His movie star body-head angle. Supermodels use their angles this way. Joan Crawford used her angles this way.
Burt is fun to study because star charisma is difficult to describe and yet it’s really fun to try.
Obsessive side note: Jensen Ackles uses his body-neck-head angles like this too – which I’ve written about in my Supernatural recaps. Just one example:
There’s an almost feminine quality to using your angles like this. It’s not preening, it’s an awareness of your affect, a dramatic presentation of self and intention which is more accepted in women than in men. Burt Reynolds up-ended that in his movie star persona. (Think of that Cosmo nude photo. The cheesecake pose with the big hairy body.)
Reynolds’ awareness of his shape/silhouette/angles/body placement was all probably pretty unconscious for him, or partly unconscious. The unconscious quality of this is why he was a star. Imagine if he did it consciously. It would come off as preening.
Reynolds understood his body in space, how it reads, how to communicate with it, and also how to make US go “My God, LOOK at him.” Maybe being an athlete gives you that awareness, you’re IN your body and you’re aware of its energy and shape, the space it takes up. Your body obeys you, you’re not cut off from it and waiting to do your “real” work in the closeup.
This is one of the reasons why, at his best, Burt Reynolds was so fun to watch. Because you feel like, “Oh. He’s got this. All I need to do is sit back and enjoy myself.”
The type of elongated angle in that screengrab from Deliverance can be suuuuper over the top in less skilled actors. Like: oh my God who are you kidding, pal …
But when it works, it works. It has to be FULL. And it’s FULL with Burt Reynolds. He knows how good he looks, he knows how to use it, and he knows how to fill it with tension but also a kind of grandiose self-confidence which is a character choice here, not actor vanity.
Amateurs need not apply.
