[Inaugurating a new series about movies that are not currently available on home video, and why this sucks.]

Patty Hearst wasn't Natasha Richardson's first movie, but it did mark the first time that the then-twenty-five-year-old actress had the lead role in a feature film. It also marked the first time that she was asked to pass for American, an ability that can make or break an English performer who hopes to make it in the international marketplace. In fact, she was asked to pass for an actual American, in a film based on Hearst's own account of her 1974 abduction by the crackpot "revolutionary" group the SLA and that event's aftermath--a film that Hearst herself, who posed for publicity photos with her movie doppelganger, had some input on. But no pressure! The director Paul Schrader made the movie on a tight budget at a time when he was coming off some expensive failures; much of the first half is set in the house where Hearst was kept prisoner. In fact, because of Schrader's decision to tell the story from Hearst's point of view, a fair amount of it is set in the dark closet where she was locked until she began parroting the SLA members' slogans and convinced them that she was ready to switch sides and become a guerrilla soldier. The strategy means that Richardson has to not just carry the picture but to supply its heart and soul, while remaining essentially mysterious to the audience: as Patty goes from being helpless, whimpering victim to fugitive from justice, you stare at her, trying to figure out where her head is at. It isn't until the end, when she's behind bars and plotting out how best to spin her story, that it's fully clear that, up to that point, she hasn't really known herself.

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All throughout Black History Month in February, the Screengrab's That Guy! feature will be taking a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. Last week we focused on Ving Rhames, and this week, we're taking a look at the man recently voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For Ving Rhames: Delroy Lindo. Born in London to a family of Jamaican ancestry, Lindo's facial similarities to Rhames, along with his powerful physique and tendency to portray gangsters, drug dealers and other low-lifes, has often led to confusion between the two. But while Rhames' on-screen style is smooth, calculating and understated, Lindo tends towards the edgy, the explosive, the half-mad. After making his first major film (More American Graffiti) in 1979, Delroy Lindo didn't make another film for a decade, preferring to focus on the stage roles to which he still occasionally returns; he earned widespread praise (and Tony nominations) for his work in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. When he finally returned to the big screen, he found his biggest proponent in America's most prominent black director: Spike Lee cast him in a number of memorable roles, and even handed him the role of family man Woody Carmichael in Crooklyn — a thinly veiled portrait of Lee's own father.

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That Guy!'s salute to Black History Month continues with a look at one of our favorite contemporary African-American character actors, Ving Rhames. A powerfully built six-footer with an intimidating mein and a penchant for playing bruisers and bad-asses, Rhames is in fact one of Hollywood's most notorious nice guys, a deeply spiritual and profoundly humanitarian person with a reputation in America's most backstabbing town for always being the touch for someone in need. Born with the substantially less intimidating Christian name of "Irving" in 1959, Rhames picked up his stage name not from the mean streets of his native Harlem, but from the decidedly non-superfly Stanley Tucci, a classmate of his at SUNY-Purchase. After formative experiences at the High School of Performing Arts and on Broadway, he launched a successful film career in the mid-1990s and has gone on to become something of a go-to guy for casting directors looking for a deft blend of intimidation and intelligence. (Which is not to say that his film career is nothing but bluster: he not only played a drag queen in a TV movie entitled Holiday Heart, but recently appeared in the excrable I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, singing "I'm Every Woman" while naked in a locker room full of men.)

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