M Emmet Walsh was both a mesmerising everyman and an indelible gargoyle. How I’ll miss those poached-egg eyes
M Emmet Walsh was the outstanding Hollywood character actor who emerged in the American new wave, a performer whose mesmerically watchable and powerful looks made him eminently castable; he was jowly and heavy set, but always looked tough, as if the idea of a fistfight would not be a novel or frightening thing for him. But he also had a woundedly sad expression in those poached-egg eyes.
Walsh lent a texture of reality to any picture he was in – like his approximate contemporaries Ned Beatty or George Kennedy, a performer who could be part of the landscape and offset the importance of the male lead, often in some kind of antagonistic or malign authority role. He could be like a gargoyle or an everyman, but never a fool and always someone to be taken very seriously. In his later career, his habitual pairing with the male star found a piquant expression in his moment opposite the young Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the Apothecary in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996).
Of course it was for the Coen brothers that Walsh found his immortal role, the part that made him a noir icon, the epitome of sleaze and skeeze in the 1984 crime thriller Blood Simple, playing the loathsome private detective Visser, a demonically inspired role and a demonically inspired performance. Walsh’s Visser is a reptilian figure of pure evil who first makes his impression on us, not with his face, but the negligent twang of his voice, a deadpan monologue, an aria of cynicism and violence, that we hear over unsentimental wide shots of the stark Texas landscape – the vocal equivalent of a bleak Ry Cooder guitar riff. Fans of this film can pretty much recite it word for word:
Walsh’s Visser is a creep, a parasite, a liar and a murderer in a Stetson and pale yellow suit, and in his sulphurous wickedness, surely the most evil private detective in movie history: Walsh presented him as someone who inhabited a circle of hell that was his and his only. (In his The End of the Affair, Graham Greene was fascinated by the private detective as the witness to and participant in sin – I often wonder how he would have reviewed Blood Simple and Walsh’s performance.)
Before this, he was almost as potent in Ulu Grosbard’s classic crime thriller Straight Time (1978), based on Ed
A Danish man has been sentenced to prison in a “historic” case after being found guilty of fraudulently profiting from royalties on hundreds of tracks on music streaming sites.
In the country’s first case of its kind, the 53-year-old man from East Jutland, whom the Danish press has decided not to name, was convicted on Thursday of making at least 2m Danish kroner (£229,676) from artificially generated streams of “several hundred” music tracks.
Prosecutors had said that the numbers of streams required to generate that amount of money could not have been generated by genuine users and that unauthorised techniques were likely to have been deployed instead.
He was also found guilty by the court in Aarhus of breaching copyright on 37 of the tracks, which were edited versions of other musicians’ work. Prosecutors had accused him of taking works from other artists, changing their length and tempo, and publishing them under his own name.
He was sentenced to one year and six months – three months of which he must serve in prison – and the judge confiscated 2m Danish kroner (half of which will be taken from the man and half from his company). He was also fined 200,000 Danish kroner.
Such was the volume of the artificially generated streams that he became Denmark’s 46th highest-earning composer for streaming between 2014 and 2017.
Musicians, artists, composers and copyright campaigners hailed what they described as a historic verdict.
Maria Fredenslund, the chief executive of the Danish Rights Alliance, which reported the case in 2018, said: “We are pleased that the court has affirmed that streaming fraud is deeply criminal and serious. It’s a historic verdict that sends a strong signal about the severity of stream manipulation challenges. The case also shows that this type of fraud can be detected, and that both rights holders and authorities take the issue seriously.”
She said it also sets an important precedent for the future. “It will be an important starting point to prevent similar cases in the future, especially with the development within artificial intelligence.”
Anna Lidell, chair of Autor, the largest Danish association for composers, songwriters, lyricists and producers, said: “It’s truly an important and historic case, and it sends a message that you cannot infringe upon our rights as songwriters.”
She added: “The man cheated his way to millions of listens, but also violated copyright by speeding up the tracks and releasing them. It’s a mockery to those who struggle to make music every day and earn peanuts.”
He was originally accused of making 4.38m kroner from streams of 689 pieces of music across services including Spotify, Apple Music and YouSee Musik. But on Thursday, the court said it did not have sufficient data to confirm exactly how many artificially generated tracks were played, how many times or the royalties generated.
Amir Amirian, the senior specialist prosecutor on the case, told the Guardian: “This is a principal case and from what I know it’s the first of its type in Denmark. This is important because if we see similar cases in the future this will be the primary case to refer to and it’s important from my perspective that the judge ruled that this is data fraud. This is actually illegal, it’s not a gap in legislation or something like that.”
He added that he hoped the case would send a clear warning to others not to attempt such schemes.
The convicted man indicated on Thursday that he would appeal against the verdict in the high court.