Bill Paxton was a big, handsome Texan guy who had the strong, capable and eminently cast-able look of a natural character actor or supporting player, rather than a starry lead – he had an open, good-natured face which could nevertheless cloud interestingly with sadness or anger or malice.
He was affectionately celebrated online as someone who had been taken out by a Terminator (he was the blue-haired mohawked punk who unwisely sneers at Arnie: “Nice night for a walk, eh?”) a Predator and also an Alien. In Aliens he was memorably moaning: “Game over man…!”
Paxton had excellent parts in big commercial successes of the 90s, like Tombstone and Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, and in Twister, he had the lead: the meteorologist and storm chaser Bill “The Extreme” Harding. He also latterly had a thriving TV career, with the lead in HBO’s Big Love, about a Mormon polygamist.
In James Cameron’s Titanic, he was Brock Lovett, the treasure hunter in the present day sequences, whose faintly desperate need to validate his lifelong and ruinously expensive quest for the wreck is contrasted with the calm and enigmatic wisdom of the aged Rose.
But my favourite Bill Paxton performance was in Carl Franklin’s excellent 1992 thriller One False Move, co-written by its star Billy Bob Thornton. Paxton plays the good-ol’-boy police chief in Star City, Arkansas, Dale Dixon, who is madly overexcited at the prospect of real detective work when three very dangerous runaway criminals come into his district: played by Billy Bob Thornton, Cynda Williams and Michael Beach.
Poor Dale is in awe of the big-city cops from the LAPD who come into town on the bad guys’ trail, and who are rather hurtfully derisive about Dale’s capabilities.
But Dale turns out to have a secret and tragic connection with the whole situation. His performance is ingenuous, innocent, but his character is weirdly hyperactive, apparently always on the move, to the bemusement of everyone else. This is not the classic laconic lawman who is the unruffled good guy, or even the amoral warrior, but something much more complicated and elusive. It was an excellent performance from Paxton.
He in fact took the lead seven years later, opposite Billy Bob Thornton, in Sam Raimi’s noir thriller A Simple Plan, in which Paxton and Thornton play brothers who discovers millions of dollars in cash in a crashed plane in a remote forest and have to decide how to keep it a secret and how to keep the cash. A good movie, but I think Paxton is possibly in danger of being upstaged by Thornton here, in a way that he isn’t in One False Move.
His death at 61 is a sad and unexpected loss, especially as he was moving into a new rich career-phase on series television. But this is a moment to revisit One False Move.
