There are actors that are saddled with reputations for overacting or for eccentricity that they bring to their performances. These actors are often disparaged — think of Sean Penn complaining that Nicolas Cage "is no longer an actor ... He could be again, but now he's more like a ... performer."

I can't disagree with Penn, but I don't believe that the distinction is important. Some films call for nuance. Some call for size. Cage is capable of both. It's hard to imagine a more careful, understated performance than the role that netted him an Academy Award: his drunken, suicidal lawyer in "Leaving Las Vegas." But that sort of performance would have been out of place in "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," a film that is equally excellent, but mad and oversized, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans in which Cage plays a drug-addled, corrupt cop who is coming unglued.

There is something about actors who are capable of this sort of bigness that leads to unusual resumes. They often find themselves the favorites of independent and genre filmmakers alike, probably because both styles of film often require a certain expressionistic sensibility. And perhaps there is something in these performers' personalities that cause them to be particularly attracted to films that share their eccentricity, where they can indulge themselves. Or perhaps they are just so hard to place in mainstream films that they are generally cast for their freak appeal — look at Crispin Glover's career for an example of this.

Many otherwise reserved performers have it in them to be spectacularly weird when called on to do so, and we shall complete this series with a collection of some of the maddest performances from actors who are otherwise known for dignified performances. This will also give us a place to discuss actors who have somehow managed to contain their urge to chew scenery in mainstream films that are too tasteful to attract the attention of this series. (Unfortunately, this describes much of the career of Al Pacino, despite his truly unhinged performances in "Scarface" and "Dick Tracy.") The focus of this series will be on actors whose entire careers seem to consist of providing the biggest performances they can in the oddest films imaginable. Some of these actors are big stars, but most are character actors — and often these are the people with the most interesting careers, as they navigate the peculiar back alleys of non-mainstream filmmaking.

I don't agree with Gloria Swanson when, in "Sunset Boulevard" she declares that she's still big, it's the films that got small. Oh, she was big all right — it's one of the biggest performances ever put onscreen. But movies are still a big place too. Most of the films I will detail in this series are small-budgeted, but vaulting in ambition and theme, and huge in unabashed weirdness.

There will always be a place for the overactor, if they don't mind getting a little dirty and making the sort of film that Sean Penn sneers at. It's a pity, too. In many of his early films, such as "Taps" and "The Falcon and the Snowman," Penn showed real potential to be a grade-a ham. Instead, he chose to pursue the path of good taste, and what do we end up with? As great as his skills are, he's just another actor. He could have been a performer.

INTRODUCTION

It's hard to know precisely what people think of William Shatner. Many hold an undeniable affection for him, thanks, in no small part, to a succession of career-defining roles in three successful television series. There was "Star Trek," of course, which found Shatner helming a starship as Captain Kirk, a young captain, still vital and ready to fight, but with a cocksure ease at command. And there was T.J. Hooker, a 1980s police drama in which Shatner played a 15-year veteran of the police force who goes back on the beat to hunt down the criminals who killed his partner. This show may be best remembered for a Saturday Night Live parody, which took Hooker's habit of leaping onto the hoods of escaping cars to ludicrous extremes, with Shatner riding on the hood of a car for hours, unsure what his next move should be, or how to get off.

By this time, it was pretty clear that Shatner had developed an unusual sense of himself. He always had an odd sense of humor — you can find videos online of Leonard Nimoy describing pranks Shatner pulled on him — and starting in the 80s on, he easily slipped into deliberate self-parody. He played an incompetent, bewildered variation of Kirk in the second "Airplane" movie, and made a series of commercials in which he mocked — and celebrated — his much-parodied recordings of the 60s.

And then came Denny Crane, his character from "Boston Legal," which netted Shatner multiple Emmys and a Golden Globe. Crane was part parody, part eccentric, and, yet, somehow, wholly human. Shatner somehow managed to pull the neat trick of creating a role that commented on, and teased, public perceptions about him, but also remained a believable, and sometimes heartbreaking, character. So what do people think about Shatner now? Do they see him as a personality, the way Charo or Charles Nelson Reilley were seen? Is he seen as an aging eccentric? Is he taken seriously as an actor, or is he just offered a succession of showy comedic roles? Is he seen as being a ham, albeit an enjoyable one?

We'll leave it to posterity to make up its mind about William Shatner. The purpose of these essays is an experiment, really. Prior to getting cast on "Star Trek," Shatner appeared in a selection of fascinating but generally forgotten films and television movies, and then, after "Trek," his career tanked, to a certain extent. He wound up taking bit roles on television shows, supporting roles in television movies, and lead roles in low-budget exploitation and genre films. Such is the life of an actor — when it's what you do for a living, you do what you have to.

But you can either do it as a mater of routine, with barely a thought put into it, or you can take each role as a challenge. And Shatner is far too interesting an actor to do anything by rote. If you are going to understand his work as an award-winning actor — and one who has managed to craft a persona that can legitimately be described as postmodern — it's useful to watch the work that lead up to his triumphs.

I don't know if there has ever been a collection of essays like this, that focus on one actor's career through two decades of work that is generally considered beneath critical analysis. But that's what I'll being doing here — looking at every film I could locate in which Shatner played a significant role, starting in the Sixties, before Kirk, and going into the Seventies, in the period between Kirks. I'll stop at the moment when "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" debuted, as it was this film that revitalized Shatner's career. As a result, essays that date past the "Star Trek" film would necessarily detail a very different performer and type of film than those that precede it.

There are a few rules I set in place before beginning this project. Firstly, I decided not to look into Shatner's guest appearances on television shows during this era, although he made quite a few. There are two reasons for this, the first practical, the second theoretical. The practical reason is that many of these appearances are impossible to track down. But even if I could have found these episodes, these roles didn't interest me. An actor doing a guest spot on a television show will put in a week's work, and there isn't much time to tailor the role around their specific skills.

Likewise, I skip films where Shatner makes only a brief supporting appearance, for the most part. Instead, I generally focus on the films in which he was top-billed or had a significant role, whether they were television films or intended for theatrical distribution. These were the sorts of roles that Shatner could really inhabit, and the writers and directors could construct the film around Shatner's unique qualities. This is where it's possible to see Shatner's progression as an actor and explore some of the acting choices he made, which were often quite bold, whatever the material he was given. There are a few exceptions to these general rules in the cases of films where Shatner had only a slight presence, but the film itself struck me as especially interesting; Shatner made more than a few of these.

This is an enjoyable exercise, by the way, and one I recommend. It's not especially uncommon to pursue the very best films made by an actor or a director, one after another, as it gives you an unusually intimate experience of film. Instead of each film being individual artistic acts that stand in isolation, they begin to seem as though they are referencing and commenting on each other. When you're dealing with an artist who has an especially clear or distinctive voice — a Hitchcock or Lynch — suddenly it no longer feels as though you were watching a dozen films, but one very long film, in which the filmmaker's interests are constantly revisited and reinterpreted. But we usually only do this with work that is considered to be significant in an artist's life, and we almost never do it with a performer who isn't an auteur, and therefore cannot superimpose a consistent vision across films.

But I think this is a shame, and that's the reason for these essays. Explore the trash, I say, and, if an artist interests you, follow his or her career wherever it went, even when it seemed like it was crashing and burning. Because it is very hard for an interesting artist to not be interesting, and you'll often find the projects they did between the hits to have their own merits and pleasures, even if they are entirely unconventional and sometimes accidental. Especially when you're dealing with an actor like William Shatner, whose current success is built, in part, on his ability to poke fun at his own excesses, it's worth exploring the early examples of those excesses.

THE EXPLOSIVE GENERATION (1961)

THIS 1961 FILM would be considered William Shatner's first starring role, but for one fact — he doesn't star in it. In fact, he's barely in it. The movie really belongs to Patty McCormack, a former child actor who had been nominated for an Oscar for her chilling turn as a tiny psychopath in "The Bad Seed." McCormack was attempting to make the difficult transition into teenage roles, with some success: she was a regular on Sixties television shows, such as "Death Valley Days" and "Route 66," and she would continue working in television for most of her career as a dependable, if unremarkable, actress. For anyone who has seen "The Bad Seed," however, her later performances are a little disappointing. She brought a level of spoiled mania to her role as "The Bad Seed's" Rhoda Penmark that verged on camp — she had mad eyes, and she used them well as a child, glaring at adults and shrieking at them when she didn't get her way, and weeping and wheedling when she is caught misbehaving. All the while, McCormack's eyes darted back and forth, oversized and scheming.

She has the same eyes in "The Explosive Generation," which raises certain expectations. As a child, she was evil enough to drown a boy after beating him with her shoe, and all because she was angry that he had won a penmanship medal. Who can imagine what that same character might be like as a teen, with the added dangers of budding sexuality thrown into the mix? And we first meet the teen McCormack at a party in a beach house, where high school boys cleverly play on petty girlish jealousies to convince McCormack to spend an ill-considered night with them. McCormack's mannerisms here are shy and halting, but those wide-set eyes wander from boy to boy, and her tiny mouth pinches up into a pout, and one starts wondering: Who will survive the night?

They all do, god damn it. Despite its title, "The Explosive Generation" isn't a film about teenagers gone wild. Instead, it's a well-meaning if somewhat blandly crafted story of a liberal teacher who wants to honestly answer his students' frank questions about sex, only to face instant opposition from parents and principal. McCormack is the girl with the questions, raised by the night in the beach house, and Shatner, who in 1961 looked as though he was barely out of college, is the liberal teacher who wants to provide answers.

Shatner is in the film just long enough to stir up trouble, argue with parents, get suspended, and give the kids some cautious advice. It's not a very interesting role — the teacher is written as being square-jawed and honorable — but Shatner fills it with enormous charm. He grins at his students with unfeigned affection, socking the boys on their arms and giving the girls avuncular squeezes, both of which would likely get a modern teacher in more trouble than a discussion of sex would. He refers to himself as the "All High," and his students do too, perhaps because when they see him, they all shout "hi!" He's quietly authoritative, enforcing discipline with genial good humor — one scene has him wandering through his class with a garbage can, demanding students toss out the gum they are chewing, and he feigns that he is passing a collection plate. "Alms," he pleads.

He teaches a class called "Senior Problems," and, seemingly on a whim, opens the class to discussing the problems that they find most pressing. As McCormack has spent the morning in a car with a weeping friend, who also spent the night at the beach house, the teenage problem troubling her most is sex. "Like, how far a girl has to go with a boy just to be popular," she explains. And, frankly, in 1961, asking those questions in class was just as mad and just as dangerous as drowning a child over a penmanship medal. Shatner is suspended for daring to treat the question seriously.

There are some neat satiric jabs in the rest of the film. In one scene, a boy goes to enlist help from his bachelor father, a used car salesman who spends most of his time lounging around his modernistic house in pajamas and smoking jacket, nursing a cocktail like a low-rent Hugh Hefner. The boy calls him at work, only to find that his father has gone home for lunch, and so the classmates all pile into his car to go talk to pop. They burst in on him putting the moves on a pretty blond secretary. Here it is, the swinging Sixties in all its sleazy glory. But when the boy asks his father to speak up on Shatner's behalf, the man balks. There's another used car lot right across the street from mine, he tells his son. The only reason I sell more cars than he does is because people like me more than him. Now how much would people like me if I went sticking my nose into something like this?

One of the other kids responds with a sarcastic jab, and the man's son, writhing in shame, snaps back. "Aw, leave him alone," he says quietly, his voice dripping with condescension. "Can't you see he's scared?"

The kids quickly decide to take matters into their own hands. Interestingly, they don't do so out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to Shatner, but because they are furious about having open discussion censored. The ringleader, a lanky, sensitive basketball player limned by Lee Kinsolving, responds to the events with a constant glower, as though the whole of the adult world were betraying him. "Okay, so we can't discuss sex," he says. "Now suppose someone wants to discuss military service, like should he volunteer before going to college, or wait and go afterward? ... How sure will we have to be that we're not stepping on someone's toes if we want to talk about it? Whose permission do we need? What if we want to discuss the H-Bomb?"

Kinsolving comes up with a unique plan of nonviolent protest. If they can't talk about what they want to talk about, they won't talk about anything at all. The entire student body refuses to speak, even during a basketball game, which they watch with steely silence. This gives Shatner the opportunity to lecture his boss, played by Edward Platt, an actor probably best known for eventually playing the constantly put-out Chief on "Get Smart," but probably cast here because of his role as a detective who was unusually sensitive to juvenile offender James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause." "Don't you know what is going on here?" Shatner asks Platt. "All over the world these past few years students have been out in the streets fighting for things. Maybe a lot of them have been wrong, but they spoke out. Here we've had nothing but silence. Well, now the silence is broken."

"This might sound corny," Shatner warns, "but that's our future down there showing enough guts to stand up for what they believe in."

It does sound corny, but Shatner delivers it in an understated deadpan that sells the line. But his monologue is unnecessary. In a film that points out the hypocrisy of an educational system that actively denies students the opportunity to learn what they desperately need to know, the most eloquent statement in the film is the students' silence.

THE INTRUDER (1962)

HERE WE COME to William Shatner's first lead role in a motion picture. He had put in a lot of work at this point — seven years of supporting roles and guest spots on television. He was hungry for something more substantial, and, when the lead role in a low-budget black and white film opened up for him, he jumped at it. "I would have done it for free," he later admitted.

On the surface, the film he chose for his debut as a leading man seemed to be pure exploitation. Firstly, it was directed by Roger Corman, who was in the midst of lensing a string of arch and baroque adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe movies and was moving headlong into producing such fast and cheap cinematic fare as "Night Call Nurses," "Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia," and "Big Bad Mama," which also featured Shatner, and you'd better believe will be in this book.

Also reeking of exploitation is "The Intruder's" potboiler storyline, in which a menacing figure invades a southern town on the eve of integration, fanning racial hostilities while bedding teenage girls and the wives of traveling salesmen. It sounds like trash, and especially crass trash at that, seeing how the south had only been forcefully desegregated a half-decade earlier when Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock. Racial hostility was still murderous at the time "The Intruder" was filmed, and not a fitting subject to try and make a fast buck off of.

"The Intruder" didn't make a buck. Until recently, it was notorious as the only Corman film not to turn a profit. The surprising thing about this, though, is that the film may not have done well because it was too good.

"The Intruder" features a script by a man named Charles Beaumont, who also appears in a small role. Beaumont was a writer with an impressive collection of television credits to his name, including penning 17 episodes of "Twilight Zone." Among these were such classics as "Living Doll," in which a father battles his daughter's toy, which has started to say things like "I am going to kill you." He also authored "Long Distance Call," in which a boy uses a toy telephone to talk with his dead grandmother, and "The Howling Man," in which a stranger accidentally unleashes the devil from his captivity among a hermitage of monks. Anyone who ever watched "Twilight Zone" will remember these episodes with a pleasurable chill, and will understand when I say that Beaumont was one hell of a writer. Beaumont originally wrote "The Intruder" as a novel, and Corman so liked it that he set about to make it with admirable resolve. Turned down by the studios, he financed it himself.

The main character in "The Intruder" is a fellow named Adam Cramer, who we first meet riding into a sleepy southern town on a bus, dressed in a neat white suit and peering out the window through a mod pair of sunglasses. Cramer is played by Shatner, who was 31 at the time and seemed impossibly vital. He grins at everyone he meets, puppy dog friendly and instantly charming, even as he explains that he was sent by a right wing group in Washington, D.C., to organize extralegal protests against a high school desegregation that is about to occur.

Corman shot the film on location in several Missouri towns, and cast local townspeople in almost every secondary role. The cast included a local high school football player named Charles Barnes, who plays an African-American youth who becomes the focus of the town's violent hatred, and bears it with a weary resignation that is heartbreaking. Corman was extremely crafty about how he shot the film, giving locals edited versions of the script so that they wouldn't suss out the film's eventual pro-integration viewpoint. Nonetheless, on the day he finished filming, Corman packed up his possessions and left wordlessly with his cast and crew, stealing out of town and fearing for his safety. He had reason to be nervous — for one thing, he managed to find locals who, to the man, seemed toothless, ill-shaven, filthy, and thick-witted, as though Goya had painted a nightmare version of the south.

They look every bit like a dangerous mob, and Shatner sets about stirring them up. His motivations are petty — he clearly means to use these events as a steppingstone to a future as a career politician. He plays on the townspeople's native prejudices easily, gathering them in front of the courthouse and delivering a terrifying speech about Jews, communists, and blacks conspiring to destroy the south. In the meanwhile, he can't look at a woman without appraising her sexually, and when he seduces the wife of his neighbor in a cheap residence hotel, the man confronts him at gunpoint. The wronged husband is played by Leo Gordon, a towering, burly man, here playing a character with crass mannerisms and a nymphomaniacal wife. But Gordon is a natural salesman, and he recognizes Shatner for what he's selling, which is hate, and warns him he's selling it badly. There is no way Shatner can control the crowd once it turns into a mob.

He's right. Shatner can't give a single speech without groups of long-john wearing men breaking off to harass black motorists or set fire to churches. Shatner argues against violence, which he considers counterproductive, but everywhere he looks he sees men grinning at him with toothless grins while stroking lengths of rope. When a local newspaperman experiences a crisis of conscience and decides to walk with the black children to their school as a sort of quiet protest, he is immediately surrounded and beaten. Whatever Shatner's intentions, the tinderbox of racial tensions is too volatile for the theatrical but nonviolent protests he had envisioned. He's leading these people toward murder.

This is, arguably, Shatner's best film performance. It probably helped that he was a Canadian Jew playing an American racist — another actor might have sought to find something sympathetic in the character, but Shatner plays his as a creature of unforgivable ambition. He takes oily pleasure in the trouble he creates, carrying himself with an arrogance that at first seems attractive, but then becomes insufferable. There's also an odd boyishness to the performance, which is often the case with Shatner: In one scene, he produces a pistol from his coat pocket and poses with it, alone in his hotel room, pretending to shoot and making gunshot sounds with his mouth, as though he were playing cowboys and Indians. When he is later confronted with that same pistol his cockiness melts, replaced with a wheedling, desperate shame.

We see that desperation again at the end of the movie, when Shatner's schemes fall apart. The townspeople abandon him in disgust, and he races after them, calling out random racial epithets in a cloying, embarrassing attempt to win them back. It's one of the ugliest moments I have ever seen from an actor, a completely unsympathetic gesture of pettiness, and, as a result, the scene ranks among the most startling antiracist statements in the history of film.

It comes at the tail end of a film that has made an eloquent, unnerving case that racism effectively functions as a tool that petty despots can use to grasp at power. The film was made at a time when petty despots just like the one Shatner played were still clinging to power in Washington, and still fanning the raging flames of racism to scare up support. Hell, it still happens, still as nakedly and crassly, and it still works. It's no wonder this film didn't make any money.

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