The deadly heather on the hill
Not much going on in the death game right now, aside from a four-time Commissioner Gordon, the Charlie Rose debacle, some forgotten attorney general, and another scientology casualty. So I’ll go ahead and note a shamefully overlooked (on this blog, at least) 2008 death trend, which in the New Year’s Eve/deathlist haze, completely slipped my radar. Namely, that the second and third-billed stars of the 1954 movie musical Brigadoon (an overrated and highly uneven film, to these eyes, with little value even as kitsch) both met their end last year: Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse.
It is rare to lose two pivotal figures from the same movie/band/TV show within the same calendar year; rarer still for their names to appear side by side, as they do on most Brigadoon posters. Even the three deceased Ramones and the two original Temptations singers perished in separate years. Thus, Brigadoon in 2008 joins, for example, The Jeffersons in 2006 (Franklin Cover and Mike “first Lionel” Evans) and What’s Happening!! in 1999 (Mabel King and Shirley Hemphill) in death lore, a fitting coda for a movie that is essentially an afterlife parable. (Too bad Tony Martin didn’t see fit to join his wife in that eternal Brigadoon last year, as he, not she, was on my deathlist.)
And the Brigadoon of 2009 could very well be the Burton-Schumacher Batman movies. Only two actors appeared in all four of those movies (1989’s Batman, 1992’s Batman Returns, 1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman and Robin): Pat “Commissioner Gordon” Hingle, who died over the weekend, and Michael Gough (who played Alfred Pennyworth), who will be 96 before 2009 is over. Let us see if age, or rage against Michael Caine, claims him before the year is through.
