Jerry Stiller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Jerry Stiller (1927–2020) plays Lt. Rico Patrone, Lt. Garber's tactical counterpart above ground, in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). The performance is restrained, procedural, and almost entirely devoid of the comic broadness that would later define Stiller's late-career second act as Frank Costanza on Seinfeld (1993–1998) and Arthur Spooner on The King of Queens (1998–2007). In 1974 he was forty-seven, two decades into the Stiller and Meara comedy duo with his wife Anne Meara, and still working primarily as a stage actor with film and television in the margins. (wikipedia)
Stiller worked dramatic roles long before he worked sitcom
Stiller was born in Brooklyn in June 1927, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, took a bachelor's degree in Speech and Drama from Syracuse University in 1950, and trained at HB Studio in Greenwich Village. He spent the 1950s doing summer stock and off-Broadway, including a notable Phoenix Theater production of Coriolanus. He met Anne Meara in 1953, married her in 1954, and formed the Stiller and Meara comedy team that became a national phenomenon by 1962 through repeated appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Both kept their dramatic careers running underneath the variety-circuit success. (wikipedia)
By the time Pelham shot in 1974, Stiller had logged dramatic television in The Defenders and Naked City, supporting film work, and a steady run of stage credits. Airport 1975 and The Ritz (1976) followed inside the same period.
Patrone is the deflated counterweight to Garber's sardonic command
Lt. Rico Patrone is introduced in the third beat of the film, when Garber walks the Japanese delegation past Patrone's assignment desk and presents him with a deadpan flourish — Patrone is the man who "on weekends, works for the mafia"b3. Stiller plays the moment with the affect of a man who has heard the joke before and stopped reacting to it years ago.
The character is load-bearing across the second hour. Patrone takes radio relays from underground while Garber holds the central seatb11. When Garber orders the personnel records pulled on motormen discharged for causeb18, it is Patrone who actually generates the list. In the climax sequence, Patrone partners Garber door to door through the suspect addressesb37 b38, including the final knock at Longman's apartment where the sneeze lands. Tim Pelan's essay on the film identifies Patrone in passing as Garber's "deadpan colleague" who "cracks wise as to how they expect to get away" — a one-line summary that captures the character's working register across the film. (cinephilia & beyond)
"His deadpan colleague Lt Rico Patrone (Jerry Stiller) cracks wise as to how they expect to get away." — Tim Pelan, Cinephilia & Beyond (essay)
The restraint is the point. Stiller is in the frame at Longman's door for the climactic recognitionb40a, but he does not act the moment. He lets Matthau land it. That gift — knowing whose scene it is — is rare in any ensemble performer, and almost invisible in Stiller's later television work, where the entire role of Frank Costanza is built out of refusing to let anyone else have the scene.
The Pelham performance reads differently against the sitcom shadow
Most retrospective writing on Stiller's Pelham appearance arrived after Seinfeld made him a different kind of star, and the contrast became the angle. Roger Ebert's original 1974 review (see Roger Ebert) noticed the supporting performances collectively without singling Stiller out — in 1974 he was simply one more competent New York stage actor in an ensemble of competent New York stage actors. The reappraisal came later, and almost always as a "watch him hold still" observation rather than as praise for a specific scene. No major critic of the period made the small-acting case for Stiller in Pelham. The case has been made, almost entirely, by the contrast he himself eventually created with Frank Costanza.
Later career and legacy
After the Stiller and Meara duo wound down in the late 1980s, Stiller spent a fallow decade before Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld cast him as Frank Costanza in Seinfeld's fifth season (1993). Stiller, after initial rehearsals, asked to play Frank louder and more energetic than the part as written — the choice that became the character's signature, earning him an Emmy nomination and rebooting his career at age sixty-six. The King of Queens followed in 1998 and ran for nine seasons; Stiller described Arthur Spooner as the most demanding acting work of his life. He died on May 11, 2020, of natural causes, at ninety-two. His son Ben Stiller announced the death in a short message on Twitter the same day. (wikipedia, twitter)