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mitzvah, an act of kindness.
    After a dramatic pause, Marvin Zuckerman says to the great monolith of an old man, “Maybe, if you will pardon my presumptuousness, you just haven’t had the right representation.”
     
    I f you went to the movies between 1960 and 1980, you most likely would have seen, at one point or another, the inimitable, craggy face of Haywood Allerton—still a relatively young man for much of this period, but ageless in his inchoate menace. Sometimes haunting the edges of great films and sometimes providing foils for cardboard heroes in, let us say, less- than-great films, Allerton, for one brief and shining moment, was the go-to heavy for all the studios, both major and minor.
    His greatest role, perhaps, was as the redneck racist who roughs up Pam Greer in the blaxploitation classic Honey Child (Avco/Embassy, 1971). He also made his mark as the brain-damaged child murderer in Orson Welles’s little-seen noir Coffin Not Included (RKO, 1974). Allerton also chilled audiences in such diverse cinematic fare as Monster Train (Hammer, 1969), Rumble in the Jungle (New Line, 1976), The Copperheads (Universal, 1979), and As the Eagle Flies (AIP, 1980), the cult World War II actioner with Burt Reynolds and Twiggy.
    Alas, in today’s Hollywood—a new frontier of digital downloads and flavors-of-the-millisecond viewed on handheld devices in bathroom stalls—a man of Allerton’s special qualities can barely land a hemorrhoid commercial. Evil is no longer essayed by the human face; it is created in the lab, through CGI and motion capture.
    Over the next few weeks, Zuckerman stops counting all the doors slammed in his face. He will not give up, though—after all, this is a mission from God, a holy mitzvah —which leads to an interesting phenomenon: For the first time in his shallow, manipulative, contemptuous life, Marvin Zuckerman actually experiences something like real affection for another human being.
    In the tradition of many great Hollywood heavies—Rondo Hatton, William Bendix, Margaret Hamilton, and Richard Widmark among them—Haywood Allerton is secretly a pussycat, a softie, a tender soul with nary a wicked thought in his head, and he begins to grow on Zuckerman. Complicating matters is the fact that the gentle giant is getting weaker and weaker by the day, the malignant cells erasing the man’s remaining time on earth faster than the nitrate fading from the celluloid of his old films.
    Eventually Zuckerman feels compelled to maximize as many of the man’s waning days as possible, so the two mismatched chums become fixtures down at Molly Malone’s on Fairfax. They dine on mountains of corned beef and lox at Canter’s Deli. They go to the Hollywood Wax Museum, Chinatown, and Griffith Observatory, where Allerton, in a pique of excitement, names every star in the firmament after an old Hollywood heavy: Elisha Cook Jr., Charles Napier, Sydney Greenstreet, John Vernon, Jack Elam, Dub Taylor, Vernon Dent, and on and on and on.
    The two of them also take to playing golf on Sundays at Zuckerman’s Beverly Hills club, spending the lazy hours trudging the fairways, talking, getting to know each other’s deepest ruminations and regrets. In fact, it is on one of these Sundays that everything changes for Zuckerman.
    “That’s a honey of a shot,” Allerton says encouragingly from the edge of the eighteenth green. Of course it’s a lie. Zuckerman’s whiffed putt has just skirted the edge of the hole and has shot off into the sand.
    “Tell me something, Haywood,” Zuckerman says, retrieving his ball from the trap. “You’re so . . . not like the heavies you played. Did you enjoy it—the glory days I’m talking about—all the villains?”
    “You want to know the truth?” the grizzled old monolith replies as he limps over to his ball. Almost skin and bones now, he’s moving slower than usual today, the pain medication fighting a losing battle stanching the tide of agony seeping up through his