The Gang
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| Name: Kumar
Played by: Kumar Pallana
Characteristics:
Safecracker
Lawnwrangler |
"I lose my touch, man."
Kumar is Mr. Henry's safecracker.
About Kumar Pallana...
Kumar, you may recall--in fact, unless you remember his
juggling act on The Ed Sullivan Show in the '50s, it's
all you might recall about him--has been in all three Wes Anderson
films. In Bottle Rocket he was Kumar the Safecracker
(key line: "Who, who is dat man?"); in Rushmore,
he was the school groundskeeper, Mr. Littlejeans (key line:
"Best play ever, man!"); and most recently,
in The Royal Tenebaums, he was the housekeeper Pagoda
-- the eyes and ears of the entire Tenenbaum family.
In each film Pallana, a short Indian guy with
a broad smile and a funny little shuffling walk, is really only
given a handful of lines--mostly, when he's in a scene, his
doleful eyes or batty mannerisms do the work. And it's both
a testament to how much Anderson's films have been fetishized
in the last few years and Pallana's own strangely compelling
onscreen mojo that have explained why he's become a minor cult
hero. Although he's in only a handful of scenes in Rushmore,
with barely a page of lines, none of which have any real bearing
on the plot, anyone who's seen the film will know who you're
talking about when you say Mr. Littlejeans.
Onscreen, Pallana is Zen-like and boyish at
once. He's as old as the hills, but on his first magazine cover
he's as cool and collected as any young rock star [an appearance
in "indie rock fanzine" called Muddle]...
As it turns out, Pallana has a story: Born in
1919 in India, he dropped out of high school and traveled the
world doing all kinds of balancing acts that were part vaudeville,
part sideshow. Billing himself as "Kumar of India,"
he came to the States in 1946, where he went on to work Vegas
and Ed Sullivan.
In 1980 he opened a coffee shop [The Cosmic
Cup] in Dallas that happened to become the young Wes Anderson
and Owen Wilson's favorite hangout. And a star was born again....
The genius of Pallana--the little guy with the
huge smile and an outlook on the world so unaffected that there's
something deeply spiritual about it--is that we have heard it
before, but the story never really gets old.
Source: "Kumar
the Magnificent," Philadelphia Weekly, April 24,
2002.
Kumar Pallana's
Filmography
Bottle Rocket (1996) - Kumar
Credit:
The
Internet Movie Database
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