The Man for Vicaries

Lee Marvin's nose is a mished, much-mashed creation, but it is honestly his.

And it says tough, which Lee Marvin is. His specialty: playing the meanest, most thoroughly sadistic roles Holly wood has to offer.

A hulking 180-lb. heavy, with a 6-ft.

21-in. frame, he scares easily -- the other guy, that is. In one live TV drama, he had a gunfight scene with Rip Torn.

Marvin stalked in, put a long, cold eye on Torn, then abruptly barked an ad-lib: "NOW!" Torn was so shaken he dropped his pistol. "No matter how fast they are," analyzed Marvin, as if it were all real, "when you've got a white eye for a guy, it really gets them."

Marvin, 41, has been getting them in films and TV for 15 years, and though he has made 25 pictures, he has never made star rank.

Saipan Sniper. Now at last, he is on the verge, and ironically it is on the strength of two films in which he satirizes the types he normally plays. In the forthcoming Ship of Fools, he is a whoring, has-been ballplayer, turns in one stunning, tragicomic scene in which he drunkenly explains the torture of being unable to hit a curve ball. And in the just-released Cat Ballou, he does a double parody, first as the silver-nosed gun fighter and then as a wildly comic former gunman so booze-ridden he can barely ride. Either way, he seems sure of a supporting-actor Oscar nomination.

Despite success, Marvin will have a hard time forsaking tough roles com pletely. "I love violence," he says, and it is ingrained. After getting bounced from eleven different prep schools, he tried war. As a Marine scout-sniper, he made 21 Pacific island landings until "some Jap bastard on Saipan" got him just below the spine; he spent 13 months learning how to move again. "You Finked Out." As an actor, he specialized in killers, but he became best known as a cop. Lieut. Ballinger of TV's M Squad. Even there he was tough--"no broads, no mother, no sleep, no eat, just a dumb, fair cop."

His favorite role was in last year's The Killers. "In the opening," he recalls, "me and my partner sidle into a blind home looking for a doublecrosser. I get behind the head blind dame, grab her by the throat and push her almost to the floor. 'Where's Johnny North?' I breathe in her ear. So she tells us. I barge into the room knocking the blindees over--we used real ones--and I say, 'You Johnny North?' He says yeah. So we take out our guns and we put ten bullets in him straight up and down his middle. It's great. And everybody out front is getting their vicaries" (pronounced we-care-ease, short for vicarious thrills).

Giving those vicaries is work. "I generally invent most of my own business," Marvin explains. "And I have a fear of imitating myself. You've always got to come up with something new. Otherwise the audience is going to say, 'You finked out, Charlie.' " Marvin hasn't, so far, even in the most hopeless of moments. In one movie, after killing everyone in sight, he is approached by two cops. Unarmed and badly wound ed, Marvin does the only thing left: he cocks his right hand and points his finger bang-bang-bang at the cops. Hardcore Marvin fans figure that the loss of blood was what made him miss.

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