I was watching How the West was Won on late night TV recently. For those who haven’t seen it, it was one of those “more stars than there are in the heavens” epics like The Longest Day or Greatest Story Ever Told in which actors who usually played leads or at least major supporting roles appeared in only slightly longer than cameo roles.
One such actor was Walter Brennan, a man who most remembered for playing the cranky but sweet/simple but wise old man for the last couple of decades of his very long career (though he did make movies when young). He’s perhaps best known for the near fatally folksy sitcom The Real McCoys. (He was also one of the richest men in show business due to investments, but that’s not so relevant.)
He was only on screen in How the West Was Won (b/w pic) for about ten minutes, but he gave a great and very convincing turn as the patriarch of a clan of cold blooded murdering thieves who preyed upon people traveling on the river. He’s almost thoroughly evil: he’s trained his teenaged daughter to take men to “see the varmint” (basically leading them away for what they probably think is sex and then killing them for their valuables), giggles while he commits armed robbery, and clearly has no qualms about murdering whole families if need be. Great performance against type by someone not usually thought of as a great actor. (I seem to remember reading somewhere that he loved that role for exactly that reason.)
It’s no surprise to anybody that Robin Williams is a talented dramatic actor (I like his dramatic roles far better than his manic schtick) but I thought he was especially good as the predatory rapist and murderer in Insomnia. He held his own as a foil for Pacino. He was also good in a small role in Dead Again as a psychiatrist who’d lost his license for ethical violations (sleeping with patients) and reduced to working in a grocery store, but still capable of valuable forensic insight (sort of a low-rent PG rated Hannibal Lecter).
Who are some other actors usually associated with light or comic fare who’ve made great villains?
PS- A few years ago there were rumors that Rowan Atkinson was going to play Voldemort (totally false it turned out, of course), but I was actually hoping they were true. I think he could probably give a great turn as a chilling psychopath (hell, it’s just Edmund Blackadder with fewer jokes). I think the words I’ve heard attributed to Edmund Kean, Edwin Booth, Donald Wolfit, and others probably are true: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
I came in here to point out Robin Williams. I think the reason he’s an effective villain, and that so many other comic actors are, is that there is often a hint of the unsettling about comedy.
Fred MacMurray. “My Three Sons,” Son of Flubber…Double Indemnity…okay, he was an ambivalent villain there, but a villain all the same. And a good one.
I think he was a good villain in some other movie but my brain isn’t working today.
And also: Andy Griffith. It may have been an MFT but he turned in a great performance as a villain who stranded a kid in the desert, and his first role (I think it was his first) he was kind of a bad guy, too. Folksy–but bad.
Ah yes- Lonesome Rhodes in A Face in the Crowd- just saw it recently on TCM. He was a class A sleazebag in that. (I don’t think I’ve ever read a first-hand account of Griffith that had anything nice to say about him, so maybe this was less acting than Andy Taylor.)
Ben Kingsley seems to play softspoken good guys in films like Gandhi, House of Sand & Fog, Schindler’s List, Searching for Bobby Fisher and even soft spoken bad guys like Cosmo in Sneakers.
But he became a menacing loud mouth bad guy in Sexy Beast unlike anything I’ve seen him do.
I’ve posted it before and am happy to do so again. Michael Keaton pegs the villain meter in Pacific Heights. His performance in **Desperate Measures ** is also quite chilling, but since we’d alread seen him playing the personification of evil in Pacific Heights it wasn’t as jarring. Pacific Heights to me was also just a much scarier movie.
I’m tempted to claim that all of his good acting karma was destroyed when it came into contact with his performance in the film of “A Sound of Thunder”. Hell, it was destroyed when he agreed to even BE IN that film…
You’ve clearly never seen John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, then, because Brennan’s even better at being “worse” as the patriarch of the Clanton gang. There was often a strain of genuine menace in his “crazy old coot” routine, and one of his 3 Oscars was for the rather amoral Judge Roy Bean in The Westerner.
The one that came to mind for me was Basil Rathbone. The bad guy in so many swashbucklers (probably most notably The Adventures of Robin Hood) because of his excellance as a fencer and yet is best known as Sherlock Holmes.
There is of course comedian Mike Myers, after all he did play Dr. Evil.
Don Rickles was much better known as a comedian, but in a number of roles he has played at least a sleeze and arguably a villain.
Ed McMann, Johnny Carson’s sidekick played a bad guy in the original Fun With Dick and Jane (The one with Jane Fonda and George Segal).
