Today IMDB posted a link to this article, sort of a commentary of an interview with NPR film criic, talking about why people find movie villains so fascinating or some garbage like that. I think a lot of the reasoning therein is rather insipid, inaccurate and simplistic, but on the other hand, it did get my own brain working, which is occasionally a good thing.
What makes a villain interesting depends on the story - or the villain himself. There are tragic villains, men who were good at one time, but were corrupted into being evil, or are driven to evil by circumstance or revenge. These certainly make complex and interesting characters, who might well be protagonists in another story. A great many examples come to mind, from Shakespeare's Richard III and Iago to blockbuster villains like Mr. Freeze to Davy Jones. On occasion, though, the just plain evil rotters, who were born evil and have little or no justification for wickedness, are just as effective. Witness the popularity of Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight, who despite the idiotic claims of the above-mentioned author, is best-observed as a psychotic who delights in causing chaos and destruction.
Really, what matters is that the villain is compelling - that the writer, director and actor do a good enough job of making him memorable, regardless of whether his motivation is avenging a slain family member or a loose screw.
Here is my fairly provisional list of my top ten movie villains. For a somewhat more comprehensive list, peruse this video of mine.
10. Colonel Saito - Sessue Hayakawa (Bridge on the River Kwai)
Saito is one of the ultimate examples of the tragic villain. The brutal head of a Japanese prison camp in World War II, he is an artist and engineer out of his depth dealing with an officer like the bullheaded Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), a born soldier with a literally unshakeable conscience and constitution. Despite his protestations of following the Bushido code, Saito clearly has no stomach for his work, and engages in a stand-off with Nicholson on account of sheer, bull-headed pride, even as his bridge project falls short of completion; the scene where he breaks down in his hut after ceding ground to Nicholson humanizes him to a degree that the British Colonel never is. Even with his limited command of English, former silent-film star Hayakawa (who won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actor nod) makes Saito a compellingly tragic figure, nearly matching Guinness's Oscar-winning turn, and arguably emerging as the more sympathetic of the two.
9. Eve Harrington - Anne Baxter (All About Eve)
The only female on this list (probably because I'm some sort of sexist), Anne Baxter portrays Eve Harrington as a truly repulsive yet chillingly believable ladder-climber. At first, she's convincing enough as a star-struck aspiring actress worshipping Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose bitter descent in decrepitude and obsolescence provides a perfect cover for Eve's creepy infiltration of Margo's celebrity. However, her subtle, near-undetectable scheming soon puts Eve towards the top, and always firmly in control. Her displays of false modesty become increasingly hollow, and after we learn her true motives - when she suddenly bears her blackened soul to the helpful Karen (Celeste Holm) - they become downright chilling. Ultimately though, even Eve is no match for the duplicitous theater critic Addison De Witt (George Sanders), who puts the conniving Eve in her place - for the moment. At the end of the film, we see Eve as arrogant as ever - though it seems the ultimate cinematic justice is just around the corner.
8. Emperor Maximillian II - Tom Hollander (Land of the Blind)
Tom Hollander is a perennial favorite of this blog, and his manic performance as the spoiled-brat dictator of Robert Evans' excellent dystopian satire is undoubtedly his career-best. Maximillian is alternately funny, frightening and even sympathetic - a Kim Jong-Il-esque dictator who uses the film's fictional country as a private playground, making Godawful films, engaging in sex games, randomly killing staff members, pigging out on lobster, and generally acting like a child too big for his britches - which indeed he is. He shows no signs of intelligence or insight, is manipulated by his Lady Macbeth-ish wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) and advisors, and his very imbecility is what makes him so dangerous - when this child throws a temper tantrum, people die. And yet, when Maximillian is faced with execution by his political rival Thorne (Donald Sutherland), he becomes strangely sympathetic - an ignorant, childish slug with no right to be where he is, he is somehow undeserving of his cold-blooded murder. Of course, it doesn't help his case that Thorne's totalitarian revolution proves even worse, even if there's a method to his madness.
7. Liberty Valance - Lee Marvin (The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)
Lee Marvin's star-making turn as the sadistic Liberty Valance is one of the greatest rotters in film history. He's a bastard without a single redeeming feature, a gun-toting, whip-wielding loud-mouth who robs stagecoaches, whips old ladies, beats unarmed men, murders ranchers, steals steaks, shoots up towns, rigs elections, and hangs around Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef, oozing flamboyant menace from every pore. He's not a remotely subtle or layered character, but as a depiction of pure evil on film, he has very few equals. When it takes the combined might of James Stewart and John Wayne to take a man down, he has to be one hell of an SOB.
6. Uncle Charlie - Joseph Cotten (Shadow of a Doubt)
Casting actors against type is a common trick, but when it works, the effects can be devastating. Witness the role of Joseph Cotten, the nice guy-next-door from Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Third Man and Gaslight, as the psychotic Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. Cotten and director Alfred Hitchcock trade brilliantly off of Cotten's screen persona; even though he's introduced as a vampiric figure hiding in a dark room at high noon, he's such a swell guy that it's no wonder everyone cottons (look, a pun!) to him.
Of course, it doesn't take long for the facade to break, as Charlie degenerates into impromptu rants about the uselessness of widows, and the generally foul nature of human society. Cotten is brilliantly chilling as he segues seamlessly from polite small talk to some of the nastiest monologues outside a Strindberg play. The seductive, hypnotic effect Charlie has on everyone around him makes him all the more creepy; he's evil hiding in plain sight, and no one except his niece (Teresa Wright) seems to notice. The banality of evil has never been more palpably portrayed on film.
5. Gentleman Brown - James Mason (Lord Jim)
About two hours into Lord Jim, around the time the plot goes off the rails, James Mason shows up out of nowhere with a wonderfully portentious introduction. He casually strolls up to co-villains Curt Jurgens and Akim Tamaroff, as the latter declaims:
"This Gentleman Captain Brown has given more men unto death than the bubonic plague. From Java to Fiji, he's wanted for slavery, for mutiny, piracy, rape, murder - and some things that aren't even mentioned in the Bible!"
Although Mason has maybe fifteen minutes of screen time, he's a wonderfully odious presence, whose mere appearance inspires foreboding and dread. It certainly doesn't hurt that he has some of the best dialogue in movie history, to wit:
"You're out, he's in - but HE'S the fool?"
"Drunk, you're useless!"
"His Highness has pretensions to heroism - a form of mental disease induced by vanity."
"You have a natural talent for disaster! Try and improve yourself into an ordinary failure by keeping your mouth shut!"
"Shut your gob!"
"If I'm an expert judge of human weakness, depravity and avarice - and I am - then we shall not go unrewarded for our labor."
"His Highness has the wreaking stench of a converted sinner."
Imagine James Mason saying those lines and you should have no trouble understanding my appreciation of the character. My only criticism is that he doesn't show up sooner.
4. Colonel Von Waldheim - Paul Scofield (The Train)
When we first meet Colonel Von Waldheim, he is enraptured by a gallery of French paintings, awed beyond words by sheer artistic beauty. He engages in a civil discussion with the museum curator (Suzanne Flon), who thanks him for protecting the art during four long years of Nazi occupation. Then Waldheim's henchmen arrive to take the paintings away, and the Colonel's cultured nice-guy image is immediately shattered. And we see that Waldheim's interest is not simply an aesthetic appreciation for art, but a personal obsession - he will stop at nothing to see this paintings protected, but only if they remain in his hands.
The beyond-brilliant Scofield (A Man for All Seasons) portrays Waldheim motivated by an abstract idea of beauty and its worth - nothing else matters but these expressions. Where he's villain is that he won't share the art with those considers unworthy of having it - but does he have a point here? When he declaims to Burt Lancaster's embattled Labiche at the end, "Beauty belongs to the man who can appreciate it", we can certainly understanding, even if we find the Colonel warped - how much blood has this man shed for the shake of a crate load of paintings? To be fair to Waldheim, however, it is at least something tangible, unlike the inscrutable riddle of patriotism and pride for which millions die.
3. Marcus Licinius Crassus - Laurence Olivier (Spartacus)
The ultimate in Roman decadence and brutality, Crassus is a ruthless fascist who flaunts his wealth and power, and will stop at nothing to return Rome to his bizarrely idealized "tradition". He is a Machiavellian schemer par excellence, engaging in a political chess game of with the gleefully crooked Republican Gracchus (Charles Laughton), fanning the flames of Spartacus's (Kirk Douglas) slave revolt into a major uprising that sees him poised to take over Rome. He is also, at base, an insecure man who wants to be loved, trying without success to seduce his servant Antoninus (Tony Curtis) and Spartacus's lover Varinia (Jean Simmons), and having little more success in persuading his political rivals to come to heel.
Though a bit hammy at times, Olivier is generally excellent, capturing all of Crassus's many facets: the cold-blooded schemer, the ruthless dictator, the driven patriot, the empty, insecure man. The scene where, with all the power of Rome behind him, he is humiliated by a bound and silent Spartacus is a wonderful piece of acting; Crassus's control is only illusory, and he is destined to lose it in short order anyway, as we see with his conversation with Julius Caesar (John Gavin) at film's end. Joaquin Phoenix's turn as Commodus in Gladiator was clearly modelled on Olivier's Crassus (don't bother mentioning Fall of the Roman Empire, which has a distinctly different characterization of Commodus) - if Olivier's Crassus were a whiny teenaged castrato.
2. Frank - Henry Fonda (Once Upon a Time in the West)
Imagine a smiling Tom Hanks shooting a defenseless eight year old and you have the shock registered by 1968 audiences in Henry Fonda's introductory scene in this film. The iconic Hollywood good guy, up there with John Wayne as the eternal symbol of righteousness in films like My Darling Clementine and 12 Angry Men, is a cold-blooded, remorseless hired gun, usurps the power of his dying boss (Gabriele Ferzetti), rapes our heroine (Claudia Cardinale), and all around proves himself to be a cold-blooded son of a bitch with not a single redeeming feature. And the most frightening thing is that it's all so casual; Fonda does not seem remotely ill at-ease playing a psychopathic killer, which makes his performance all the more chilling. Who doesn't get goosebumps as the final flashback unfolds, with a bearded younger Fonda slowly coming into focus, spitting out a cruel "Keep your lovin' brother happy!" to the young Harmonica before lynching his brother?
1. Bruno Anthony - Robert Walker (Strangers on a Train)
Another Hitchcock villain, even more chilling than Uncle Charlie, Walker's Bruno gets the top award. When we first see him, he seems a bit too friendly towards Guy (Farley Granger), but otherwise not a bad person. That he discusses murdering people shouldn't bother us overmuch in a Hitchcock film. However, the absolutely chilling scene where, seemingly on a whim, he stalks Guy's disloyal wife through a carnival and kills her, lets us know that we're dealing with a psycho - and not just any garden-variety psycho either. And, of course, he expects Guy to hold up his end of the bargain, leading to scene after chilling scene of Bruno watching Guy from a distance - at a party, a tennis match or a family gathering, there's nowhere he's safe.
Walker wins by delivering a marvellously subtle performance, not resorting to mad man stereotypes but remaining restrained and believable even in the depths of dementia. Although many critics read a homosexual angle into Walker's portrayal, it seems more to me that he's just plain sick - a highly intelligent and jovial, but childish, immature and utterly warped individual, spoiled rotten and turned into a killer by a combination of lousy parenting and mental illness. The film doesn't explain Bruno's psychosis (unlike, say, Psycho) but gives us enough clues (troubled past, domineering mother, distant father, posh lifestyle) for us to piece things together. A combination of Norman Bates and the Terminator, he is truly the most repulsive and frightening villain in film history.
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