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… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #47
The character: Captain Alan Thorndike The actor: Walter Pidgeon The movie: Man Hunt A person seeking revenge against the Third Reich makes it his mission to assassinate Hitler by using the best tools at his disposal. This is the Melanie Laurent plot in Inglourious Basterds, which is a movie everyone loves, but it’s also the… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #47
The character: Fredo Corleone The actor: John Cazale The movie: The Godfather Part II The original AFI Villains list includes Michael Corleone in this same film as their eleventh greatest villain. It is probably the most boring place to call Michael Corleone a great villain, or at least the safest. (The heel turn in The… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #48
The character: Mame Dennis The actor: Rosalind Russell The movie: Auntie Mame (1958) Mame has the depth of a teaspoon, and it is in shallowness that her greatness lies. Auntie Mame has one of the most essential and insane sets of any film this side of The Ladies’ Man, and it’s because of Mame that… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #48
The character: Rupert of Hentzau The actor: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The movie: The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) If you were a boy at the turn of the last century, you had your choice of two fantasies. The first was to be part of Dracula. Perhaps that boy dreams of himself as Van Helsing, the outcast… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #49
The character: Kelly The actor: Constance Towers The movie: The Naked Kiss (1964) For me, this is Sam Fuller’s most affecting film. From the beginning, I’ve always found Fuller to be a little bit secondhand. He is a filmmaker of ideas, and while it’s certainly possible to be a filmmaker of ideas with remarkable reliance… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Hero #49
The character: Adam Pontipee The actor: Howard Keel The movie: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) No decade made better revisionist westerns than the 1950s, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers stands as one of the essentials, perhaps only a step down from the work of Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann and John Ford. The… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Villain #50
I’ve been riffing off the American Film Institute’s mid-2000s lists for a long time now, and the one that I assumed I’d never touch was the Heroes and Villains list. I’m compelled more by the idea now than I used to be. Granted, I still think Joseph Campbell deserves at least one good swirly from… Read More Better than AFI’s Heroes and Villains: Intro and Landing Page
Seeing Things Secondhand 