Sunday, September 25, 2016

R.I.P. Bill Nunn

Bill Nunn has been part of my internet presence for the last few months. It started when I changed the banner on my twitter profile to a pic of him from the movie Do the Right Thing. A few weeks ago, I used the same pic to headline a post shortly after re-watching the film. In it, Nunn played the iconic Radio Raheem, the character at the epicenter of the movie's explosive finale. Since it is unequivocally my all-time favorite piece of cinema, Raheem, and Nunn by extension, has been part of my life for nearly three decades. Unfortunately, he passed away yesterday at age 62.


My first encounter with Nunn goes back a year before he marched up and down a Brooklyn block with a huge boom-box drowning out the heat of summer's hottest day. I first "met" him as the jock who wanted sop ladies up with a biscuit in another Spike Lee joint, School Daze. Though that is widely accepted as Nunn's big screen debut, he did show up in a brief uncredited role in the 1981 Burt Reynolds vehicle Sharky's Machine. Lee would also put Nunn in Mo' Better Blues. In 1991, Nunn showed up in the 'hood classic New Jack City as the oh-so-politically incorrectly named Duh Duh Duh Man. The character has a severe stuttering problem. Nunn was not the star of any of these films, but always provided a memorable performance.



For the rest of his career, parts came steady enough for his filmography to grow to seventy-one acting credits, according to his IMDb page. They often weren't as meaty or important to the movies he was in, but he was always a welcome presence. Some of his highlights include playing Robbie Robertson in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, the golden goose guarding Uncle Bubba in He Got Game, the wannabe entrepreneur in a made-for-TV remake of A Raisin in the Sun, along with a host of detectives and other authority figures. Most recently, he had a recurring role on the TV series Sirens. I enjoyed him in everything I've seen him in, but I can't shake the one indelible. mark he has made on my life. I see his face and say to myself, "there's Radio Raheem." If I were able to tell him that, I imagine he would smile and thank me for appreciating the work for which he was known best, but privately think I was selling short his entire career. I prefer to think of it as succumbing to one of the most powerful moments in cinematic history. Radio Raheem is gone, but he'll never be forgotten.


10 comments:

  1. Dammit, this year sucks.

    For what it's worth, I don't think you'd be selling his career short. There are plenty of actors who have had long and brilliant careers who might still be summed up in some way by a single sequence or a single shot or completely tied to a single role. The hip hop rewriting of Mitchum's love/hate speech from The Night of the Hunter is one of the great moments in what I think is one of the great movies of its decade, and Nunn handled it flawlessly, alluding to the original but making it entirely his own at the same time.

    Too many people gone too soon this year.

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    1. Yes, way too many gone way too soon in 2016.

      He did handle it flawlessly and that's a big reason it has endured.

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  2. Radio Raheem and the Duh Duh Duh Man are iconic characters. I also love him in the Spider-Man trilogy and his role as the guy that helped Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry. One of the great character actors in film and certainly will be missed as this year is just fucking terrible. Fuck you 2016.

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    1. 2016 has certainly taken a lot from us and doesn't seem to be giving much in return. Sigh.

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    2. And now Arnold Palmer just died. Johann Cruyff, Muhammad Ali, Jose Fernandez, and now Arnold Palmer. I want this year to be over.

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    3. Just heard about Arnie. This is crazy.

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  3. SJHoneywell sums it up for me. That film blew my mind when I saw it, and Radio Raheem was a big part of it.

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    1. That film is still blowing my mind.

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    2. When Empire magazine didn't include it in their 500 best ever films I got so mad!

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    3. I know. Sure, I may be biased, but that made no sense to me, either.

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