Family Album
|
 | Name: Pagoda,
Family Servant
Played by: Kumar Pallana
Characteristics: Loyal
Closest allies: Royal |
"He has the cancer..."
Pagoda
is Royal's man on the inside... of the Tenenbaum household. He is his
spy, his ally, and his friend. Oh yeah, and he stabbed Royal once in
Calcutta...
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
The
Royal Tenenbaums (2001) - Pagoda
Rushmore (1998) - Mr. Littlejeans
Bottle Rocket (1996) - Kumar
Credit:
The
Internet Movie Database
|
The Royal Tenenbaums Criterion
Collection
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