Robert Stack RIP

I'm glad they picked a nice picture of him. The one on the cover of the Enquirer this week is Cancer Man! Not the way you want to remember him.

I want to remember him in Airplane and Joe vs. the Volcano.

That stinks. He was an interesting guy. Not a great actor, but he worked with and was respected by Ernst Lubitsch, Douglas Sirk, etc. In fact Sirk said he was the only lead actor in Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels to understand Sirk's ambitions for these films. Apparently during down time on set they would hang around and talk about Eastern philosophy.

About 10 years ago my friend spotted him wandering around a L.A. movie theater, wearing an Unsolved Mysteries jacket.

My friend, a huge Sirk fan, did a nice interview with Stack a couple years back. I'll try and track it down.

I remember him from a terrific Sam Fuller movie called House Of Bamboo where Stack plays an ex-serviceman who goes undercover in post-war Japan to bust a racketeering operation.