News of Glenn Ford's passing Wednesday rekindled my deep regret that my group, the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., never bestowed its Career Achievement Award on the popular star. Nearly every year during the 1980s and into the '90s, the late KPFK critic Dean Cohen and I would make our pitch for Ford. And every year someone else, equally as worthy to be sure, won the prize. I could never put my finger on why. Ford made more than 80 films in a career that lasted more than a half-century, and he was the star in most of them. Certainly no star was more versatile. His name was above the title in Westerns, comedies, romances, weepies, melodramas and adventure films. He was consistently good and eminently likable. In his best movies -- Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Big Heat (1953), Gilda (1946) and Pocketful of Miracles (1961) -- he was terrific with a sincerity, easy manner and sense of timing that disguised all the hard work. In more ordinary entertainments, he kept you riveted to the screen. He had that kind of charm.
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