I don’t have a whole lot to add to all the other Roy Scheider tributes popping up out there, only to say that those who just knew him from the high points of Jaws or All That Jazz should immediately get to the video store to check him out grimly busting up cars in The Seven-Ups, or going all the way with Cronenberg’s gloppy conceits in Naked Lunch, or Marathon Man, where he makes Dustin Hoffman’s Method acting look silly within their first few seconds on screen. Whatever the part, he always mixed true professionalism with a genuine enthusiasm for being on screen. Without his busted schnozz, the movies just seem a little more bogus.

The only time he ever seemed truly unhappy in a movie, really, was in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, a legendarily cursed shoot that’s only now starting to creep beyond cult status. Whatever the conflict and shooting difficulties off-screen (Scheider was reportedly pissed off enough at Friedkin’s Gestapo directing style to refuse to ever talk about the film in interviews), it’s a credit to his very real, very underrated talent that he managed to take it all in and work with it to create a tight-lipped, scary marvel of a performance – a true existentialist hero, even for folks who don’t bother much with philosophy. The director wanted Steve McQueen; he wouldn’t have pulled it off half as well.