Tom Lauglin

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andrewstx

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I am surprised not see Tom Laughlin’s death not mentioned. He died the next day after Peter O’Toole.

With a name like Laughlin he had to have been an Irish Catholic.

Anyway he was hero when I was a teen in the Billy Jack pictures. When I was a teen the line would go around the block for his Billy Jack movies.

He was also in other films especially the original version of South Pacific where he played a cigar chomping Marine pilot.
 
andrewstx said:
I am surprised not see Tom Laughlin’s death not mentioned. He died the next day after Peter O’Toole.

With a name like Laughlin he had to have been an Irish Catholic.

Anyway he was hero when I was a teen in the Billy Jack pictures. When I was a teen the line would go around the block for his Billy Jack movies.

He was also in other films especially the original version of South Pacific where he played a cigar chomping Marine pilot.
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Oh man. 😦

My childhood is gone.
 
I’m with you Andrew. Billy Jack was pretty big in the early 70’s.
Tis a glorious day when an Irishman passes from this world to the next.
Peace, Joy and Merry Christmas!
 
mik3 said:
I’m with you Andrew. Billy Jack was pretty big in the early 70’s.
Tis a glorious day when an Irishman passes from this world to the next.
Peace, Joy and Merry Christmas!
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I remember seeing Billy Jack with my then boyfriend back when I was a freshman in university. He sank down into his seat in embarrassment when, at the end of the movie I slumped into him sobbing. I sobbed my way back to the dorm, a good 20-minute walk away.

I think the next movie that hit me like that, in fact the ONLY movie that ever hit me like that, was “Shine”, some 25 years later.
 
Phemie said:
If you watched these movies for the first time today you couldn’t fathom the impact they had on our generation. Seen through today’s eyes they are cheesy as they can be but, boy, in their day…
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They were made shortly after the upheavals of the 1960s, when various social reform movements were flowering: women’s rights, gay rights, American Indian rights, Latino rights, African-Americans rights etc. For young persons getting their first sense of the of news of the nation, the air was thick with protests about injustice caused by a corrupt and abusive power structure. Teens and college age persons themselves felt victimized by a military draft which forced them to fight and die in a far-off, pointless war. Toss in the Watergate scandal, when even the President of the United States was a criminal, and the setting was ripe for movies about a hero who championed the down-trodden against the powers that be.

As for Tom Laughlin, according to IMDB.com his film career pretty much stopped at the end of the 1970s. Given that its been 30+ years, and the Billy Jack movies don’t hold up as timeless classics, perhaps that is why his death got so little attention.
 
I met him once when he spoke to a film class at ASU after showing “Billy Jack”. I knew the fight choreographer (who also doubled for him in many of the fight scenes), Bong Soo Han, who also passed away awhile ago. He still spoke highly of Laughlin.

I saw an interview with Laughlin before his death - he was almost unrecognizable, he had gone through a lot of health crises. Still very left-wing and very cranky.

Much of “Billy Jack” was filmed around Prescott, AZ. I drove up there for the lighting of the Christmas Tree at the courthouse. That’s the site where they filmed the big fight scene in the movie, and walking around always brings back memories of watching those movies as a youth.

His L.A. Times obit quotes his daughter Teresa (who played the guitar-strumming girl in the cafeteria in the movie):
After becoming disillusioned with Catholicism, he immersed himself in Jungian psychology, writing books and counseling friends.
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“He was an extraordinary Catholic for about five minutes,” Teresa Laughlin told The Times, “but once he found Jungian psychology, it supplanted everything else.”
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The director Robert Altman, who directed him in “The Delinquents,” said, “He was so angry that he wasn’t a priest. Big Catholic hangup.”

He was encouraged to enter acting by a Catholic priest, one of his professors at Marquette. He also tried to make a film about the life of Father William DuBay.

I would guess it was Laughlin who introduced St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer into the original movie.

May God embrace his soul, and bring peace and healing to his loved ones.
 
Coatimundi said:
They were made shortly after the upheavals of the 1960s, when various social reform movements were flowering: women’s rights, gay rights, American Indian rights, Latino rights, African-Americans rights etc. For young persons getting their first sense of the of news of the nation, the air was thick with protests about injustice caused by a corrupt and abusive power structure. Teens and college age persons themselves felt victimized by a military draft which forced them to fight and die in a far-off, pointless war. Toss in the Watergate scandal, when even the President of the United States was a criminal, and the setting was ripe for movies about a hero who championed the down-trodden against the powers that be.

As for Tom Laughlin, according to IMDB.com his film career pretty much stopped at the end of the 1970s. Given that its been 30+ years, and the Billy Jack movies don’t hold up as timeless classics, perhaps that is why his death got so little attention.
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No wonder I never heard of him. I conscientiously avoid movies with “social Content”
as well as those that promotes any particular political viewpoint. I do not pay admission money to be preached to. I pay my money to be amused! The last good movie I saw was the recent Mel Brooks musical based on his movie “The Producers”.
Unfortunately, most of today’s movies do not even approach the quality of second rate films from the “Golden Age” of Hollywood - which happened while I was in my teens and twenties. The writing of most movies today is execrable; and the acting is not much better. For the most part, the acting is what I call Soap Opera Acting, in which the actors do not learn their lines, they read them from a telepromptor…and they do not read all that well.
It used to be that one could find decent foreign films when there was a dearth of good American films. Unfortunately Foreign films have caught the American disease.
 
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