James Whitmore, who died of lung cancer at the age of 87 at his Malibu home last week, was the Mr. Flinty of American character actors. Compact, bushy-browed, and shovel-faced, he had the look and manner of an economy-size Spencer Tracy. Whitmore won a Tony for his Broadway debut in the 1947 World War II play Command Decision. Entering movies two years later, he won a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his Hollywood debut, the World War II drama Battleground. (He got the part after it was rejected by, yes, Spencer Tracy.) He would go on to play a hunchback small-time crook in John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950), provide narration for Huston's butchered Stephen Crane adaptation The Red Badge of Courage (1951), sing Cole Porter in Kiss Me Kate (1954), go down fighting against the attack of the giant ants in Them! (1954), preside over the monkey assembly in Planet of the Apes (1968), serve as the corrupt chief inspector of the N.Y.P.D. in Madigan (1968), and witness the bombing of Pearl Harbor as General Halsey in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). In more recent years, he appeared in The Majestic (2001), The Relic (1997), and most notably, The Shawshank Redemption (1994), as the elderly prison librarian who can't cut it on the outside. He also did a lot of TV, including an especially sharp 1986 PBS production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with Aidan Quinn and Joan Allen. He also won an Emmy Award in 2000 for a guest appearance on The Practice.

Whitmore also has a special place in recent theatrical history as a major popularizer of the historical-figure-based one man show. He started out with a stage show called Will Rogers' USA, where he made with the lasso and the familiar wisecracks, which was recorded for TV in 1972; he later moved on to Harry Truman with Give 'Em Hell, Harry, which was made into a 1975 movie version that earned him another Academy Award nomination. Three years later he filmed his tribute to Teddy Roosevelt, Bully!

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The Library of Congress has announced its annual selections of the twenty-five films chosen to be added to those included in the National Film Registry, on the basis of their "cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance." (They've been doing this for nineteen years now; this year's inductees bring the total up to a neat 500.) As usual, the list features a number of Hollywood classics, including John Huston's caper film The Asphalt Jungle (1950); John Boorman's modern Southern Gothic Deliverance (1972); Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, one of the earliest indictments of the potential rabble-rousing power of television; Erich Von Stroheim's silent feature Foolish Wives (1922); King Vidor's 1929 Hallelujah, an early sound musical with an all-black cast, and the 1961 Broadway musical adaptation Flower Drum Song, an early break away from the tradition of casting Caucasian performers in Asian roles; James Whale's Universal horror classic The Invisible Man (1933), starring the voice of Claude Rains; Nicholas Ray's febrile Western Johnny Guitar (1954); the 1957 On the Bowery, an attempt to fuse documentary locations and non-professional actors in a story of skid row alcoholics; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), an adventure film featuring some of the best work of the special effects master Ray Harryhausen; and the obscure sci-fi B-movie,The Terminator (1984). There are also films that document moments in the careers of legendary performers, such as the 1926 W. C. Fields short So's Your Old Man and the early Buster Keaton two-reeler One Week, and such historical curios as Disneyland Dream (1956), a color home movie of a family trip to Disneyland that provides "a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott’s Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956"; three year's worth of documentary footage that George Stevens shot during World War II; and a film directed by the late James Blue for the United States Information Agency documenting the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington. Also included are experiemental and student films such as Len Lye's "scratch" film Free Radicals (1979), Mitchell Block's 1973 No Lies, and Pat O'Neill's "city symphont", Water and Power, which dates from 1989--the first year that the National Registry began to make its selections.

The full list is as follows:

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Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday.  Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat.  Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him.  The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies.  By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen.  When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born.  Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen.  But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code:  although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code.  So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

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