A look back at Stacy Keach's classic 1972 breakout

I was late to appreciate character actor Stacy Keach. I was too young too see his breakout role as Mike Hammer on television in the 1980s, and I largely knew him from terrific but small supporting roles in movies like Nebraska. But then I saw him in the 1972 John Huston movie Fat City, and he was a revelation.

Why wasn't this incredibly nuanced and soulful actor considered alongside other '70s greats like Pacino, De Niro, Caan and Nicholson? Well, there's the fact that he wasn't in the big movies those actors were in. But in 1972 he had a hell of a year for any actor.

Fat City is the more widely known picture. He plays a drunk, broken down boxer who is past his prime but also incapable of doing anything else. It could have been a cliched character but Keach brings an authenticity and specificity to his performance, making it uniquely his.

He certainly should have been in the mix for a Best Actor Academy Award for this John Huston classic, but he was overshadowed in the year of The Godfather. Ironically, Brando was originally considered for Keach's part in Fat City, and The Godfather would make household names out of Pacino, Caan and Robert Duvall.

Now this gem of a movie has been rediscovered more and more (it also stars a young Jeff Bridges) and it's now seen as one of the great little character studies of the 1970s.

But Keach had another underrated, little seen film that year that he's also phenomenal in -- it's a George C. Scott police drama called The New Centurions. I'm sort of shocked that this episodic film isn't more widely known or revered, it certainly is ahead of its time addressing a host of issues from undocumented immigrants to police brutality.

It is definitely first and foremost a George C. Scott film, he's a dynamite presence as always, but Keach emerges as a powerhouse as well, with the film effectively tracking his evolution from rookie cop to grizzled veteran.

Not unlike Fat City, the life of a beat cop movie covers terrain you think you've seen a million times, but Keach is an actor who brings a slightly off kilter physical and intellectual presence to these two movies. He is striking looking but by no means conventionally handsome (he famously has a cleft lip and consciously chose not to conceal it). His delivery is almost hangdog, he never goes for the big acting moment, instead letting others be showy while he deftly plays off them.

His timing and likability served him well when he would go on to play the chief antagonist in the two first Cheech and Chong films, which would ironically be bigger hits than any of his more prestige movies.

Clearly, Keach is doing just fine -- he's been an acclaimed working character actor for several decades now and he's always solid in everything he's in, but when I look back on these two movies, his work in the '70s in general, I can't help but wonder what might have been.

There are so many actors from that decade I adore, who either had a brief moment (Elliott Gould, Roy Scheider) or just never had the career they could have (tragically, John Cazale) and it's always a little bittersweet, especially when you look at how thin the bench is right now of consistently great mainstream acting talent.