Then in 1979, two specific films put him so firmly on my radar that I began hunting out anything else in which he had appeared. Films in which he did make a specific impression on me the first time around include John Milius's Dillinger, Monte Hellman's Cockfighter, Dick Richards' Farewell, My Lovely, Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks and Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time, all excellent movies from a decade in which American cinema seemed to be bristling with them. I still delight in spotting the younger Stanton in small roles in movies or TV shows, particularly when revisiting films that I saw as a younger man and I didn't realise he was in. I should point out that I now regard his performance as the withdrawn and initially mute Travis Henderson as one of the finest of his esteemed career. I still have strong memories of my first viewing of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, one of only two films I've seen in which he plays the lead role, but Stanton didn't figure that highly in that recollection for reasons I've already been into in my DVD review of that film. I'm fairly sure there was no single revelatory performance that clued me into him, but suspect that it was a gradual process of recognition and osmosis.

I can't recall with any clarity when I first started to really notice and appreciate the work of Harry Dean Stanton, a hugely talented character actor with a captivating screen presence whose wonderfully weather-beaten face makes me suspect that even in his late teens he looked like a man in his 40s. Screenwriter and Stanton's friend and assistant, Logan Sparks 'If you're the kind of person that doesn't like Harry Dean Stanton then you have a character flaw, there's something wrong with you.' Slarek is seduced by a film that encourages us to face the void with a smile. The late, great Harry Dean Stanton stars as an ageing bachelor in a small desert town who is learning to confront his own mortality in LUCKY, a perfect swan song of a movie that was written specifically for him and based partly on his life.

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