We all know the scenario, the main bad guy has the hero cornered or otherwise at a disadvantage and offers to spare his life if he’ll join the bad guys cause.
Its easy to see why the hero dramatically spurns the bad guys offer in movie-land but in what we laughingly call the ‘real world’ surely the hero would just pretend (after some hesitation to make it at least semi-convincing) to sign up to Evil in order to escape his current situation while biding his time to take his nemesis’ organisation down from the inside.
So has any movie/tv hero actually done this?
(feel free to swap gender related pronouns in the above post, men don’t have the lock on either heroism or scenery-chewing supervillianary but its much harder to type)
It’s more often done as a ruse, I expect, or as a temporary truce, rather than switching sides.
One movie where it appears that hero changes sides is Charade, but, of course, it’s purely appearance, and there are several layers of deception.
Jayne switches sides on Firefly. Several times, in fact. For some definitions of “good” and “bad.” He sells out his original employers when Mal makes him a better offer, and he later tries to sell out Simon and River to the Alliance.
For that matter, Luke could be seen as doing this when he goes to Vader in RotJ. His father certainly thought so. Maybe.
Brick, Miller’s Crossing, Yojimbo (all of which are based to some degree on Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest), The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, and countless other noir-ish films. It is a central plot point in Casablanca and (reluctantly) The Third Man. It is a common trope in noir, i.e. “playing both sides”. In The Big Lebowski, a sort-of spoof of The Big Sleep,the detective played by Jon Polito accuses The Dude of running this kind of game, (“I dig your work. Playing one side against the other, in bed with everybody,”) but of course The Dude is clueless and actually being used by everyone else to advance their agendas.
This set-up seems common enough that I can’t believe I can’t think of a good example:
(1) Group of good guys trying to stop some evil
(2) Somewhat troublesome good guy gets his plan rejected or bid for leadership shot down, etc.
(3) Troublesome good guy may or may not leave the group in a huff.
(4) Good Guy Group gets into a tight spot, usually a trap. Troublesome good guy appears and says he has joined the Bad Side where he’s respected.
(5) At some point, True Protagonist and New Bad Guy fight, NBG says “Come to our side, it’s awesome” but True Protagonist stays firm and defeats NBG in a bittersweet conclusion.
Now obviously this only works if you have an ensemble cast of good guys to draw someone away from.
Also A Fistful of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More, Last Man Standing…
You also kinda see this all the time in undercover police movies - either the character will be undercover the whole time and you’re not sure if he’ll go back to being good (Deep Cover, Donnie Brasco, Rush), or a previously unknown undercover character will be forced to dramatically blow his cover (Running Scared, The Departed).
Given a chance to live and see his twue wuv again some day, he agrees to join the crew of the Dread Pirate Roberts, and eventually BECOMES the Dread Pirate Roberts.
In some versions of The Count of Monte Cristo (certainly in the Jim Caviezel version), the newly escaped Edmond Dantes is given a choice between death and joining a pirate’s crew, and he elects to join the crew, as a means of biding time and putting together the money and the plan he’ll need to wreak his revenge.
I haven’t seen any of the*** Hostel ***movies, but isn’t there one where the last surviving girl is a millionaire’s daughter who stays alive at the end by JOINING the secret society that had been killing all her friends?
In the Jet Li film, Twin Warriors, Li plays one of two childhood friends exiled from a Shaolin monastery. After some adventures together, Li joins the rebel army, while his friend becomes the Emperor’s enforcer.
In the Flash Gordon movie from the '70s, Dr. Zarkov is brainwashed into serving Ming, but it turns out it was a trick, and Zarkov had beaten the brain washing.
Wait, really? I obviously wasn’t paying that much attention. I like my ending better, so I’ll stick with that instead of rewatching that confusing mess
I was trying to remain focused on the specific scenario of the good guy “going bad” in response to duress and then undermining his opponent from within. So an undercover cop (who conceals his “good”) identity doesn’t really fit. In the “Man With No Name” films, the Eastwood character is really just out for himself; he isn’t particularly good in any respect.
Martins pretends to be won over by Lime, while really just setting him up to be captured by the British in the international sector of Vienna. Since he actually spends most of the film believing Lime to be good (or, at least, not nearly as bad as the major makes him out to be) and really only sells out Lime to “rescue” Anna, it is not really the best example.
However, another that occurs to me is the underrated (if absurd) Hitchcock movie Torn Curtain, in which rocket scientist Paul Newman defects to East Germany in order to get a lecture on the East Bloc’s understanding of missile interveption systems. A better example from the Cold War period and genre is the Le Carré adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold with Richard Burton as the faux turncoat, albeit with a particular twist that I won’t reveal for those who have not seen the film.
The Bridge over the River Kwai has Alec Guinness helping the Japanese to build the bridge out of pride, even though the bridge would be used against his own compatriots. The switch from resistance to aid is slow and subtle, but at the end he realizes the horror of what he’s done.
