what happened to charles durning’s character?
he just disappeared. he narrates the beginning of the film.
shareI have a couple of theories about that!
One, Solarbabies is *weird*. It's got a lot of odd worldbuilding for audiences to take in. When studios get nervous about alienating their audience, they often pack in an opening narration, even when it's not something the writer or director ever had in mind. I believe this happened with Bladerunner as well. It's pretty common, especially in scifi movies. Perhaps Charles Durning's character wasn't originally considered important enough to do the opening narration, but for whatever reason the studio went with him. (He's a respected, older actor, so he's pretty studio friendly compared to say, Lukas Hass doing it.)
Another theory is this movie seems super edited down. Scenes just come to an abrupt stop, there are time jumps, etc. It's possible an original edit of the film was longer, with more scenes for The Warden.
The last possibility I can think of is, once they leave the prison there's just not much for The Warden to do, especially since they never go back. I would have liked him to ride along with the Strictor, perhaps arguing about their methods of tracking down the runaways and such, but that's not how it played out.