Montalgone

Remember that scene in "Blue Velvet" where Dennis Hooper's Frank is meeting up with his friend Ben played by Dean Stockwell and he keeps telling Ben throughout how he is so impressively "fuckin' suave" and how much of a "suave motherfucker" he is?

That about sums up my definition of the late Ricardo Montalbon. The man was so goddamn suave.

His unique brand of ultra smooth, borderline caricatured, Latin accented, classiness was the driving presence that defined for me, among others, the greatest Star Trek movie of all time, in the best Naked Gun movie of all time, one of the best Freakazoid! villains of all time, a decent Spy Kids sequal, and a relatively tolerable Taco Bell commercial.

Roger Ebert has a personal "Stanton-Walsh Rule" which states that no movie featuring either character actors Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh can be altogether bad (apparently with the exception of Wild Wild West). In that sense I can probably say that for me any work was always a little better with a dash of Montalban.

Damn, that's suave!