I wasn’t a fan of actor Chris Penn, brother of Sean Penn, but when I read that he died, I immediately thought of the movie I most identified him with: Footloose.
Some of you thirty- and fortysomethings may have gone to see it in 1984. I was in high school, and my best friend and I went to see a new movie with Kevin Bacon, set in a small Texas town that outlawed dancing. Bacon was the new kid from Chicago, out of place, and coming to terms with his parents’ divorce.
Needless to say he shakes up the sleepy, backward town and demands the right to dance, leading his new friends on a town council/bigot-fighting crusade. His best friend was a country boy who liked to fight named Willard, played by Chris Penn (on the right wearing the hat). As Bacon’s character is risking life and limb for a prom, he teaches Willard how to dance. Those are the funniest scenes in the movie because, of course, Kevin Bacon can’t dance either! Like the young and impulsive often do, my friend and I sat through another showing of “Footloose” that day, and my favorite character wasn’t the “star” but the star’s best friend, played by Penn.
I saw Penn in other 80s movies such as “Rumble Fish” with Matt Dillon, “All the Right Moves” with Tom Cruise, and “At Close Range” with his brother. By the way, if you’ve never seen “At Close Range” (1986), you really ought to. It’s one of the most underrated films of that decade, in my opinion.
Sean Penn was married to Madonna at the time, and she sang the haunting theme, “Live to Tell.” Sean and Chris were brothers whose estranged father was a charming criminal, played by scary-but-cool Christopher Walken. I don’t want to give too much away, but when Sean’s character realizes how cold and depraved his father really is and what he must do to stop him…the scenes are heartbreaking, especially the final one. I hate Sean’s politics, but his acting is a different story.
I didn’t know the state of Chris’s soul, but I can only hope…
Previous obituaries:
- Richard Pryor
- Rosa Parks
- Nipsey Russell
- Johnnie Cochran
- Ossie Davis
- Johnny Carson
- Shirley Chisholm
- Rick James
- Ronald Reagan
- Superman
