responded that one must always keep in mind that the bad guy doesn’t consider himself a bad guy.

The problem Marvin’s insight presents for philosophy is this: How does a bad person morally improve, if he doesn’t consider himself bad?

As a university student in West Germany, I once read a German translation of an essay by the British philosopher, Bernard Williams, in which he broached said issue, in a Humean vein.

Williams argued that one would get moral improvement out of a bad man by stretching his moral world. For instance, he might consider his moral obligations limited to his mother and his girlfriend. We must then get him to stretch his moral world to include others, who are not as close as the few people currently inhabiting it, yet not people he is merely profiting from. At the same time, a man’s moral improvement would be vitiated, if he “compensated” by being nicer to more people, by being even more vicious to people whom he does not count as in his moral universe, and expanded the number of people he harmed.

I don’t recall Williams ever solving how one goes about getting a bad man to be less bad.