Robert Duvall in Invasion of the Body Snatchers

It's a better role than the small one Walter Matthau had in Earthquake.

Of course, there's the saying that there are no small rolls, there are just small tractors.

Bob was considered no great shakes as an actor until he was nominated for an Oscar for The Great Santini. Prior to this, he was frequently cast as aliens on 1960s television.

No r3...The Godfather, Network, Apocalypse Now,,,,,all prior to Santini.

To get under your skin. It seems it worked.

She not my wife.

[quote] “We were good friends,” Kaufman says of the head-scratching moment. “We’d done The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid together. He’d come to San Francisco and we’d hang out together. I just thought if you’re going to make a horror movie, you’ve got to have a priest in it.” So Kaufman made a quick call to obtain some priest garb and put his pal on a squeaky swing. “I think Bob Solo gave him an Eddie Bauer coat as payment or something like that. There he is in the background, it’s odd and skewed, and the angles are sort of strange. The pods have landed, there’s a squeakiness in the air and a priest on a swing. It was just a moment I thought of.”

There's a lot of unexplained weirdness in the first thirty minutes or so of 'Body Snatchers,' like that scene in the hallway at the Department of Health with Matthew Bennell showing Elizabeth the rat turd in the bottle, and they're walking past a doorway with frosted glass. There's some strange guy with his nose pressed to the glass, staring at them. Is he a pod, or just someone who's noticed that something strange is going on, and is trying to get a handle on it?

It's the same with the Robert Duvall cameo. Is the priest a pod, or just someone who's observing the weirdness of a pod teacher taking her students on a flower-gathering tour, instructing them to get the right ones and take them home to their parents?

Is it my imagination, or did Geoffrey Howell, pod dentist, take his engagement ring back from Elizabeth Driscoll when she and Matthew are captured by Kibner & Co. at the Health Department? Just after Kibner injects Matthew with the sedative, Elizabeth jerks her hand back from Geoffrey, and he sticks something into his inside-jacket pocket. It seems odd the kinds of human behaviors the pods retain after taking over their hosts. One wouldn't expect something like a ring to matter to a pod, but you never know.

This is such a good remake.

[quote] Of course, there's the saying that there are no small rolls

Oh, DEAR, R2.

Thank you, R7, for confirming my first assumption! Because when I see a top actor in a cameo, I generally assume they had a friend or lover in production, and had come to the set to hang around.

And R9, that's one of the things I love about this movie, all the subtle touches of *wrongness* through the early scenes, when nothing is obviously wrong. And I don't know if you can hear the screams as well as see the odd things you've mentioned, or if you had to see the film in the theaters, but they're there! When the characters are outside on the city streets, several times there's a faint and distant scream, which the leading characters don't appear to hear, as if someone were under attack several blocks away. It's deeply unsettling whether you notice the scream or not, and it creates an terrible atmosphere of threat and tension, even when the only apparent menace is the big city itself.

When Kaufman made the TV movie "Hemingway & Gellhorn" in 2012 he used both Duvall and Brooke Adams for blink and you miss them cameos.