Richard Jordan, Underrated Actor

Back when Joseph was just a twinkle in our eyes, Shayne and I spent a Saturday at the mall (there was only one back then) in San Bernardino, or San Berdoo as most of the people at George AFB called it. We had just been paid, so we were naturally spending freely. We had bought lunch and decided to take in a movie before driving back to Victorville. The theater was in the mall, but it was much smaller and less awe-inspiring than theaters of today. The film was a new one called Rooster Cogburn and The Lady. We were fans of both Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne, but we'd never seen them together before and thought it might be fun.

We soon found that the character John Wayne was playing was the same fellow he'd played a few years before in True Grit. That had been the only film I'd ever seen up to that time that used true nineteenth century speech and language style. I've seen a couple of others since, but they're pretty rare.

Well known character actors were seen throughout this great new Western. But the chief antagonist was a new face to me. Cogburn refers to him once as "a mean, blue-eyed villain." Typing those words puts me in mind of what someone said of Lt. Gen'l. T.J. Jackson. He called him "a pious, blue-eyed killer." Succinct, pithy, and accurate. But I digress. Former students will know just how easily and frequently I do that.

Richard Jordan's bad guy was an unhesitating killer with a constant impatience which led him to kill his own men as casually as he killed those who were guarding the shipment of nitro glycerine he was after. He even went so far as to kill Anthony Zerbe's character for not killing Cogburn when he had a chance. I mentioned this to Zerbe that time he came to Ricks College to read poetry with Roscoe Lee Browne. "I didn't wind up too well in that one, did I?" he said, smiling.

Jordan's cold-bloodedness and boundless confidence lent the film a tension it would not otherwise have had. Set-backs could enrage but never deter him from his wicked goals. When Cogburn and his two compani0ns manage to steel a Gatling gun from his camp, Jordan's character shouts down the hill at them through the night air, "You've got the gun, but you ain't got the know-how to use it!" Katharine Hepburn ("Miss Goodnight") liberally sprays the hillside with .45-70 Government ammunition, cutting down trees, blowing up rocks, and sending all the bandits under cover. "Ain't that how it works, Hawk?" Only John Wayne could gloat in such a casual, American way.

A couple of years later I saw Richard Jordan again, this time in a late show on TV. It was one of the many good films I'd never heard of, because they came out during my time in Italy. It was a great western, too. Valdez is Coming! Bob Valdez, a quiet, unassuming Mexican-American sheriff in a border town gradually comes to see that the only way for good to triumph is for him to dig out the trappings of his youth as a scout for the American Cavalry and start hunting the cattle baron whose greed and duplicity have caused all the problems in the first place. Richard Jordan played a rotten kid who started out on the wrong side and almost didn't change his ways in time. Again, he was so believable! I had known oily, sneaky kids like that.

The years passed and I would occasionally recognize Jordan in something else. Never did he disappoint. Never did he give anything but a seriously professional performance. He even played one of my favorite literary heroes, Dirk Pitt, in a film I only saw part of called Raise the Titanic, based on the novel by Clive Cussler.

The last two performances I saw him do were in a couple of great films, again based on good books. Tom Clancy's novel, The Hunt for Red October , saw Jordan playing the oft-repeated Clancy character Jeffrey Pelt, National Security Advisor to the unnamed POTUS. He put on a lovely southern accent for this one which lent a marvelous charm to some of his most quotable lines. Early in the film, he tells the protagonist, "Dr. Ryan, I'm a politician, which means that when I'm not kissin' babies, I'm steelin' their lollipops." After the Soviets have been fooled into thinking that the submarine Red October has been destroyed, the Soviet Ambassador comes humbly, hat in hand, to Jeffrey Pelt to ask for aid in locating another submarine, a hunter/killer type, which the Americans know perfectly well has been sunk. But Jordan's character is all sympathy. "Oh, Andrei! You've lost another submarine!"

While he was dying of cancer, Richard Jordan played his best, most moving role, that of Brigadier General Lewis "Lo" Armistead, CSA. He positively shines in three major scenes. On the night of 2 July 1863 he tells Lt. Gen'l James Longstreet of his great love for Maj. Gen'l Winfield Scott Hancock, USA, against whom he must help to lead a charge the next day. He speaks rapturously of his admiration for Hancock's wife, Elmira, with whom he, Armistead, had once been in love. He reminisces about their last night together in a fort in California. "And I said, 'Win, if I ever raise my hand to you, may God strike me dead.' " It was perhaps the finest portrayal of brotherly love I've ever witnessed.

The next day, 3 July 1863, a Friday if memory serves, sees Armistead explaining the motives of all the young men who are about to die in the terrible event which today is called "Pickett's Charge." Colonel Freemantle, Queen Victoria's military attache' and author of a book back home in England which helped the British understand the American civil war, listens very respectfully to Armistead's slow, reverent description of the southern men and their simple faith in their cause. It was a scene that some actors would have been tempted to overdo. But Richard Jordan actually makes the viewer feel the sacred privilege so many of the Rebels felt they were receiving in the opportunity to die for their "country" - Virginia.

As he prepares to lead his men on foot, Lewis Armistead quietly bows his head and quotes his Savior. "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." I still recall with joy the one little Junior girl in my class who said, "Hey! That's what Jesus said."

At the end of their one mile walk into certain destruction, Gen'l. Armistead places his hand on a Union field gun and begins to urge the men of his brigade to turn the guns around on their enemy. At that moment he is hit by a Minie'-ball. When told by his captors that General Hancock has also been wounded, his grief is palpable. He dies two days later.

Richard Jordan died before the film Gettysburg could be finished. Knowing this makes his part in Pickett's charge all the more poignant to me.

There are many people of the past whom I look forward to thanking for the inspiration they have given me. Many of them were martial men. Many were politicians. A few were scientists. Many were prophets and apostles. A few were actors. In this last group, I can think of no one who reached me as did Richard Jordan.