Mr. Jordan has been busy lately — the latest person to wander into his presence is Ossie Davis, a wonderful stage-and-screen actor and all-round impressive human being who died last week at the age of 87.
I can’t remember for sure when I first became aware of Mr. Davis — he worked so steadily throughout his long life that it seems like he’s just always been there, somewhere — but I think I connected his name to his face when he co-starred in a short-lived TV series called B.L. Stryker. Stryker was a would-be comeback vehicle for Burt Reynolds, a rather unremarkable detective series in the Magnum/Rockford Files mode. It didn’t go anywhere, obviously, but it did lead to a longer-term job for both Ossie and Burt, the amiable sitcom Evening Shade, which I remember watching pretty regularly in the early ’90s (although I’ll be damned if I can remember much of what it was about).
The thing I liked about Ossie Davis was that he always seemed to radiate warmth and dignity, no matter how minor or ridiculous the project. Case in point is one of his final films, Bubba-Ho-Tep, a bizarre cross-breeding of horror, comedy and social commentary in which Davis played a character who claimed he was John F. Kennedy, despite the fact that he was obviously still alive. And black. When questioned on these points by his fellow retirement-home inhabitant, Elvis Presley (who also is still alive, by the way, at least in this filmic universe), “Jack” explains that the assasination was faked and the CIA dyed him black before dumping him in the worst, most anonymous old-folks’ home in Texas. Pretty silly stuff — and this is even before the ancient Egyptian mummy shows up and begins to feed on the souls of the old folks! — but Davis plays Jack as, well, presidential. It’s a wonderful performance in a movie that many actors wouldn’t have taken at all seriously. I think that says all you need to know about the sort of man Davis was… however, if you would like to know more about the remarkable life of a remarkable man, check out Roger Ebert’s fine eulogy.
