In 2006, Robert De Niro donated an archival collection containing “more than 1,300 boxes of papers, film, movie props and costumes” from throughout his motion picture career to the Harry Ransom Center, a research library and museum at the University of Texas in Austin. “Filling more than 300 archival boxes, the paper portion of the collection includes De Niro's heavily-annotated scripts and correspondence, make-up and wardrobe photographs, wardrobe continuity books, costume designs and posters, and extensive production, publicity and research material,” according to a press release from the Ransom Center.

“With about 8,500 items filling more than 1,000 boxes, the costumes and props within the collection constitute the Center's largest single costume holding and include such iconic items as the leopard-print boxing robe worn by De Niro in Raging Bull (1980) and the voluminous, body-length coats of the creature in Frankenstein (1994).

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Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied:  "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies."  So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers.  We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even.  While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud.  The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir.  When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things:  the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane.  As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

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