The character:	Waldo Lydecker
The actor:	Clifton Webb
The movie:	Laura (1944)

A guy wearing a mask and holding a chainsaw or a knife or controlling a garage door is an explicit threat. A guy who is well-groomed and whose vocabulary is better than yours is an implicit threat. A guy who can do both and has the capacity to wear another person’s face as a mask is Hannibal Lecter. For whatever their deficiencies in managing their emotions, the filmic urbane have a way of understanding the human mind. Again, enter Lecter, who cuts through Starling’s schooled but naive understanding of why Buffalo Bill kills. “He covets!” Lecter says. “That is his nature…We begin by coveting what we see every day.”

Waldo Lydecker may not have the pulpy panache of Hannibal Lecter, although you can’t help but notice a similarly poetic consonance in their names, but long before Lecter or Buffalo Bill was this man who coveted. The columnist is an ideal type for covetousness. He sits high above the rest of us in his penthouse, looking down his snobby long nose at us, judging the hoi polloi and the highfalutin alike. No matter how plebeian we are, he thinks that he should have whatever he wants that we might have instead, and his facility with words will make it so that he convinces others of that belief. The wealthy man is an ideal type for covetousness, for the truly rich cannot be satiated, and they will always want another boy’s balloon. Waldo chooses Laura, grooms her, adds to her success, and by seeing her so often, by putting her at his table or at his side, he covets her.

Clifton Webb was only about thirty years older than Gene Tierney, but his pinched face against her oval beauty makes him seem like he could not only be her father, but her grandfather. We’ve made a deal as a society. The old may covet the vigor of the young, but they may not covet the young themselves. At least not as toothily as Waldo does, anyway. Webb’s performance is one of the very best on this list of villains, which is really saying something, and he has a wonderful capacity to be both near and far. He is distant from Laura, at least distant enough to claim that he isn’t her vampire, but of course he is close to her, awfully near to this woman who is burdened with his obsession. She will never choose him. At one point he laments in his sardonic way that she has a habit of choosing virile meatheads, which of course means that she wants Dana Andrews’ or even Vincent Price’s drumsticks rather than the dry bones Clifton Webb can offer.