It was twenty-seven years ago last month that John Belushi died, at the age of 33. At the time, Belushi's movie career was approaching a crossroads. At the end of 1981, he had released two films, Continental Divide, and Neighbors, that had an important place in the trajectory of his career--they were the first features he'd done in which he played a clearly defined starring role, rather than as a standout member of an ensemble cast (as in National Lampoon's Animal House and 1941), in a movie that (unlike The Blues Brothers) wasn't a pretested spin-off of something he'd done on Saturday Night Live. Taken individually, Continental Divide was a tepid comedy for which Belushi tried to stretch himself to play a romantic lead, and a flop, whereas Neighbors was a misplayed, sloppy travesty of Thomas Berger's darkly comic novel, which Belushi came to hate, and which actually made some money. Neither film capitalized on what Belushi might have been able to bring to movies, but between them, they seemed to sum up what Belushi (perhaps ill-advisedly) wanted to do, and what the studios, to his horror, thought he was good for.

That tug-of-war was going on as Belushi spent his last days mulling his choice of projects: a comedy based on (or at least yoked to the title of) The Joy of Sex that was being pushed on by the studio, and Moon Over Miami, which the director Louis Malle and the playwright John Guare, fresh from their upscale success with Atlantic City, wanted to tailor to Belushi and Akroyd's talents. (It would have starred Belushi as a small-time con artist employed to help Akroyd, as an uptight FBI agent, cook up an Abscam-like sting operation.) This time, though, Belushi had his own pet idea, a script called Noble Rot that he and Don Novello were adapting from a screenplay by Jay Sandrich called Sweet Deception. If Belushi was disgusted by what the bosses were offering him but nervous about jumping into the art-movie deep end with Malle and Guare, it must have made sense to him to try and work with Novello, a colleague from the SNL days (where Novello, a staff writer, used to pop up in the guise of Father Guido Sarducci), to shape something specifically to what he saw as the true nature of his gifts. Of course, it must have also seemed like a good idea one night to check into the Chateau Marmont hotel and send out for speedballs.

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Robert Goulet has died, after a sudden illness, while waiting for a lung transplant. He was seventy-three. Goulet struck gold in 1960 when he was cast as Lancelot in the original Broadway production of the musical Camelot. That triumph led to a successful recording career and a string of TV appearances, notably as a favorite guest of daytime talk-show host Mike Douglas. He also returned to the Broadway stage, most recently in a revival of La Cage aux Folles.

But to movie audiences, Goulet had his own special niche: he was one of the pioneers of the straight-faced, ironic cameo appearance by the celebrity who may or may not be in on the joke. Goulet, who appeared in several "straight" dramatic roles on such TV series as Police Woman and Fantasy Island, never developed much skill as an actor, but whether playing the villain in a Naked Gun movie or getting shot through the roof in Beetlejuice or parodying himself by name in Scrooged or a memorable episode of The Simpsons, he seemed like a nice guy and a good sport. He may have been a sacred object to many a fan of Broadway ballads, but to a generation of movie lovers, he came to be fondly regarded as the Chuck Norris who sings. The two halves of his career came seamlessly together in the high point of his movie career, the great moment in Louis Malle's 1981 Atlantic City where, again playing a clueless version of himself, he presides over a publicity event in a casino lobby and attempts to serenade a woman (Susan Sarandon) who has just been informed that her husband's been murdered. — Phil Nugent