Earlier this month, America lost one of its funniest and most versatile character actors, Garrit Graham. He was one of those actors whom everyone recognized instantly, but no one ever knew his name. Rather, he was “that guy who played X in Z,” where X is one of your favorite characters in one of your favorite (Z) movies—often a cult movie like Phantom of the Paradise.
For me, that favorite role/movie was in one of Robert Zemeckis’s early films, 1980s Used Cars. I should really devote an entire post to that movie, surely one of the best B-comedy flix ever made, with humor on a level of Mel Brooks and the Marx Brothers. And Graham one was the elements that made it so damned funny. As Jeff, the nerdy-yet-hip sidekick to Kurt Russell’s fast-talking main character, he both abets and reigns in the antics. Jeff is a mensch, nearly crippled by his own neurosis, yet smart and kind of sexy, too. Best of all, he becomes a hero at the end of the film. (He also participated in one the riskiest practical stunts I’ve ever seen, in which he is almost run over by a hurtling muscle-car.)
Sadly, Graham never achieved the kind of fame he deserved, not the secondary kind of fame that some great character actors enjoy. With a little luck, he might have filled the same kind of niche in the 1980s as Steve Buscemi would in the 1990s. Instead, Graham worked steadily in small, one-off parts in film and on TV. (He appeared twice in the Star Trek universe, playing different aliens.)
He was also something of a renaissance man, having co-written one song for the Grateful Dead and penned teleplays for TV.
The world is a little less interesting without him in it.
This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.
As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…
By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.
For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.
So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.
Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.
I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom.
Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.
In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish. And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.
But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.
I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic.
Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang.
Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.
Like a lot of Southern boys with a literary bent, I absolutely love New York City. Ever since I went there in the early 1990s to visit a girlfriend (herself a native New Yorker), I have been entranced by the place, a feeling which only deepened after I got a remote job with a Manhattan consulting firm and got to make frequent trips there for business. (That’s the best way to see The City—when someone else is paying for it.)
Ever since then, it’s often occurred to me that NYC is still Hollywood’s most beloved city, too, with L.A. coming in a distant (and often more loathed than loved) second. This is probably due to the fact that NYC is still the cultural and artistic center of the nation, as well as the place where many young actors and directors get their start, still.
Of course, many great films show the dark side of New York. Too many to mention, in fact, but the list includes Rosemary’s Baby, Seven, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Bad Lieutenant, and on and on. However, I want to focus on films that show it in a favorable light. That is, movies where The City is almost a main character, and a great one at that.
Here is a list of my top ten favorites. Note that I am including all five boroughs in my criteria, although Manhattan is, as usual, the stand-out.
Moonstruck
Moonstruck is the greatest romantic comedy film ever made. And so, it makes perfect sense that it takes place in New York City, which is our most romantic city. That is, it has the most character, the most mystery, and the most beauty. Like a lot of the films on this list, it takes place in one of the boroughs—Brooklyn, in this case, with its great Italian-American culture. Never has that city-within-a-city, with its family-owned shops, brownstones, and restaurants, seemed so magical. Like “moonlight in a martini,” as one character says. (He’s speaking of a woman, but close enough.)
Throughout the film, the towers of Manhattan loom in the distance like a fairy-tale kingdom, to which the heroine, Loretta Castorini (Cher), finally ventures with her new unlikely “prince,” Ronny (Nicholas Cage in one of his definitive roles) when he takes her to the opera.
Do the Right Thing
Spike Lee’s masterpiece from 1989 is not only one of the best movies ever made, it is also one of the very few to depict life in a predominantly black urban community (except crime thrillers full of drug dealers and prostitutes). Set in the legendary Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, it follows the lives of several people who live and work there, including Mookie (Spike Lee), a pizza-delivery man, his sister Jade (Joie Lee), and his boss, Sal (Danny Aiello). The story takes place on a single, hot summer day when tensions—racial, economic, familial, and sexual—all reach a boiling point. It’s a great film with a great soundtrack, to which artists as diverse as Public Enemy and Teddy Riley contributed. With its combination of propulsive music, kinetic cinematography, and excellent, all-in performances by the stars, Do the Right Thing captures the energy and spirit of working-class New York better than any other film. More importantly, it’s one of the first hit movies to focus on the African-American community of New York, which gets a lot more attention than the Italian-American or Irish-American or Any-Other-American community.
Basically, it’s just a great movie.
Manhattan
What list of great New York movies could be complete without at least one entry from The City’s most iconic director, Woody Allen? (Okay, he’s probably tied with Martin Scorsese; see below). Manhattan is Allen’s lyrical cinematic ode to the borough, shot in sumptuous black-and-white and featuring the music of George Gershwin (whose work, apparently, inspired the film). It tells the story of Isaac (Allen), a middle-aged TV comedy writer who is dating a beautiful, brilliant seventeen-year-old, Stacy (Mariel Hemingway). Their relationship might seem ridiculous (even he finds it so), but he’s happy. At least, he thinks he is, until his life is upended by a woman his own age, Mary (Diane Keaton). Mary is Isaac’s equal in intellect, spirit, and sheer neurotic energy, and he finds himself smitten with her. Unfortunately, she is currently the mistress of his best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy), who seems to take her affections for granted.
Like most of Allen’s early classics, Manhattan is an almost Dickensian satire of highly-paid, arty New Yorkers, with their hilarious pretensions and absurdly tortured relationships. Isaac laughs at them almost as much as he laughs at himself. But it’s clear that he (like Allen) loves them, too. Especially Mary. She essentially functions as a stand-in for Manhattan (the city) itself—complex, gorgeous, and endlessly changeable.
Arthur
Steven Gordon’s 1981 rom-com Arthur is not a great film, but it is a very, very good one. Not only did it make Dudley Moore a Hollywood movie star (he had already been famous in the U.K. for decades), it revitalized the careers of Shakespearean actor John Gielgud and music-legend Liza Minelli. More importantly, the film brilliantly evokes the magic of Manhattan, as seen through the eyes of rich, alcoholic, and extremely lovable playboy, Arthur Bach.
Arthur (Moore) is a brilliantly witty, talented, and rich man. He is also a congenial drunk. He spends his days enjoying bubble baths in a huge, gilded tub set in the center of his penthouse apartment, sipping martinis made for him by his long-suffering butler, Hobson (Gielgud). Then, he spends his nights wining-and-dining streetwalkers whom he picks up on 8th Avenue.
In the hands of a lesser actor, Arthur might well have come off as a pathetic—even repulsive—character. But Moore was able to infuse him with so much charm and humor that it’s impossible not to like him. Crucially, Moore also imbues him with his (Moore’s) own wounded and vulnerable qualities. While Arthur has been psychologically crippled by his domineering and sadistic father, Moore was a chronically shy person who grew up with a myriad of physical disabilities (including a clubfoot). And Arthur, like Moore himself, was enchanting in his apparent childishness combined with a rapier wit.
In short, Arthur is a glittering, New York City archetype: the charming drunk who makes good in the end. And the movie’s title song, “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do),” is also a classic.
After Hours
Martin Scorsese is known for a lot of things, but comedy isn’t one of them. Yet his 1985 film, After Hours is one of the funniest movies about NYC ever made. It follows the nightmarish adventure of a likeable, unassuming nebbish, Paul (Griffin Dunne), who works in a Manhattan office as a “word processor.” One day, he ventures to SoHo in pursuit of a beautiful young woman, Marcy (Roseanna Arquette), whom he has met at a café earlier. Things go pear-shaped when Paul loses all his money en route to Marcy’s apartment. When he finally gets there, he meets her equally beautiful—but also dangerous and possibly insane—roommate, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), a sculptress who dabbles in S&M. Thus begins a Dantesque—and very funny—descent into the bowels of lower Manhattan, with its odd cast of avant garde artists, deranged cabbies, bar hoppers, burglars, and general freaks. Anyone who’s ever lost their wallet on the wrong side of NYC will instantly relate to this film, which celebrates The City’s weirdness as much as it mocks it.
Dinner Rush
What list of great NYC movies would be complete without at least one film about the restaurant scene? My favorite is a little indie production from 2000, Dinner Rush. Directed by Bob Giraldi, the plot focuses on a single night in the lives of the people who run a posh TriBeCa restaurant. The joint is owned by Louis (Danny Aiello), an avuncular bookie and former mafioso, whose son, Udo, is the brilliant but pretentious head chef. Udo refuses to cook the traditional Italian meals that Louis loves, so the sous-chef, Duncan (Kirk Acevedo), secretly prepares them for him. Duncan is a working-class kid with a bad gambling habit, and Louis obviously thinks of him as a kind of second, “better” son. Duncan and Udo seem to hate each other, but they help each other when the going gets rough.
Intrigues abound among the restaurant staff as well as the diverse array of patrons who show up, including an art gallery owner (and his starving artists), a food critic, two young hoods, a pretty office girl, and a charming, mysterious Wall Street broker whose significance isn’t revealed until the end of the movie. (I won’t spoil it; you’ll have to watch the movie.)
Working Girl
In many ways, Working Girl is the best movie on this list, with its tale of a hive-haired, Staten Island girl, Tess (Melanie Griffith), with the intelligence and audacity to take a shot at success in the cutthroat business world of New York.
Specifically, Tess dreams of becoming an executive in the big Manhattan M&A firm where she works as a secretary. That is, she dreams of becoming her boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver in one of her best roles), a tough-as-nails business operative. Katharine, whose blue-blood background is as upscale as Tess’s is trashy, seems nice at first, and even promises to mentor Tess on her way up the corporate ladder. But when Tess discovers that Katharine has secretly stolen one of Tess’s business ideas and fobbed it off as her own, she decides to beat Katherine and the whole, male-dominated business world at their own game.
I love this movie because not only is it one of the best romantic comedies ever made, it also asks many questions about the nature of the American dream: is it real? Is it corrupt? What does a girl have to do (really) to achieve it?
Fame
Alan Parker’s 1980 film Fame is an underrated film about the experiences of “gifted kids” who attend New York’s High School for the Performing Arts. As with any coming-of-age tale, the main characters—who each focus on dance, acting, or music—discover a lot about themselves as people, and also about what it takes to succeed in the arts. That is, how to achieve real fame.
The young actors are all first-rate, including Gene Anthony Ray, who had never acted before. A young Irene Cara is a stand-out. All-in-all, Fame is a great study of that most celebrated aspect of New York City: its music, theater, and dance culture. Basically, it’s about the bush-league for Broadway.
Men in Black
At one point in Barry Sonnenfeld’s classic summer movie, Men in Black, one of the main characters, veteran MIB agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) tells his young trainee that the MIB headquarters are “Just like Casablanca. Only no Nazis.” But this is not quite right. A much more apt description would be Ellis Island, where immigrants from all over the world (galaxy, in this case) come to gain entry to our civilization.
You don’t have to be an English lit major to glean that Men in Black is all about immigration and the diversity that immigration brings. The film opens with the MIB men disrupting an NIS raid of a truck near the Mexican border. (K mocks the way the NIS men treat the “dangerous aliens”—i.e., Mexican immigrants.) Later, the new MIB recruit, J (Will Smith), routinely mistakes weird-looking (but human) people on the streets of New York for extraterrestrials.
The point of the movie is that, well, we’re all people. (Except for those evil bugs, of course.) And diversity is a good thing—a miraculous thing—which is another reason NYC is the coolest city in the universe.
Ghostbusters
One of my favorite scenes in Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters is the one in which the demon-possessed accountant Louis Tully (Rick Moranis) wanders the streets of Central Park West. He encounters a horse-drawn carriage driver and warns the man (and his horse) about the imminent coming of Gozer, the God of Destruction. After Louis staggers off, the driver thinks for a moment and says to himself, “What an asshole.”
To me, this moment reveals the message of the entire movie—that New Yorkers are the toughest, most unflappable people on earth. They can handle anything, so long as they stick together.
While purportedly a horror-comedy, Ghostbusters is mainly one long celebration of that New York attitude, especially as demonstrated by Peter Venkman, the quick-thinking, bullshit-spewing, totally selfish guy who leads the Ghostbuster team. Venkman is one of the great anti-heroes of American cinema. He thinks he’s just looking out for himself—until the shit hits the fan and he has to step up to protect his friends and his city.
Another great example is the old rich guy in the lobby of the building where the heroes catch Slimer. When Venkman, clad in full nuclear-powered GB gear, tries to hold the elevator for the man, the old guy merely puffs on his cigar and deadpans, “I’ll wait.”
The countdown is an obvious dramatic instrument. You might think it was strictly a modern invention—depending, as it does, on a clock ticking—but I think it goes back to at least the 19th Century. Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is based around an (extremely long) countdown. And in the Sherlock Holmes stories of the 1890s, Holmes often finds himself racing against the clock, desperate to find some missing treaty or compromising letter that, if not secured in time, will spell certain doom.
As for film, one of the greatest westerns of all time, High Noon, has an obvious, analog countdown, with the camera often showing the town’s clock as it sweeps toward noon. (That’s when a gang of bad guys is expected to arrive on the train and kill the heroic sheriff, Gary Cooper.)
In modern fiction films—and especially genre films like science fiction and spy movies—the digital countdown has become something of a staple. Over the next four days, I’m going to discuss four of my favorites.
For this first installment, I choose what is still one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time, Robert Wise’s 1971 masterpiece, The Andromeda Strain. The story of what happens when an alien pathogen arrives on Earth via a crash-landed satellite, it is perhaps the first great techno-thriller film, combining science fiction with a tale of a military and political crisis.
When fighter jets are sent to overfly the satellite’s crash site in the Arizona desert, the authorities see that everyone in the nearby town of Piedmont is already dead. They activate a secret “Wildfire” team of scientists, who are grabbed from their homes and flown to a secret, underground biolab that is also (a bit too conveniently) located in the Arizona desert. Most of the drama takes place in the sterile, spaceship-like interior of the lab, where the scientists bring the satellite and isolate the germ. They also bring along the two surviving inhabitants of Piedmont—one, an old, alcoholic man and the other a month-old, helpless infant—who seem mysteriously immune to the alien bug.
The scientists name the bug “Andromeda” and discover, to their horror, that it is a crystalline-based life form with no DNA, which cannot be killed by heat, solvents, or even radiation. Indeed, it laps up X-Rays and uses the energy to mutate at an alarming rate.
As luck would have it, one of these mutations is able to dissolve rubber, which allows Andromeda to escape into the lab’s silo-like core. Naturally, this triggers a countdown to the automatic detonation of a nuclear bomb placed under the lab, intended to sterilize the site before the contamination spreads. Realizing that the bomb’s radiation will not kill Andromeda—it will, rather, cause the germ to flourish, perhaps ending all life on earth—the Wildfire team rushes to cancel the countdown. The only member with this ability is a surgeon, Mark Hall, who has also just solved the riddle of the two unlikely survivors (it has to do with their blood acidity). Hall bravely enters the core and begins the long climb up to the one level where the bomb can be disarmed, using a high-tech key that he has dangling around his neck.
The last five minutes of the movie show Hall desperately trying to avoid the automatic laser guns that guard the core (one of which shoots a hole through his cheek), as well as the nerve gas that the lab’s central computer releases.
Does he make it in time? Does he save the world? You’ll just have to watch the movie…
No self-respecting cinephile could live with themselves if they failed to mark the passing of a great movie star like Sam Neill. Yes, Neill was a movie star. He seldom played the lead in big-budget films—Jurassic Park was a lucky exception, and even that film was more of an ensemble piece—yet whenever he was on-screen, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. And that inexplicable quality, more than anything, is what defines a movie star.
I say inexplicable, because no one can really define it. Yes, it has something to do with good looks, and Neill was definitely handsome. (Early in his career, he was an outright heartthrob in his native New Zealand.) Intelligence, too, often has something to do with star-power, and Neill was certainly, obviously smart. And charming, albeit in a reserved, unassuming way.
But there are lots of other good-looking, smart, and charming actors who never achieve the status of movie star. Neill did. How did he do it? I’m not sure. If I had to assign Neill one of my 15 Hollywood archetypes, I guess he would fit best in the Noble Everyman slot. But he was almost too handsome for that category. Really, he was almost his own archetype—that of the quiet, capable, professional man.
These terms certainly describe the first role I saw him in, which made me a fan—that of the titular superspy in Reilly, Ace of Spies. A 12-part miniseries shown on the Masterpiece Theater program in America, it told the story of the dapper, aristocratic, and amoral Sidney Reilly, a Russian-born secret agent who works for the British Empire circa 1910. With his deceptively soft, incisive voice and penetrating intellect, Neill was perfect for the role, and it made him a star.
Throughout his subsequent film career, he played many other resourceful, smart, but quiet characters, often in supporting roles. He played naval officers (Dead Calm, The Hunt for Red October), scientists (Jurassic Park, The Dish), and, of course, spies (Reilly, Ace of Spies, Plenty).
Whatever he played, though, he always exuded a kind of affable, open, benign quality that viewers instinctively warmed to.
It’s almost a cliché to state that, as you get older, you re-evaluate a lot of things you liked in your youth. Often (alas), you discover that the books you read, the music you listened to, and the movies you listened to when you were in high school really weren’t that great—with a few exceptions. Also, as you age, you sometimes discover that something you didn’t pay much attention to when you were young is actually pretty frickin awesome.
That happened to me recently with this song, “Still the Same,” by Bob Seger. For some mysterious reason, the song popped into my head about a week ago and wouldn’t leave. Maybe I heard it on the speakers at the grocery store; I don’t know. But for some reason, I kept hearing it, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
This was even more strange considering that, as a kid, I didn’t really groove to much of Seger’s music. I mean, I liked his stuff, especially “Night Moves.” And his songs were all over the classic rock station that me and my friends listened to, so I knew all of them by heart, almost, and I admired them. Ironically, though, the one Seger-hit that didn’t register on me at all was “Still the Same.”
Until now. I found myself looking it up on Youtube, playing it, then playing it again. I really listened to the lyrics for the first time, and I was totally blown away by them. On the surface, it’s another one of those mythopoetic songs about dark, conflicted hipsters in the 1970s (Steely Dan wrote some great ones, too). In this case, the narrator sings about a gambler—who could be a man or a woman—with whom he was friends but now rejects because they’re “still the same.” That is, despite enormous talent, intelligence, and self-control, the gambler is essentially dead, emotionally and spiritually. They’ve achieved the kind of life they always wanted, but they are basically at a dead-end. A corpse.
Of course, the mere act of describing the song makes me want to hear it again. After all, Seger says everything I just did, but in poetry. Take the first verse:
You always won every time you placed a bet You’re still damn good, no one’s gotten to you yet Every time they were sure they had you caught You were quicker than they thought You’d just turn your back and walk
Imagine how many more words a bad writer would need to say the same thing with much less effect. “You were consistent in your skill and ability, winning all the time. And you have maintained that skill, somehow, despite the fact that you are a lot older now. Both in the past and now, your rivals always underestimated you. On each occasion when they thought you were beaten, you managed to simply get up and leave as if nothing had happened.”
Blech!
As a writer, I find myself in awe of the economy and density of Seger’s lyrics. There is one line in particular—“You still aim high”—that I find heartbreaking, even though it’s only four words (four beats) long. Somehow, it encapsulates all the admiration, even love, that the narrator still feels for the “gambler.” (I put it in quotes here because I believe that “gambler” is really just a metaphor for some kind of hustler, male or female, who gets by on their smarts, charm, looks, and daring. E.g., almost everyone in Hollywood.) The narrator still loves the gambler (perhaps they were lovers, once?), even though he now sees the gambler as a bit pathetic. “Still the same,” but no better. Stuck. Stagnant. In another of Seger’s hits, he describes a “beautiful loser.” In this song, he describes a beautiful winner—who wins the world but loses their soul.
In other words, the song is a great 70s rock tragedy, in the same vein as “Layla”, “Dreams”, and “Free Bird”.
Maybe I should go back and re-listen to those songs, too.
A couple of weeks ago I reposted an old essay of mine called The Anti-Heroes of American Cinema: A Tribute. Ever since then, I’ve been thinking that there is a counterpart to the anti-hero—the anti-villain. Whereas anti-heroes often display characters that seem to contradict the classical definition of a hero, such as occasional selfishness, comical cowardice, and foolishness, anti-villains often run counter to the classical definition of a villain. That is, they can be courageous, charming, and even noble (albeit in a misguided fashion).
Ironically, it is classic literature itself, I think, that gives the first, prototypical anti-villain: Hector, the Trojan prince who flummoxes the Greeks in The Ilyad. Hector is, in many ways, more compelling and even sympathetic than the nominal “hero” of the work, Achilles, who spends most of his time sulking in his tent. Hector, whose moniker is “the breaker of horses,” is determined to defend his country from the invading Greeks, which makes him far more relatable than the glory-hound Achilles. He is also shown to be a devoted family man, gentle to his wife and infant child, as well as being a loving son and older brother.
In the same way, the very best films of American cinema often have a great “villain” who is actually more of an “anti-villain.” In John McTiernan’s Die Hard, for instance, Alan Rickman gave a career-making performance as the hissable Hans Gruber. Hans isn’t just smart. He’s resourceful, courageous, and disciplined. When he accidentally gets cornered by John, he fakes a brilliant American accent that we can understand how someone would fall for it.
But what really makes Hans such a compelling character is that, in some ways, Hans seems to be struggling almost as much as the hero, John McClane. We sense that Hans really needs this heist to work. That, despite all his bravado and (yes) cruelty, he’s really just a guy trying to make his mark while there is still time. “You’re just a common thief,” Holly says to him, to which he replies, “I am an exceptional thief.” And we have to agree. He is exceptional.
More importantly, he feels like a fully rounded, three-dimensional character. Yeah, he’s still the bad guy, with wicked and even evil motives, but he is still compelling, likeable, and real. Much of this depth, of course, comes from the brilliant script by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza, but is it mainly due to Rickman’s refusal to play the character as a trope, the dimestore villain. As Rickman explained in an early interview: “I’m not playing ‘the villain’. I’m just playing somebody who wants certain things in life—who’s made certain choices—and goes after them.”
To take another great film from the 1980s, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street presented us with one of the great anti-villains of all time, Gordon Gekko, as brilliantly played by Michael Douglas in an Oscar-winning performance. Gekko is whip-smart, ruthless, and willing to play for table-stakes when the circumstances call for it. He also has a bit of an inferiority complex, as he reveals in an early scene when he and the film’s young hero, Bud Fox, play squash. Bud compliments Gekko on the luxury of his health club, to which Gekko responds, “Yeah, not bad for a City College boy. I bought my way in, now all these Ivy league schmucks are sucking my kneecaps.”
Of course, this kind of admission on Gekko’s part—that he comes from humble beginnings, and that he harbors a huge amount of resentment against the American aristocracy—serves to make him more compelling, not less. In other words, he becomes an anti-villain. We can understand how the movie’s young protagonist, Bud Fox, would be in awe of the man’s talent and grit. It’s only later in the film, when Bud figures out the man’s true, reptilian character, that he turns on Gekko and reclaims some of his dignity.
Come to think of it, Oliver Stone’s other great movie from the 80s, Platoon, also has a great anti-villain, who also tempts the movie’s young hero toward the dark side. In Platoon, it is the ruthless Sergeant Barnes (brilliantly played by Tom Berringer in a career-highpoint). Barnes is surely the most capable and lethal soldier in his platoon, displaying enormous courage and self-control in battle. He seems to genuinely care about the well-being of his troops (up to a point) and to harbor an authentic (if perverse) form of patriotism. Unfortunately, he is also a bit of a fascist, set on revenge against the Vietnamese people (both the Viet Cong and the villagers who sometimes aid them). We sense the depth of the trauma he has suffered from his previous war experience (manifested in a symbolic wound, the disfigurement of his face).
An earlier Vietnam movie, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, presents us with another great anti-villain, the mad Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando). As we learn from the film’s (anti-)hero, Willard, Kurtz is a former war-hero, a West Point grad whose patriotism and courage led him to achieve high rank at a young age. But then, deep in the existential maw of Vietnam, he suffered a psychic that led him to go rogue, becoming a renegade war-lard in Cambodia, waging his own horrific, private version of the war.
It’s not surprising that Vietnam was such a great source of cinematic anti-heroes (and anti-villains), considering the way moral lines became so blurred in the long, horrific conflict. In the same way, modern military conflicts in the Twenty-First Century also generate their share of vexed, morally complex characters. In fact, one the greatest anti-villains of all time appeared in Dennis Villeneuve’s 2015 thriller, Sicario. In that film, the nominal hero, a young police officer named Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) finds herself entangled in a covert, CIA-run military operation against a Mexican drug cartel. One of the CIA operatives, Alejandro (Benecio del Toro), becomes a kind of demented mentor to her, showing her how to survive in the morally-inverted universe of the U.S. War or Drugs.
Alejandro is such an effective villain because neither the viewer nor Kate realize he is a villain until late in Act III, when we discover that Alejandro is, in fact, an assassin—the “hitman” of the film’s title—whose mission is to kill the cartel’s leader, Fausto Alarcón. The entire plot is then revealed to be an elaborate scheme to secretly insert Alejandro into Mexico, where he breaks into Alarcón’s house and kills him—along with his wife and children—while the family is having dinner.
It’s a shocking moment, one that might sink any other film. But Villeneuve and the screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan (later of Yellowstone fame), have prepared us for it by fully fleshing-out Alejandro’s character to the point that we can understand—almost—his actions. Throughout the movie, he is presented to us unfailingly cheerful yet lethal, fearless yet controlled, protective yet ruthless. We also learn that Alarcón brutally murdered his daughter in the past, which goes a long way to explain his wrath.
Most importantly, in the climactic scene in which Alejandro first sneaks into Alarcón’s house, he is spotted by a kitchen maid. Instead of killing her, though, he lets her go, knowing she won’t warn anybody about his presence. In this way, the film subtly suggests that Alejandro doesn’t necessarily kill the wife and kids out of wrath. Rather, he has to make the assassination look like an inter-cartel hit, so he has to be as brutal as required—but no more so—to maintain that fiction.
It’s a great movie, and it also presages what I’ve seen as growing development in American action cinema. Namely, the blurring together of anti-heros and anti-villains, to the point where they are not only indistinguishable from each other, but they inhabit the same (main) character. What is Walter White of Breaking Bad if not an agglomeration of anti-villain/anti-hero? Or Frank Lucas in American Gangster? Or John Wick?
It’s almost as if Hollywood has entered some kind of time-warp and looped back to the gritty, neo-noir films of the early 1970s. Movies with dark, morally ambiguous protagonists like Point Blank, Charley Varrick, The Mechanic, and even Super Fly. That Vietnam-era when the American cinema goer became more hardened, more cynical toward government and law enforcement and Capitalism and…well…just about everything.
Author’s Note: I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve read that someone is going to remake John’s Carpenter’s class B-Movie action flick Escape from New York. I’m of two minds about this news. On the one hand, I find it repulsive that someone wants to make a new version of already perfect, classic film that hasn’t gone anywhere. (It’s streaming on Amazon Prime right now for cripe’s sake.) On the other hand, I realize that cinema is a popular medium, and young people today deserve a chance to see the tale told anew. (Young actors deserve a shot at it, too.)
At any rate, the news got me thinking about old Snake Plissken, who is one of the greatest anti-heroes in the history of Hollywood. So, I thought I would repost this short essay, which original appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes. Enjoy…!
When I was writing my last post about George Lucas’s digital fiddling with the iconic character of Han Solo, I started think about about the role of the anti-hero in American film. Why is it that so many of our cinematic “heroes” are anything but?
An anti-hero is usually defined as a protagonist who exhibits non-heroic traits, such as selfishness and amorality. Han Solo surely qualifies as a classic American anti-hero in that he firmly avows his own self-interest, only to later commit himself to a cause larger than himself. But when I think of an anti-hero, I usually think of Humphrey Bogart. Bogart’s Rick Blaine is perhaps the pinnacle of the American anti-hero, embodying as he does the core of American isolationism in the face of the Second World War. “I stick my neck out for no one,” Blaine says to his friend, the even more corrupt Captain Renault. Blaine seems to epitomize those very American qualities of pragmatism and an apolitical business sense (he runs the the most profitable bar in Casablanca, after all). But of course, he comes around, in the end, finding himself inextricably bound to humanity in the form of Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa.
Blaine might be the ultimate American anti-hero, but he is by no means the first. If you ask me, the American anti-hero has deep roots in the wild west, with our cultural fixation on cowboys, gunfighters, and the men who tamed them. Wyatt Earp might well be our first, best anti-hero, the saloon keeper, gambler, and occasional pimp who became the most famous lawman in history. America is a nation, after all, of exiles, people always seeking the frontier, and the values of the frontiersman are deeply intertwined with our own.
It’s no accident that the greatest Western ever to come out of Hollywood is John Ford’s The Searchers—a movie in which the “hero”, Ethan Edwards, is a borderline psychopath. Ethan (which means “strong” in Hebrew) exudes physical strength and a cold, practical wisdom. (He takes time to rest his horses even when pursuing the Indians who killed his brother.) Only Ethan has the strength to pursue the renegade Comanches and finally kill their leader, Scar, but Ethan comes perilously close to murdering his own niece in the process. Even in our greatest myths, the dark side of the American anti-hero seems to lurk just beneath the surface.
William Holden played not one but two famous anti-heroes in World War II dramas. Both were POWs: the cold-hearted, viciously entrepreneurial Sefton in Stalag 17, and then the resourceful Commander Shears in Bridge Over the River Kwai. Both films seem to acknowledge a kind of philosophical transition that took place in the post-war environment, a shift in values from the resolute, romantic heroism of the British Empire in favor of the more ambiguous, morally flexible version that Americans seemed to espouse. (It was we, after all, who dropped the atomic bomb and thus finished the war that the Old World started.)
All through the 1960s and 1970s, this new, darker, and perhaps more realistic vision of heroism seemed to thrive in counter-cultural films like Easy Rider, Billy Jack, and Cool Hand Luke. Perhaps the greatest actor to inhabit the anti-heroic mold since Bogie was Jack Nicholson, who in 1974’s Chinatown played the world-weary Jake Gittes, a private detective who specializes in taking compromising photos of cheating spouses, and who confesses to his lover that, when he was a cop, he did “as little as possible.” And yet Gittes is a bona fide American hero. Despite his better judgment, he finds himself unable to condone the corruption and evil that surrounds him.
Perhaps the darkest version of the anti-hero can be found in Francis Coppola’s flawed 1979 masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Martin Sheen plays the American Army assassin Captain Willard, who is dispatched on a journey through Cambodia to find (and kill) the renegade Colonel Kurz. The movie represents the intersection between our darkest war (Vietnam) and our darkest novel (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), the result being a kind of cinematic descent into hell
Even the greatest anti-heroes of science fiction like Mad Max and Snake Plissken have their roots in the post-war characters of Holden and Bogart. When Mad Max paces menacingly across the post-nuclear Outback, he seems like the reincarnation of Ethan Edwards, haunting our depopulated future even as John Wayne haunts our sun-scorched past.
Which brings me to my main point about the American anti-hero. For all their faults, there is one quality that Han Solo and Rick Blaine never come up short on: courage. Characters like Sefton and Gittes may profess to be cowards, but they aren’t. Not really. As Americans, we like to believe that we have no Old World illusions of grandeur, but we also want to believe in our own basic decency and moral integrity (despite all evidence to the contrary). Like Jake Gittes, the American anti-hero often fails—and sometimes fails miserably—but by the very act of attempting to do the right thing, he finds a kind of redemption. Americans pride themselves on not being suckers, but in the end, we want to think we are good.
Otherwise, what was all the fighting about, anyway?
There is a great moment in David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart when Nicholas Cage’s character, Sailor, says to his girlfriend, Lula, “The way your head works is God’s own private mystery.” Sometimes, I feel the same thing could be said about me. About my brain, that is.
A case in point: When Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—yes, The-Andrew-formally-known-as-Prince—was arrested by British authorities last February, my mind went on a very strange tangent. He was arrested, it is believed, for crimes he might have committed while in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, who has become the most famous sexual predator and pimp in the history of the world. As soon as I heard the news of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, my mind went back to the early 1980s, when he was dubbed “Randy Andy” by the U.K. tabloid press for his playboy lifestyle and many affairs with attractive women.
The name of one of these women leapt into my mind—that of Koo Stark, a beautiful actress from the 70s, with whom Mountbatten-Windsor had a long, heavily publicized romance. Stark contributed significantly to the “Randy Andy” mystique because she had (unwisely) appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Awakening of Emily, which I and millions of other teenaged boys watched (and re-watched) on late-night cable.
I must confess that as soon as I remembered her name—Koo Stark!—I was instantly transported back to that long ago time. What a great name it is, too, and even more so back then. Perfect for a hot young actress in swinging London! Yeah, baby! KOO STARK! “Koo,” as in the sound a dove makes right before it achieves orgasm; “Stark” as in stark naked! STARKERS!
I must also confess, however, that after the thrill of remembering Ms. Stark’s name wore off, I didn’t give her, or Mountbatten-Windsor, a second thought. UNTIL, just one day later, I was reading a great book about the great American film directors of the 1970s entitled The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer. The book documents the history of all three men as they created their early, iconic films including The Godfather, Jaws, and (of course), Star Wars. My jaw dropped when I read this passage describing Geoge Lucas’s quest to find the perfect actress for the role of Princess Leia…
George considered fourteen-year-old Terri Nunn, soon to be lead vocalist of the pop band Berlin, before whittling his list down to two nineteen-year-olds: Koo Stark and Fisher. They were strikingly similar: bright, funny, and gorgeous, both from show business families—Stark’s father, Wilbur, had produced film and television since the 1940s—and each with limited screen acting experience. Koo had appeared in one of her father’s smaller pictures and popped up, uncredited, as a bridesmaid in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Carrie had stolen a couple of scenes earlier that year in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo.
I was thus flabbergasted to learn that Koo Stark, rather than becoming famous for one stupid Cinemax-After-Dark movie and for her relationship with Randy Andy, might have become PRINCESS FRIGGIN LEIA instead! Ye Gods! How the Wheel of Fortune doth turn!
Mr. Fischer’s book got me thinking that Ms. Stark probably had a much more interesting history and character than I suspected, so I immediately did a web search on her. Sure enough, her Wikipedia page confirmed that she has had a pretty amazing life. Besides having been in contention for the role of Leia, she appeared in several “real” movies from the 1970s, and she was the understudy for a role in the National Theater’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the decades since, she became a successful and respected stage actress, as well as an accomplished professional photographer. Also, it turns out that she is American (I always thought she was English), and she is three years older than Mountbatten-Windsor, which suggests she might be one of the few beautiful women in England at the time whom he did not (obviously) exploit.
Stark in the 1970s
I was even more amazed to learn that, in fact, she did ultimately land a small part in Star Wars, that of Camie Marstrap, a friend of Luke Skywalker’s. (Her scenes were, alas, cut from the final film.)
And so, in true Synchronicity-for-Bookworms fashion, I discovered a tenuous karmic link between Jeffrey Epstein and Star Wars, conducted through the being of Ms. Koo Stark (and my own imagination, of course).
Or maybe it’s not so tenuous. At the risk of seeming a bit precious, I would suggest that Koo Stark was a victim of the same exploitative, male-controlled world of acting and model that men like Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and countless others have abused for a century. After all, if she had not appeared in that “erotic” film when she was a kid, she might have found more success in films later. Of course, I have no idea if her appearance in an exploitation film had any impact on Lucas’s decision not to cast her as Princess Leia (I doubt that it did). But I do know that the stigma followed for years.
Fortunately, she overcame it. She has successfully sued several newspapers for libel, including a 2022 case against The Daily Mail, which referred to her (unfairly) as a “soft-core porn actress.”
Yesterday I got a three-word text message from my son Connor: Kilgore is dead.
I knew, of course, exactly who he was referring to—Robert Duvall, the great actor who passed away yesterday at the age of 95. More specifically, Connor was calling out one of Duvall’s most memorable characters, that of Lt. Colonel Kilgore, the cheerfully psychopathic Army commander in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Everyone, it seems, has a favorite Duvall role. For many young dudes these days, it is Kilgore. For others, it’s the soft-spoken but iron-willed Tom Hagen in the Godfather films. For still others, it is the authoritarian Marine dad in The Great Santini, or the fearless Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae. No matter what kind of character he was playing, Duvall’s own, real-life character always shone through: smart, fierce, tough, and comfortable in his own skin.
Being a mega-film-nerd, my definitive Duvall role was that of THX 1138, the titular character in George Lucas’s first film, which is still one of the most daring and visually stunning movies ever made. THX 1138 also marked one of the few films in which Duvall got to play the lead. Most of the time, he was cast in supporting roles, working in the background. Invariably, this allowed him—like Kilgore in his helicopter—to swoop in and steal the movie.
Although he trained with many famous Method actors, he was not generally considered to be one himself. Yet, he could hang with the De Niros, Pacinos, and Hoffmans of the world with seemingly effortless ease. Indeed, as an actor, he could hang with anybody.
For many (White) guys my age, Duvall represented the ideal American man. German/Irish but still cool. Macho but not toxic. Smart but not showy.
And funny. Even in the midst of mass-slaughter, Kilgore is funny. So is Santini. So, in his own way, is THX 1138. One of my favorite, later roles that Duval played is that of the craggy old Marine who helps Tom Cruise in the 2012’s Jack Reacher. With just a few lines of dialogue, and a barely suppressed, ghoulish chuckle, he manages to deliver some of the funny moments in recent cinema.
