Background
HOPPER, Dennis was born on May 17, 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, United States.
HOPPER, Dennis was born on May 17, 1936 in Dodge City, Kansas, United States.
Educated at public schools in San Diego.
In this writer’s considered opinion, Dennis Hopper was an ardent young man fatally unlucky to cross the path of James Dean—in Rebel Without a Cause (55, Nicholas Ray) and Giant (56, George Stevens). He believed he was somehow the heir to something. He knew he wanted to act, and he believed rebellion was some proof of artistic integrity. Much of Hollywood—Henry Hathaway most famously—found Hopper a pain in the neck. Let spectators simply observe that the young actor was staring, strident, and monotonous. He was not capable of the intricacy or the intimacy that made Dean so remarkable: I Died a Thousand Times (55, Stuart Heisler); Gunfght at the O K. Corral (57, John Sturges); Sayonara (57, Joshua Logan); The Story of Mankind (57, Irwin Allen); From Hell to Texas (58, Hathaway); The Young Land (59, Ted Tetzlaff); Key Witness (60. Phil Karlson); Night Tide (63, Curtis Harrington); The Sons of Katie Elder (65, Hathaway); Queen of Blood (66, Harrington); Cool Hand Luke (67, Stuart Rosenberg); The Trip (67, Roger Gorman); The Glory Stampers (67, Anthony M. Lanza); Hang ’em High (68, Ted Post); Panic in the City (68, Eddie Davis); and True Grit (69. Hathaway).
Then came East Rider, a disaster in the history of film to set beside the loss of Technicolor, the invention of gross participation, the early death of Mnrnau, and the longevity of Richard Attenborough. Millions would dispute all of this: they saw East/ Rider over and over, until the mo\ie was scarcely distinguishable from the haze in the auditorium. In the process, “youth" was given the kingdom—not just as filmmakers, but as the controlling element in the audience; incoherence became sensitive; drugginess was for a time a mainstream mode; and every studio drove itself stupid trying to repeat the hit. Dennis Hopper became a genius, and very rich.
This did have the advantage of letting him do less. Indeed, he labored over The Last Movie, a title that Battered to deceive, but which remains a marker lor pretentious nonsense. He acted in Kid Blue (73, James Frawley); Mad Dog (76, Philippe Mora); he was decent as the soldier in Tracks (76, Henry Jaglom); opaque in The American Friend (77, Wim Wenders); and stranglable in Apocalypse Now (79, Coppola).
Out of the Blue was a picture in which he had been hired only as an actor. He took over the direction at the last moment from coproducer and cowriter, Leonard Yakir. With a fine dead-eyed performance from Linda Manz, and an agonized one from Hopper, the symbolic associations are kept under restraint. The picture works.
Hopper acted in Wild Times (80, Richard Compton) on TV: King of the Mountain (81, Noel Nosseck); Human Highway (82, Bernard Shakey); The Ostennan Weekend (85, Sam Peckinpah); My Science Project (85, Jonathan Beteul); Riders of fhe Storm (86, Maurice Phillips); as an alcoholic in Hoosiers (86, David Anspaugh), for which he got a supporting actor Oscar nomination; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (86, Tobe Hooper); Stark: Mirror Image (86, Nosseck) lor TV; the shortest-lived husband in Black Widow (87, Bob Rafelson); River's Edge (87, Tim Hunter); O.C. I? Stiggs (87, Robert Altman); Straight to Hell (87, Alex Cox); and The Pick-up Artist (87, James Toback).
Colors was a routine cops versus gangs story set in L.A. Backtrack and The Hof Spot have been hack jobs, the one briefly illuminated bv Jodie Foster, the other exactly what a Don Johnson-Virginia Madsen pairing would lead one to expect. Hopper still acts—he is in Backtrack, as well as Blood Red (88, Peter Masterson); Chattahoochee (90, Mick Jackson); Flashback (90, Frank Amurri); Doublecrossed (91, Roger Young); The Indian Runner (91, Sean Penn—who acted in Colors); Nails (92, John Flynn); The Heart of Justice (93,
Bruno Baretto); Boiling Point (93, James B. Harris); True Romance (93, Tony Scott); Red Rock West (93, John Dahl); and Speed (94, Jan De Bout).
Late in 1993, he did a series of commercials for Nike, playing a football freak, so precise, so funny, and so daring (and perverse—sniffing Bruce Smith's shoe), they may be his finest work.
Well, the legend of Hopper as a director seems to have been put away. As for his acting, it is a grim sequence in which, in his sixties, lie has returned to a worse form of the stuff in which he spent the sixties. But here’s the true rub: in one film—Carried Away (96, Barreto)—he was not just good, but marvelous (as well as quiet, shy, anxious, and simple). That makes this toll all the more nightmarish: Witch Hunt (94, Paul Schrader); Search and Destroy (95, David Sale); Watencorld (95, Kevin Reynolds); Basquiat (96, Julian Schnabel); Samson and Delilah (96, Nicolas Roeg); The Blackout (97, Abel Ferrara); Road Ends (97, Rick King); Toj) of the World (97, Sidney J. Furie); Meet the Deedles (98, Steve Boyum); Michael Angel (98, William Gove); as William S. Burroughs in The Source (99, Chuck Workman); Straight Shooter (99, Thomas Bohn): Jesus' Son (99, Alison Maclean); The Venice Project (99, Robert Dornhelm); Bad City Blues (99, Michael Stevens); Lured Innocence (99, Kikuo Kawasaki); Luck of the Draw (00, Luca Bercovici); Held for Ransom (00, Lee Stanley); The Spreading Ground (00, Derek Van Lint); Ticker (01, Albert Pyun); Unspeakable (01, Thomas J. Wright).
In the middle 1980s, Dennis Hopper underwent a much publicized “recovery" He admitted to years of drugs and drink—to say nothing of impossible ambitions as actor, artist, and spirit of the 1960s. He had a run of interesting parts that seemed to bear out this rehabilitation, by far the best of which was Blue Velvet (86, David Lynch), where his Frank Booth is both a roaring villain and, eventually, a psyehosexual infant who is father to Kvle McLachlan’s son. There was a nakedness in the performance, especially in his spied-upon scenes with Isabella Rossellini, in which Hopper's unquestioned daring was more under control than he had ever managed before. It was a terrific performance, and it seemed to signal a new maturity in the man, even if some people who supposedly knew looked at Frank, and said, “Yes, that's how Dennis Hopper is."