I’m eulogizing David Carradine today more out of a sense of obligation than compulsion or desire.  (And, I might add, after specifically telling one of my fellow Morlocks I wasn’t going to write this obit.)  Truth be told, he was never one of my favorite actors and I often shook my head in sadness at certain offscreen antics that my contemporaries and colleagues found so amusing.  Yet David Carradine was in my life for most of my life, on my radar from about 1969 or so, and now his sudden and rather unexpected death in a Bangkok hotel room has left a hole.  I’ve been casting sidelong glances at that hole since I heard the news yesterday morning – via Facebook status updates, which ranged from vague, haiku-like allusions (“Rock on, Grasshopper”) to out-and-out statements of dismay (“David Carradine dead?  WTF?”) – and seeing there scenes from his movies and his life, flickering, reminding me of past times and days gone by and things that were and never will be again.

I knew of David before I knew of his father, John Carradine, or his brothers Keith and Robert.  If I had to guess the first movie I saw David in it would be the made-for-TV movie MAYBE I’LL COME HOME IN THE SPRING (1971), in which he played Sally Field’s hippie boyfriend, who spirits her away from her middle class suburban lifestyle to an alternative reality of freedom, free love, squalor and desperation.  Even in this relatively unimportant role (made before his breakthrough as the star of the ABC series KUNG FU), Carradine brought something unique to the table.  He was formidable… tall, with long, equine features and unreconstructed, feral-looking dentition, yet he rarely played an out-and-out tough guy.  Even when cast as a villain, say in THE GOOD GUYS AND THE BAD GUYS (1969) – in which his character Waco represents a New West in opposition to and defiance of the old school honor system embodied by lawman Robert Mitchum and gunman George Kennedy – he was never really one to menace by blandly physical means.  No, there was psychology there.  There was always something shamanistic about David Carradine, Rasputin-like, messianic.  Martin Scorsese was one of the first to recognize this latent quality and cast Carradine as the Christ-like union organizer “Big” Bill Shelly in BOXCAR BERTHA (1972).  Last seen in that film literally crucified to the side of a moving train, Carradine was resurrected a couple of years later as “Frankenstein” in Paul Bartel’s DEATH RACE 2000 – a patchwork racecar driver stitched together from the bodies of dead men.  From Christ to Frankenstein in only three years – well, that’s David Carradine all over.

Like his father, John Carradine, David bounced back and forth between A projects, like Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic BOUND FOR GLORY (1975) and Ingmar Bergman’s THE SERPENT’S EGG (1977), and B-films that capitalized on early successes.  Stuff like CANNONBALL! (1976), THUNDER AND LIGHTNING (1977), DEATHSPORT (1978) and Q (1982) are fun and Carradine seems fully in on the joke (the story goes that Carradine was cast over the phone by Larry Cohen for Q and showed up right from the airport to shoot his first scene with Michael Moriarty) but most of the projects he was involved in were trash and he knew it.  If you know Carradine’s CV, fill in the blanks yourself – suffice it to say that for every THE LONG RIDERS (1980) there were a dozen forgettable junkers whose titles (KILL ZONE, FULL BLAST, DEAD CENTER, KARATE COP, MARTIAL LAW, MIDNIGHT FEAR, MARTIAN LAW, BITTER END) are virtually indistinguishable from one another.  During the early 80s, he did better work on television, playing Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin in GAUGUIN THE SAVAGE (1980) and doomed prairie bounty hunter Tom Horn in MR. HORN (1979),  a project that predates the better-known Steve McQueen film TOM HORN (1980).  More personal projects included  CIRCLE OF IRON (1978, pictured at top) and the films he directed:  AMERICANA (begun in 1973, released in 1983), YOU AND ME (1975) and the unfinished MATA HARI (1978).  He reprised his KUNG FU character, Kwai Chang Caine, in KUNG FU: THE LEGEND CONTINUES (1992), which spawned a short-lived (1995-1996) series and got a huge comeback boost when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the eponymous baddie in KILL BILL.

Briefly but magnificently glimpsed at the end of VOL. 1 (2003), he came back with a vengeance in VOL. 2 (2004) and delivered a wonderful third act speech before being dispatched by leading lady Uma Thurman with the Five Finger Exploding Heart move.

Tarantino brought out the best in David Carradine, the beauty in his desolation, the poetry in his excess.  He lived five years beyond this career high point and the list of films and projects he completed in that short span of time is staggering.  (As an aside, I spent many a late hour giving bottles to both my children while watching through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes episodes of WILD WEST TECH on The History Channel, for which Carradine was a laconic, bemused and barely interested host/narrator.)  Carradine’s family, his children, his colleagues and friends can all eulogize him better than I can.  I never knew the man, never met him.  I was never what you’d call a fan… but when people are in your life long enough they belong to you in some way, love ‘em or hate ‘em.  And when you lose something you’ve always had, well, no surprise you’re left with a sense of loss and a hole that can never again be filled.  That’s my point, I guess.  That’s David Carradine for me.

I began writing this post while listening to Eddie Vedder sing “Guarantee,” and the lyrics seem appropriate to pass on in memory of David Carradine:

Wind in my hair, I feel part of everywhere
Underneath my being is a road that disappeared
Late at night I hear the trees, they’re singing with the dead
Overhead…

Leave it to me as I find a way to be
Consider me a satellite, forever orbiting
I knew all the rules, but the rules did not know me