In the summer of 1962, the director John Ford, 68 years old and with only three more features left in him, summoned the remaining members of a stock company of actors and technicians that time and Ford’s prickly personality had lately thinned to spend eight weeks in Hawaii making a film called “Donovan’s Reef.” Ford’s films were always marked, if not defined, by repetitions of themes, characters, dialogue, and whole scenes from the director’s previous pictures. But “Donovan’s Reef” is a sentimental, anecdotal Frankenstein so shamelessly stitched together from the corniest and hoariest of the director’s favorite clichés that it approaches lace-curtain Irish postmodernism.

Nevertheless, a torch-lit Pacific island Christmas pageant midway through the film contains a defining moment for one of the artists Ford personally selected to join him for a summer in the tropics. The local priest (played by Marcel Dalio, the lead in Jean Renoir’s “Rules of the Game”) mugs and shrugs while a chorus of sarong-wearing South Seas islanders sings “Silent Night” in their native language. Caesar Romero, playing the leader of the island’s vestigial French colonial aristocracy, narrates the nativity story from a legal pad he’s been handed by Dorothy Lamour.

“And then from the east came three wise men, three kings bearing gifts. The king of … Polynesia.” Enter actor and ex pro-wrestler Mike Mazurki, stripped to the waist, decorated in palm leaves and bearing a plate of tropical fruit through the congregation before kneeling at a crèche. “The emperor of China,” Romero announces, and actor Jon Fong follows suit with a tray of tea, rice, and lotus blossoms. Lastly, “the king of … ” Romero stops and does a double take at his script. The hint of a knowing smile and dawning understanding transforms his face. With a tenderness and wonder that exists nowhere else in the film, he pauses before calmly and reverently announcing, “The king of the United States of America.”

Lee Marvin strides into the grass-hut chapel wearing a mosquito netting robe and a yard-high gold paper crown, carrying a hand-cranked Victorola to present to the Christ child. Had Marvin’s role as Thomas Aloysius Gilhooley in “Donovan’s Reef” gone to Ford’s beloved house buffoon Ward Bond, as it surely would have had Bond not died in 1960, the “King of America” bit would’ve been yet another misfired cute gag in a labored lark of a movie.

But when Ford cast Marvin in the director’s final masterpiece, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” the year before, he discovered what filmmakers like Fritz Lang, Budd Boetticher, Richard Fleischer, and Robert Aldrich already knew. Marvin (1924–87) had the actor’s Midas touch — every word he spoke, every gesture he made, every scene he played turned to solid truth. Outrageously costumed, yet absolutely dignified, Marvin made a beautifully ironic moment out of Ford’s blarney. With Lee Marvin beneath the crown, a hammy Nativity scene became a coronation.

By the time he made “Donovan’s Reef,” Marvin, who is the subject of a two-week retrospective beginning today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, was American genre film royalty. Slack-jawed and oblivious one moment, vulpine and capriciously homicidal the next, Marvin spent the 1950s wielding his rich baritone voice, scorching heavy-lidded gaze, fists, guns, and, in Lang’s “The Big Heat,” a pot of boiling coffee, with such focused and honest malevolence that he became, in the words of the director Jim Jarmusch, “an icon of psychotic behavior.”

Marvin’s rogue gallery of gunsels, creeps, and saddle trash with names like Blinky, Chino, Slob, Babe, and Dill were all blessed with the same unostentatious yet undeniable intelligence and physical grace that would eventually make Marvin a bona fide star. Don Siegel, who directed the 1964 film “The Killers,” a show that Marvin stole from costars John Cassavetes and Ronald Reagan, said the actor, “moved like a cat, a ballet dancer.” What had been animal magnetism in his supporting “I say we hang him” roles became a kind of animal pragmatism once Marvin’s marquee value was bolstered by multiple seasons on the popular TV cop show “M Squad” and his 1965 Academy Award win for “Cat Ballou.”

According to John Boorman, who directed Marvin in two of his most seminal roles, and who made a beautifully affectionate documentary about the actor’s life 11 years after Marvin succumbed to a heart attack, he was “the essence of America — big, wild, and dangerous.” But no matter how it’s phrased, Marvin’s screen presence was uncanny. At rest or in motion, he ennobled a two-dimensional medium with his own three-dimensional depth.

Cinemascope, the oblong widescreen format created to capture natural splendor and theatrical spectacle, seemed to romance Marvin’s lean silhouette and deliberate effortlessness with an ardor reserved for him alone. In John Sturges’s early Cinemascope film “Bad Day at Black Rock,” Marvin throws a narrow, frame-bisecting shadow outdoors and curtains over furniture indoors. His body is like a human divining rod pointing to the last psyche in the world into which anyone should dig — the one inside the character he’s playing.

“You’re a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man,” whines one of a series of white-collar thugs whom Marvin dispatches en route to a missing $93,000 in Mr. Boorman’s 1967 crime picture masterpiece, “Point Blank.” An implacable, violent, sharkskin-suited human cipher, Marvin’s Walker is, in truth, a very deconstructive man. There’s a beautifully telling moment in Mr. Boorman’s documentary when the director freezes Walker mid-stride and explains that despite the actor’s warning, the camera operator was so mesmerized by the performance in his viewfinder that he was barely able to catch Marvin’s surgically precise but sudden lurch across the widescreen frame. “He knew the grammar of film,” Mr. Boorman says with a casual awe. “He understood the force of images.”

It’s common these days to bemoan the death of dangerous old-school machismo among America’s movie stars as a casualty of easy living. Lee Marvin played killers so well, the reasoning goes, because he was himself a decorated World War II Marine (not to mention a distant relative of Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee). But by that logic, Medal of Honor Winner-turned-actor Audie Murphy should have been a bigger star than Clint Eastwood. Marvin’s performances and the films that they graced remain the gems they are because Marvin lent his keen mind and sinewy body to filmmakers like Mr. Boorman, who were challenging themselves to tell the American story in new ways. King of the United States of America, or a man with a gun, a suit, and a really big chip on his shoulder, “He was,” Mr. Boorman concludes, “a director’s dream.”

Through May 24 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 212-875-5601).