Kevin McCarthy has been in the news a lot, and by coincidence he’s been on my mind a lot since this past Saturday.
That’s when I finally got around to watching the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Amazon Prime, which features a memorable scene where McCarthy reprises one of his most famous roles:
It’s generally accepted that McCarthy is paying homage to his role in the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and maybe even playing the exact same character.
But as an dedicated film scholar - why, I’ve even seen all of the Police Academy movies except for the one where they’re in Russia, which I’m sure has aged extremely well - I’ve studied the nuances of this performance and know the real truth about McCarthy’s character.
That is, he’s very clearly reprising his role of R.J. Fletcher, the villainous TV station owner obsessed with crushing the small independent channel run by “Weird” Al Yankovic in 1989’s UHF.
If you’ve seen that movie - and if you haven’t yet seen UHF, why are you wasting time on the internet instead of watching UHF right now? - you know that Fletcher is thoroughly ruined and humiliated at the end of the movie.
His station is shut down, his insulting comments about his own viewers have been broadcast across the city, and old lady kicks him in the nuts as legally required for an eighties comedy, and the coin he gave to a panhandler turned out to be worth thousands of dollars.
I know if I went through that, I’d be reduced to a disheveled crazy man running around San Francisco screaming at random strangers about whatever delusions are going through my thoroughly broken mind.
These two classic films fit together almost too perfectly, and it’s especially impressive considering that McCarthy had the foresight to play R.J. Fletcher eleven years before UHF came out. That is some serious dedication to his craft.
Kevin McCarthy never became a household name, but he appeared in dozens of movies in a career spanning several decades. I’m glad to see him getting his due, though it just goes to show you can never tell when a long-deceased character actor will be rediscovered and get a lot of media attention.
Either that or there’s another guy named Kevin McCarthy at the center of a big story lately. I dunno, I haven’t really been paying attention. I mean, he couldn’t have been in UHF, so who cares?