The character: Old Scratch The actor: Walter Huston The movie: The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) Within ten minutes of Faust, F.W. Murnau puts the image of Mephistopheles above and around an unsuspecting, celebrating town, with one wing rising to blot out the sun itself. It is, quite possibly, the most spellbinding film image of… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #34
The character: Son of the Hunter The actor: Francis Kee Teller The movie: Navajo (1952) Navajo was sold to audiences as a documentary when it was released in 1952, and it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 25th Academy Awards. It is not a documentary, and it’s weird that anyone was willing to… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #34
The character: Julianne Potter The actor: Julia Roberts The movie: My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) Given that my last two posts have been about a guy I accuse of genocide and a guy who collaborates with Nazis and then tries to kill someone else in order to hide that fact, I’ll grant that it’s a… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #35
The character: Mary Kate Danaher The actor: Maureen O’Hara The movie: The Quiet Man (1952) Scott Eyman, in his biography of John Ford, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, makes a nifty little observation about The Quiet Man and its heroine. For those of us who have survived the era of… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #35
The character: Frank Enley The actor: Van Heflin The movie: Act of Violence (1949) In modern movietalk, you can put any three movies together that have similar themes and the same director and call it a trilogy. Forgive me for being similarly tiresome. At least there’s a little novelty for me in applying that framework… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #36
The character: Barney Greenwald The actor: Jose Ferrer The movie: The Caine Mutiny (1954) In December 2018, a man who “attempted to spark an open discussion” on Twitter asked something very important. Sadiq posed the question, “Why do we bash ‘dead-beat’ dads for not being there for their kids but we never question if the… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #36
The character: Otto Hasslein The actor: Eric Braeden The movie: Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) Genocide ought to be fairly easy to accomplish when you’ve only got to knock off two, maximum three individuals. Hasslein, the scientific advisor to the president, has a problem here not because he can’t accomplish it, but… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #37
The character: Rocky Sullivan The actor: James Cagney The movie: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus differentiates between the reward that a person receives for doing good publicly versus doing good privately. Let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing, he tells us. It is… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #37
The character: Slim Dundee The actor: Dan Duryea The movie: Criss Cross (1949) Dan Duryea’s New York Times obituary phrases it this way: “As movie publicity agents loved to point out, Mr. Duryea’s personality was quite the opposite of the one he displayed in films.” Duryea was married thirty-five years, was a member of the… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #38
The character: Bub The actor: Sherman Howard The movie: Day of the Dead (1985) Organic posthumanism, a future in which humans will recede and some different product of the planet will fill our void, is much to be wished for. Better yet, it ought to be planned for. Nothing could vouchsafe the preciousness of human… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #38
Seeing Things Secondhand 