Dabney Coleman Was A Miserable, Irascible Keeper of Antiquated Attitudes In Movies Like ‘9 To 5’ and ‘On Golden Pond’

The late ’70s were a golden age for progressive television, guided for the most part by the Norman Lear factory that cranked out dozens of titles during his legendary run. Its crown jewel, All in the Family, ran for nine seasons from 1971-79 and dealt frankly with hot-button topics like race, rape, miscarriage, homosexuality, feminism, trans issues, income disparity, gun control, and on and on. In the character of Archie Bunker (Caroll O’Connor), nothing was verboten. He was the useful idiot, the loudmouth at the bar, the loving family man who was raised by a different set of rules and traditions that made him intolerant of difference and terrified of change. He was the butt of every joke. Broadcast into millions of households every week wrestling, boorishly, with generational tension, he expressed his bigotry with fumbling malapropisms and unearned confidence, the loudest member of the proverbial “silent majority” who would be corrected, laughed at, shouted down and otherwise rebuked in ways intended to start conversations rather than stifle them. Archie is a satire of the kind of worldview that, bolstered now by the illusion of echo chamber consensus and without meaningful opposition, is now winning elections and giving lifetime appointments to Supreme Court justices. The show’s theme song is a gently-ironic ditty called “Those Were the Days.” Those were the days when the television monoculture forced this kind of show by dint of a lack of options into the national discourse. In this age of a la carte programming, a show like this will never again reach so many people on both sides of the divide.

The end of the ’70s saw an ideological shift with Reagan’s vision of America as a “shining city on a hill.” He ran on a platform of nostalgia and restoration of self-esteem and, unlike Jimmy Carter, Reagan promised America would feel good about itself not through honest work and meaningful sacrifice, but through blind nationalism and voodoo economics. The remarkable films of the American 1970s reflected the deep, sober introspection about American exceptionalism Carter set out in his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech; and the blockbuster era of the American 1980s reflect a period of hedonistic excess, xenophobia and empirical isolationism. We didn’t have Archie Bunker in the 1980s, but it occurred to me as I thought about the legacy of Dabney Coleman that in Coleman we did have someone very much like Archie. Coleman was a character actor in the broadest sense of the term, but more than that he was a gadfly, a curmudgeon, a relic and keeper of antiquated attitudes who served an essential purpose in the rapidly de-radicalizing 1980s. He was a loud, abrasive parody of the kind of man in charge pining for the “good ol’ days” that were, after all, only ever good for the very few, and he was so effective because he was still relatable and empathetic. Straw men are by their nature inhuman — what Coleman did so perfectly, the impossible trick he pulled off so effortlessly, was find within the caricature of patriarchal rot a fully-realized human being beset by self-loathing and haunted by the sneaking suspicion that he is pathetic and unlikeable.

His signature role came in 1980 when he was 48, already twenty years into a career in which he played largely cops, civil servants and other ordinary joes. As Franklin Hart, Jr. in 9 To 5, Coleman is the thoroughly disgusting “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot,” the pugnacious, vile middle manager of a purposeless corporation “Consolidated Companies” where he spends his days chasing his secretaries around the desk and hurling abusive, patronizing invective in the kind of gendered workplace melodrama already lampooned by seven seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-76). (Coleman made a cameo during a Season 6 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, funnily enough, as mild-mannered Minnesota Congressman Phil Whitman who takes Mary out on a couple of dates on a Washington D.C. trip.) In 9 to 5, Hart is the foil to a trio of women (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton) who dream of hog-tying, roasting, shooting and poisoning him — who strap him into an S&M contraption they construct after a trip to the chains and dog-collar aisle at the hardware store before affecting employee-forward measures at the office that prove to be both humane and profitable. Hart deserves whatever humiliation is coming to him, but the film doesn’t work if Hart is just a villain. Through Hart, Coleman expresses the violent desperation of inadequate masculinity — how easily it’s humiliated and how unbearable is that humiliation to fragile male self-esteem. 9 to 5 was a breakout hit, grossing ten times its $10mm budget during its run. It announced Dolly Parton as a bankable movie star, and cast Dabney Coleman into the role of the quintessential 1980s version of toxicity in all its puffed up, swaggering, salt-and-red-meat-bloated glory.

He’s a little bit like W.C. Fields in how he’s part monster, part child. Between diatribes against the weak, he betrays shocking moments of vulnerability and neediness. We feel sorry for more than hate him, but he’s dangerous so we do love to watch him get embarrassed by victims of his bullying. Like Fields again, he’s wonderful with children who, recognizing him as one of their own, aren’t intimidated by his bluster. Like many people of my generation, the first time Dabney Coleman registered to me was as NORAD administrator McKittrick in John Badhman’s WarGames (1983), perpetually mashing a mouthful of gum and struggling to understand how a high schooler (Matthew Broderick) managed to hack into the nation’s nuclear weapons grid. The next time I saw him was in Richard Franklin’s family-oriented espionage thriller Cloak & Dagger (1984). I was drawn to it mainly because Atari’s arcade stand-up tie-in had mysteriously appeared in my neighborhood’s bowling alley a few months before its August release. The film is anchored by Coleman in dual roles as a child’s struggling, working, well-intentioned single father and that same child’s imaginary secret agent friend who guides him through various dangerous interactions with an international cabal of vicious, video game-stealing villains. The film is uneven, but there’s real wisdom in casting Coleman as both a disappointing father and an idealized one: reflections of the two sides of the Dabney Coleman coin — the man he hopes he is in constant tension against the the man he actually is. There’s a quality to Coleman where you think maybe if he’s reminded enough of his insufficiency, his obvious lack of fitness and delusions of perfection, maybe we’ll strip away all that noise to drill down finally to the quiet, decent imperfection of the father we need. We yell at Archie Bunker not because we hate him, but because we want very much to love him.

Coleman had his own shot at a television series in 1983 after a run of memorable supporting roles in Modern Problems (1981) in which he plays a smoking-jacket cad who bears the brunt of a super-powered Chevy Chase’s fury; in Tootsie (1982) as an oversexed, overmatched soap opera director. In On Golden Pond (1981) reunited with Jane Fonda, he plays schlubby dentist Dr. Bill who faces off with crusty old coot Norman Thayer (Henry Fonda) in a sequence that is very much like the passing of a baton from a miserable old bastard the film is trying unsuccessfully to forgive for his failings as a man, to a miserable middle-aged bastard who still has a chance to be better.

Then came Buffalo Bill, created by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, which ran for just 26 episodes across two, truncated, uncompromising seasons. In it, Coleman plays Bill Bittinger, the irascible, ignorant, loud-mouthed host of a daytime talk show a full decade before real-life counterparts like Jerry Springer and Phil Donahue would proliferate in the environment tilled by Oprah Winfrey in the mid-80s. Buffalo Bill is incredible. It’s The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm rolled into a single ball of social commentary, metatextual jokes and intimate personal excavation. I love a scene in the first season where one of his producers tells him about the lessons of On Golden Pond and Bill says “never seen it.” I love a segment where Bill hurts himself showing off and then takes out his shame on his next guest, a priest, accusing him of being a pedophile while his own audience turns against him. And I love a moment that presages Glen Gordon Caron’s magical realist Moonlighting (1985-89) in the third episode, “Woody Quits,” where Bill dons tophat, coat and tails and does a softshoe song and dance in his bachelor’s pad to rationalize his self-imposed loneliness.

As Bill, Coleman was twice-nominated for Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. He’s an affable bigot, an unrepentant philanderer who pines for his ex-girlfriend and current producer Jojo (Joanna Cassidy), a self-promoting narcissist with an inflated sense of self who feels terribly when he hurts the people who love him but can’t find the courage to be vulnerable enough to apologize. He manages himself with bluster and supreme confidence, but he’s in a constant state of terror that his show will be canceled and that his co-workers whom he belittles and takes for granted, don’t like him. He is Archie Bunker with a talk show soapbox: the thorn in the station manager’s (Max Wright) side for his unpredictable bursts (note his treatment of a Native American guest in the early going), and his prickly, racially-charged sparring with makeup artist Newdell (Charlie Robinson). But over the course of thirteen hours, Bill fails almost entirely to evolve. He reconciles in his way with his estranged daughter (Pippa Pearthree) by giving her a job but continues to be brusque with and dismissive of her; he finds equilibrium with Jojo but never quite learns to respect her as an equal – he learns to value his assistant Woody (John Fiedler) but only by dialing down his insults a single notch – and he reckons in the last episode with his loss of virility by becoming more aggressive for a while before desperately finding validation in the discovery of possibly a new hair sprouting from a receding hairline. It’s a tiny, sad lifeline and he holds onto it with both hands because he is the representative of everything we’re afraid we are, and everyone we recognize is destroying our country and the world with their massive, unregulated insecurity.

But my favorite Coleman performance is in a little-seen Gregg Champion film called Short Time (1990). I stumbled upon it during a video store run to discover a tightly-wrought little action/comedy in which a cop, Burt (Coleman) on the verge of retirement, learns he has a terminal disease but that his life insurance won’t pay out unless he dies in the line of duty. Thinking of his ex-wife (Teri Garr) and their son who hopes to go to Harvard, Burt throws all caution to the wind, asks for double-shifts in the worst part of town, and becomes the most reckless, and best, cop anyone’s ever seen. All of Coleman’s qualities are on display here: his crustiness, his engorged masculinity, and also his tenderness with children and in a devastating, still-comic scene, his ability to play romance as a man taught never to express his emotions finds the spine to finally tell the woman he loves that he loves her right before it’s too late. I don’t know if I’ve ever laughed more from surprise during a film and I’ve revisited it a dozen times since. I don’t know if the role was written for him, but there’s no one who could have played it better. Burt the coward; Burt the hero.

Dabney Coleman died on May 16, 2024. In his most memorable turns, he played terrible men who were in enormous pain. He played the kind of men responsible for standing in the way of social progress and he made them so ridiculous and feeble that they’re laid bare for the paper dictators and women-fearing misogynists they are. We’re in a period now where we’re losing an entire generation of character actors and stars and it’s terribly painful. With social media and our Balkanized viewing habits, we’ve also lost our ability to isolate the small percentage of the nation’s Archie Bunkers for their hostile, regressive beliefs. Compounding the tragedy of losing Coleman now is how his death feels symbolic of the passing of a particular kind of hope that we might find common ground with our ideological opponents. For a while during my childhood, it seemed like Dabney Coleman was everywhere. I liked it every time he showed up in something — the uncle you loved when you were a kid and love still even though you see him now with different eyes. We used to be able to love people we disagreed with. Those were the days.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.