The character:	Major Toht
The actor:	Ronald Lacey
The movie:	Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

You don’t have to know a lot of German to know that “Toht” gets you real close to the German word for “death.” In a movie where the cheese reverberates as gloriously as it does in Raiders, that’s fine. Basically every Nazi could have been named “Tod Totenkopf” and it would have been cool.

In all movies, the look of an actor is at least as important as any other single element, and that’s even more essential in the curds of this one. Karen Allen, who is very pretty but whose face is just angular enough to suggest that she’s no debutante. Paul Freeman, who has the seeds of something rugged in his face but whose gray hair suggests that he is not man enough to square up to the more rugged, more youthful Indy. Denholm Elliott, whose slightly puggy face allows him to be alternately academic and comic.

Then there’s Ronald Lacey, who looks basically the same in that sequence where his face melts off as he did at any previous point in the movie. In Tibet, his paleness makes him a fascist poltergeist dressed in the dark clothes of the ghost. The round glasses cube a round face to make a shape for geometers to name. His lips are thick and enfroggen his face. He seems to have no hair in so many of these early scenes, although there’s a reveal that he has a shaggy ring of hair from ear to ear and nowhere else later in the film. It’s humanizing, just like his sweat is humanizing, and as the ghost regains a corporeal body he shrinks. By the end, when the Ark is opened, he is a minor character with major screams, not much more than another Hitler disciple laid low by Jehovah. Belloq is the true villain now, and even Colonel Dietrich outstrips the melting major for importance.

So no, he’s not an especially important character in the story. His usefulness to the plot ends when he shows up in Egypt with his hand still scorched with one side of the headpiece for the Nazis to trace. Belloq takes over, the man whose rejoinder to “It belongs in a museum!” is something like “It belongs in the Adlerhorst!” From there he is additional scenery in a movie riddled with Nazi extras and large shirtless men on runways and tanks. But in American movies, after the diminishment of noir, there are vanishingly few guys who suggest evil in the same nearly wordless way that Lacey gives us in Raiders. They stopped importing Peter Lorres, stopped feeding Sydney Greenstreets, stopped castrating Elisha Cook, Jrs.

When they were at their best, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas could be so efficient. I don’t mean the overblown “he did not show the shark” thing. I mean that the images they created, even if we were unaware of the totality of the import at the moment, instantly told us what we needed to know. Major Toht’s appearance at Marion’s bar is not that different from Darth Vader appearing to swish his cape above the corpses on Tantive IV. No backstory is required (ironically…so ironically). You see and you understand totally, and the unaltered first impression holds for the entirety of the picture.