The Screengrab : major dundee

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Bambi’s Mother in BAMBI (1942) & Debra Winger in TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)

The actual moment that Debra Winger’s character dies in Terms of Endearment is all well and weepy (and fairly Goth, what with that deathbed make-up job), but the real reason James L. Brooks’ ten-hanky drama makes the list is the gut-punch scene where Winger’s dying Emma Greenway Horton says goodbye to her two sons in the hospital, easily the most harrowing family tragedy scene since the national trauma induced by the off-screen demise of Bambi’s mother (thanks to goddamn Man entering the forest) way back in 1942. In the all-time Top Ten of throat-lump-inducing lines of dialogue, it’s hard to beat Mr. Bambi’s grim pronouncement, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.” But for me, no single moment of cinema is sadder than Winger’s Emma telling her youngest son, after their final visit together, “I think it went pretty well, don’t you?” -- except maybe the look on the little kid’s face when he bravely nods goodbye. (Now if you'll excuse me, I...uh...think there’s something in my eye...) (AO)

Warren Oates in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974)

Bennie the down-on-his-luck piano player just wanted to make an easy buck. Some rich guy who calls himself El Jefe was promising money in exchange for proof that a poonhound Bennie knows, one Alfredo Garcia, was dead. Sure, Bennie knew that proof might involve a little grave robbery, but the promise of money and a new beginning with his ladyfriend Elita gave his small-change dreams a lift. What he didn't know was that every step he made was shadowed by death and failure. First he has to kill a couple of bikers who intend to rape Elita. Then, when he finds the body, he loses Elita along with whatever remnants of his soul he had kept scraped together. After he recovers his precious proof of death, the severed head of the poonhound, the death toll mounts furiously while Bennie grows more and more unhinged, monologuing in his car to the filthy, fly-streaked bag in which Garcia's head rots. There's something rotten in Bennie now. There's something rotten in the whole scenario, and when he finally confronts El Jefe, he's beyond caring about life and death. He has nowhere else to go, and the trajectory of his life will soon converge into a single point with the probability of his death. (HC)

Warren Oates in MAJOR DUNDEE (1965)

It's supposed to be Moby-Dick in the Old West, but where the Great Whaling Book starts cooking with grease about 2/3 of the way in, Major Dundee falls to pieces. With Charlton Heston and Richard Harris in the lead roles, there's a Christmas dinner's worth of ham smeared all over even the good parts. But the supporting cast is excellent. And when Warren Oates, playing ne'er-do-well Confederate soldier O.W. Hadley, deserts and is captured, the supporting staff quietly, almost wordlessly, shows up the stars of the movie. In the above scene, consider how natural Oates seems, how L.Q. Jones and Ben Johnson express their characters' tension, sorrow, and anger with barely a sentence between them. The movie falls apart after this. It seems that Oates, with his weird energy and comic timing, was the thread holding everything together. (HC)

Joel McCrea in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

Although the clip is nowhere to be found on YouTube, Joel McCrea's Steve Judd goes out with a dignity that all who live by the gun -- or whatever "living by the gun" means metaphorically these days -- should aspire to. Earlier, he tells his old friend Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) that he "just wants to enter [his] house justified." When Westrum makes to steal the gold that's under their protection, Judd is a step ahead of him, but the disappointment in the way he looks at Westrum is almost worse than his threat to make Westrum stand trial. The final shootout isn't about the gold, though. It's about the girl they're protecting from the feral mining family she's gotten herself mixed up with. Westrum redeems himself at the end, choosing to take the honorable side and stand with his friend. When Judd is mortally wounded, Westrum has the wisdom to step back, shield the young people from the blunt reality of death, and give Judd the closure he wants: alone, justified, eyes gazing up at his beloved high country. (HC)

Toshiro Mifune in THRONE OF BLOOD (1957)

Here's something all of you aspiring regicides should know: when the witch or witches make a prophecy about your success or failure, don't share it with anyone. Macbeth saw his thanes defect to the other side and was finally dispatched by Macduff, whose rough birth made him Macbeth's ideal assassin. Toshiro Mifune's Lord Washizu meets death at the hands of his own archers in a spectacular rain of arrows as he runs from place to place, bamboo shafts sticking out of his body at odd angles, his face a mask of horror, fear, betrayal, and anger. It's a crime that this scene isn't available on the youtubes. (HC)

Takashi Shimura in IKIRU (1952)

Takashi Shimura's face is, even in rest, a remarkable vehicle for his emotions. Perhaps its highest calling was carrying the stricken look he uses throughout Ikiru as Kanji Watanabe, a dying bureaucrat who realizes that his life will mean nothing when he is gone. He decides that his decades of pointless public service will be worth it if he can turn a stinking cesspool of a lot in an unappreciated corner of Tokyo into a park with a playground for children. The final third of the movie leaps forward to his funeral, as his family and co-workers discuss his drive and mission, growing more and more grief-stricken as they realize why he fought so hard for this little playground. At the end, we hear and see the testimonial of a police officer who saw Watanabe on the final night of his life, sitting on a swing in the park that is his legacy for the world, with his face transformed. All of the fear and sadness that he had been carrying in every scene of the movie has become into a beaming look of pure and simple satisfaction and joy. It's one of the most impressive and powerful emotional gut-punches in all of cinema. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Hayden Childs

Charlton Heston: Gentleman, Shakespearean, Attempted Loser

Phil Nugent — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Whatever you thought of his politics (which over the course of his career covered a lot of self-contradictory ground) or his movies (ditto), few deaths this past year left a bigger crater in movie history than Charlton Heston's As Anthony Giardina writes in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, "Heston was an actor about whom what we say, now and forever, is likely to be determined by the huge, looming bookends of his career. Barely out of his 20s, he put on a beard, dyed his hair gray and descended Mount Sinai carrying the tablets in The Ten Commandments (1956). Some 40 years later, Heston carried a different set of tablets for the N.R.A., extolling its members’ rights with a passion that edged close to zealotry. Lost somewhere in all of this was the subtler, more reflective man who emerged in the 1960s when Heston, after the back-to-back successes of Ben Hur and El Cid, made a series of smaller films critical of the traditional male ethos, an ethos he himself had pretty much come to embody. 'Our time is oriented to the loser,' Heston wrote in his diaries in 1965, and though he had, up to that time, almost invariably played winners, he seemed to know in his actor’s bones that the true riches were to be found playing the sorts of antiheroes then dominating the movies." Heston had a special affection for his role in the 1968 Western Will Penny, in which he played a middle-aged, illiterate cowboy facing the end of his way of life with nothing to look forward to but the closing of the frontier and Donald Pleasance as the head of the local welcome wagon. Heston's performance in that movie is very fine, but there was something wasted when Heston, with his American eagle profile and embodiment of the can-do spirit, played a real loser, a mere mortal. That's why his most fruitful exploration of that terrain was probably in the title role of Sam Peckinpah's 1965 cavalry Western and Vietnam allegory, Major Dundee. Giardina describes Dundee, whose rash and remorseless decision to track down a renegade Apache and his followers smacks of both honorable duty and an ambitious, frustrated man's grab for glory, as "a kind of Donald Rumsfeld of the Civil War, but a Rumsfeld suffering an identity crisis." Peckinpah clearly pushed Heston hard to deliver the performance he wanted, and it makes sense that, in the heat of the battle to get the picture made, Heston offered to fork over his entire salary to the studio in exchange for them backing off from their decision to fire the director. (To his eternal astonishment, they took him up on it.) But it also makes sense that he never worked with Peckinpah again, though it's tantalizing to imagine him as Peckinpah's Pat Garrett.

Another, closer and more personal glimpse of Heston comes from Nicholas A. Salerno, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, who has written a brief remembrance of how he came to make Heston's acquaintance through a shared passion for Shakespeare. In the 1970s, the prof screened for his students the Joseph Manckiewicz movie version of Julius Caesar, with Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, David Bradley's film of a student production made in 1950 with Heston in the role, and a 1970 film, directed by Stuart Burge, in which Heston reprised the role of Marc Antony. "In both those films, a near-nude Heston was shown running the race on the Feast of the Lupercal. A hunk when he ran for Bradley, the somewhat overweight Heston running for Burge was not necessarily a pleasant sight." But Salerno managed to pull it together enough to ask Heston for permission to show his class a 16-mm. film of the 1972 Antony and Cleopatra, which Heston directed and starred in. ("This time around," he assures us, "Heston's more mature body was better suited to Shakespeare's mature Antony than it had been to the younger Antony in the Burge film.") Heston "did me one better. He called me with a generous offer: He would send his personal 35-millimeter print and come with it for a question-and-answer session with my class -- if I could find a way to screen the print. Enter Dan Harkins, the owner then of a few local movie theaters, now the emperor of a chain of theaters crossing state boundaries. He had been a student in the first film class I taught. All it took was a phone call: Harkins offered me his Valley Art Theatre in Tempe free of charge. The print came by courier a few days before Heston's scheduled arrival. My students packed the theater. But would Heston really turn up? On Nov. 1, 1973, I was pacing in front of the Valley Art, waiting, I suppose, for Moses to drive up in a stretch limo, when I spotted Heston walking down Mill Avenue. He'd had his driver let him off a few blocks away, so he could get a feel for Tempe." It would be the first of a number of run-ins that Salerno would have with a man he found to be "a lover and thoughtful interpreter" of Shakespeare as well as "gentlemanly, generous with his time, willing -- nay, eager -- to talk with my students." Heston would invite Salerno to see his 1975 production of Macbeth with Vanessa Redgrave and sometimes ask his opinion of scripts. He also attended a one-man show Heston gave where he showed clips from his movies and took questions from the audience, an evening where the "most moving moment was his emotional retelling of Eddie Robinson's death scene in Soylent Green; both actors knew that Robinson was dying in real life and that they were immortalizing their last Earthly goodbyes on film." Salerno adds that "By the time all the NRA stuff made the news, we had gone our separate ways," and he mentions that in all his conversations with Heston, he managed to avoid the subject of politics. You learn this stuff on the road to tenure.

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.