Who do we think are the most despicable characters in movie history? I don’t mean most evil or scariest. I mean the ones we find most loathsome, most deplorable. Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men” is terrifying, but not despicable in the sense I’m looking for.
I’ll start the list with:
Mister Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” - No explanation needed
Jerry Lundegaard in “Fargo” - Selfish, cowardly, and stupid. A truly awful person
Mr. Sheldrake in “The Apartment” - Slimy, selfish, smug, a user. After the movie came out, women would stop Fred MacMurray to scold him for playing such an awful character. One woman even went so far as to hit him with her purse.
Gregory Anton in “Gaslight” - Manipulative, the original gaslighter (there was an earlier version of the film, but this is the one that popularized the term).
Percy Wetmore from The Green Mile: Cruel, vindictive, homophobic, and petulant (I’m purposely avoiding the actual criminals in the movie, or Sam Rockwell’s Wild Bill would be included.
Billy Ray Cobb (Nicky Katt) and Pete Willard (Doug Hutchison) in A Time to Kill: Racist pedophiles who rape and attempt to murder a young Black girl, leaving her battered, urinated on, and unable to have kids.
I think the last of these fits more the evil trope the OP didn’t want rather than the despicable trope he did. Yes, evil people generally have bad character, but more often they’re just cruel & stupid.
My contribution:
Perhaps Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) from The Devil Wears Prada can start the female leading role for this thread.
Carlo Rizzi from The Godfather. A sycophant, bully, wife-beater, traitor, and, in the end, a sniveling coward. In a movie filled with violent gangsters, crooked cops, and assorted sleazeballs, it takes a truly noteworthy degree of douchebaggery to stand out truly.
Beat me to it! That’s the first character I thought of, too.
But it’s hard to top Jerry Lundegaard from Fargo, especially the “stupid” part. Like it never occurred to him that his plan was doomed to failure from the start because his father-in-law wouldn’t trust him with the ransom money, after earlier not grasping that his father-in-law and his financial advisor wouldn’t just hand him money to “invest.”
So he only succeeded in getting several people killed because of his stupid plan. At best, the two kidnappers would have gotten a much larger payday and he would still be no better off financially.
As much as I love William Macy’s performance, I have to agree on Jerry Lundegaard. I’ve always seen him as pathetic and stupid, never thought of him as despicable until this thread.
And a probably minority opinion: Benjamin Braddock (The Graduate). After a zillion viewings of The Graduate I’ve come to see him as a narcissistic sociopath who ruthlessly disregards the pitiful Mrs. Robinson who’s had the terrible bad luck of falling in love with him.
One slight mitigating factor in her despicability is that she’s an agent of The System, so the awful things she does aren’t so much her own actions as The System itself. She can be easily replaced by someone else who’ll do the same thing.
Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity was cold, calculating and manipulative. Does she count?
On another level, Thomas Keefer in The Caine Mutiny was calculating and manipulative, and when the chips were down, he was a craven coward. I think he definitely counts.