I was just rewatching Batman (the Burton/Keaton/Nicholson one), and I was reminded that there are several of the Joker’s goons/henchmen who have no dialog, no name, but are quite memorable. To wit: the ninja guy with the swords, and the big black guy with classes from the bell tower.
That got me thinking about other such nameless characters who stand out… one whose face we never even see but who I’ve always felt sorry for is the Tie Fighter pilot from Return of the Jedi who chases Wedge and the Millenium Falcon all the way through the Death Star 2, almost all the way to the other side, and then explodes. That guy was an AMAZING pilot, and he deserved better than to go out like that.
What goons or henchmen made an impression on you?
(For purposes of this thread, any character who has a name, nontrivial dialog, or meaningful emotional interaction with the hero doesn’t count… so Karl from Die Hard, while clearly a henchmen, is hardly a faceless one, but the Asian henchman played by Al “Genghis Khan” Leong, or the guy who looks like Huey Lewis, would.)
The swordsman who gets shot from Raiders of the Lost Ark. His scene is just a few seconds long, but memorable.
There’s a scene in one of Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar novels that always stuck in my head. These human characters are going through a lair of these nasty lizard-man types, when an egg hatches. The baby lizard crawls out, sees the humans - and its eyes instantly fill with hate and it attacks, despite being unable to do more than chew on their boots. It underlined just how deeply hardwired the lizardmen were for hostility towards everyone else.
The unnamed goons from the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West. Best unnamed goons ever, with ~13 minutes of screen time lovingly lavished on them.
She isn’t nameless I don’t think but the goon played by Grace Jones in A View To A Kill was pretty memorable, I enjoyed her disbelief that her boss and lover a neo-nazi betrayed her along with Bond.
The minion that gets turned into a glow stick in Despicable Me, as well as the minion who unexpectedly turns his fellow minion into a glow stick. I laughed so hard I almost choked.
He doesn’t fit with the OP’s qualifications because he has a name, but one of my favorite henchmen is Ben Foster in 3:10 To Yuma. He was truly fierce and frightening.
My favorite Tie Fighter Pilot example is in Empire Strikes Back…the one that had his Tie Fighter collide with an asteroid and he is ejected into space in flames.
That makes me think of another Die Hard example…although it is with nameless cops instead of nameless goons. When the SWAT team is storming the building and McClane is screaming “You macho assholes” there is the one guy that gets his hand stuck on a pricker bush and recoils away from it like it was poison.
Ben Welden. Appeared in numerous episodes of “The Adventures Of Superman” as an old-fashioned “underworld” henchman. Always anonymous, IF memory serves.
You guys know that was the same actor, right? He was also the henchman who gets chopped up in the stone grinder in Temple of Doom.
My choice? The guy from Never Say Never Again who beats the crap out of Bond with his metal belt cord thingy, then Bond beats him by throwing his own urine sample in his face. Remember him? FYI, it was the same aforementioned actor.
