The Screengrab : manhunter

21 Stars We Hate (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

SEAN PENN

Spicoli in Fast Times At Ridgemont High? Classic. Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking? Harrowing. Emmett Ray in Sweet and Lowdown? Hilarious. Milk? Looks great. And nobody’s better at playing sketchy, fidgety weasels like the coked-out traitor in The Falcon and The Snowman, the coked-out lawyer in Carlito’s Way and, uh, the incredibly annoying coked-out movie producer in Hurlyburly. But, ugh...it’s amazing how a guy capable of sporadically fantastic character performances can be such a humorless, pretentious tool in real life. I’m guessing he’s calmed down a lot since the Shanghai Surprise days when (as observed by Christopher Ciccone in his book Life With My Sister Madonna) the middle class white boy from the comfortable home enjoyed presenting himself as a tough street kid, trashing hotel rooms, assaulting paparazzi and hanging out with Charles Bukowski. But Penn still can’t take a joke, as evidenced by his humorless retort to Chris Rock’s joke about the low-wattage stardom of Jude Law during the 2005 Academy Awards, not to mention the stereotypical "serious artist" grim=quality aesthetic he brings to his directorial work (i.e., two films about dead children, one about feuding brothers and one about a completely egocentric guy who dies moronically ‘cuz he’s just gotta be free, man). Even when the actor pokes fun at his own self-serious image, it’s hard to believe it’s all just for laughs: his recent cameo in What Just Happened? paints him as the kind of actor who equates depressing bummers with integrity and...well, something tells me Penn takes that characterization as a compliment. As the old saying goes, it’s hard to make people laugh, but drama’s easy: just kill a puppy and you’ll get a reaction...which more or less describes Penn’s m.o. If you dare to mock his maudlin, manipulative performance as the mentally-challenged protagonist of I Am Sam, that just means you’re insensitive, dude (so many thanks to Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr. for doing it for me in Tropic Thunder). If you’d prefer not to drag yourself through the boring slog of 21 Grams, it’s just that you don’t “get” it. And if you laughed out loud during Mystic River when Penn’s character discovers the latest dead child in his oeuvre, then screams “NOOOO!!!!” to the heavens in the type of overblown “ACTING!” moment that was already a parody of itself years before the movie was released...well, maybe you just can’t handle “serious” art.

MICHAEL DOUGLAS

Michael Douglas was born to be a movie star. Which is too bad, because he sucks at it. His father, Kirk Douglas, was an actor of limited talents, and too often prone to gassy overplaying, but he was also fortunate enough to work with a lot of great directors and get a handful of great scripts. No such luck for Michael: though he made tens of millions of dollars in his career and appeared in tons of hit films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, they tend to be forgettable (The Star Chamber), obnoxious (Wall Street), dated (The Jewel of the Nile), or downright terrible (The Game). Which, really, is only appropriate, since all those adjectives apply equally to Douglas himself, who resembles his father less as an actor than he does Charlton Heston. His personality and his performances also tend to be forgettable (surely no one remembers Basic Instinct because he was in it), terrible (he was the world’s least convincing action hero as Jack Colton), dated (who on earth isn’t deeply ashamed to watch Falling Down nowadays?), and, especially, obnoxious. Unless we know him – and hey, give the guy credit, he’s nailing Catherine Zeta-Jones and we’re not – we can never be sure if he just happened to pick about a hundred scripts in a row where he plays an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk, or if he just happens to be an annoying, self-important, egomaniacal, horse-cock jerk who brings those qualities to every role he plays. But that’s not really the kind of micro-fine distinction you want to hang a career on.

JOHN WAYNE

Since I’m going to hell anyway, I might as well take this one. “Hey,” some of you asked when we posted our list of the all-time great leading men a few weeks back, “how come John Wayne didn’t even make the top 25?” Well, I’ll tell you, Mr. or Ms. Screengrab Reader: it’s because John Wayne was a miserable actor. While there’s no denying Wayne’s importance in Hollywood history, and without minimizing his role as a film icon, the fact remains that he was really bad at the thing he did for a living. He basically only played one role in every movie he ever made, and it wasn’t a very interesting one. It’s a role that could have been played better by any number of other actors, many of whom were appearing with him in those very films. And in his case, you can’t blame a short career or an inability to get good scripts: Wayne lived a long time, and by all accounts showed almost zero interest in playing anything outside his war/western tough-guy métier. By the end of his life, he was getting offered roles that would have allowed him to slightly redefine his image, but instead chose ones that let him stretch about a centimeter in every direction. He was either a miserable judge of scripts or had the world’s worst agents; for someone who made almost 175 movies, he sure didn’t make that many good ones. While I’m willing to concede that Wayne was an effective movie star, the distance between what he did on screen and what I think of as acting is abyssal; I remember getting into an argument with a friend that concluded with me saying that if John Wayne was a good actor, I obviously didn’t understand what acting means.

JAMES DEAN

We don't want to spend too much time here talking shit about the dead. Just because we Screengrab people are barely human doesn't mean we're vultures. But after more than fifty years, the upward trajectory of Dean's posthumous reputation is long overdue for a course correction. In his first two (of three) starring movie roles, Dean had the mixed fortune to play desperately troubled teenagers in material pitched directly at a teen audience that liked to project itself onto stories of the tragically misunderstood, under the guidance of directors (Nicholas Ray on Rebel Without a Cause and Elia Kazan on East of Eden) who never saw an emotional flourish they didn't like and would have been reluctant to declare a performance over the top even if the fallout from it brought about nuclear winter. Dean's unrestrained, sometimes apparently uncontrolled exploration of the wronged-and-unloved theme made him a legend and a cult hero, but it also meant that what he left behind in the way of an acting legacy is very heavy on him breaking down into a shivering mess and howling, "You're tearing me apart!" For some of us, a little of this sort of thing goes a very long way, which makes it that much more remarkable that Dean's most devoted fans have watched those movies scores if not hundreds of times: we can barely believe that we made it throught them once. To Dean's credit, he seemed very ready to move on to new things if his last film, Giant, is any indication: there, as a cocky poor boy who becomes a self-made asshole, he's better-controlled, more winning, more resilient and funnier than he ever had a chance to be in a movie released during his lifetime. This is especially true because the movie, in which Dean has only a supporting role, is in a traditional-boring-prestige-epic mode that can just barely accommodate Dean's Method style, and the actor serves the same function in it that his character serves in the story. It's not just about Jett Rink getting up in the face of Jordan Benedict, Jr., and weirding him out with a scary taste of a new world in which he'll be an anachronism, but also about James Dean doing that to Rock Hudson.

ANTHONY HOPKINS

Hopkins was in his early fifties and had been acting, and even sometimes starring in, movies since 1967, when Jonathan Demme made him a household name with The Silence of the Lambs. This was not a case of genius being discovered late. Hopkins is talented and hard-working and had already given a number of excellent performances, such as his sensitive but restrained Dr. Merrick in David Lynch's The Elephant Man. But he was always more meticulous than exciting onscreen, and when he was cast at the center of a movie, whether it was a popcorn horror flick like Magic (1978) or a serious contemporary drama like the British film The Good Father (1987), he tended to veer so heavily into depressiveness that watching him could be like talking somebody in off a ledge. He had already been smoked in the Hannibal Lecter role before Lambs even came out: as all true connoisseurs of character acting know, Brian Cox's brief performance as Hannibal in the 1986 Manhunter had a rich, convincing creepiness that sank into viewers' bones. By contrast, Demme spoon-fed viewers Hopkins' Hannibal with frozen close-ups of his face held in a jack-o-lantern gaze, with just a suggestion of the raging ham behind his features. The results somehow passed for realistic, but there was enough camp in the recipe that it's no wonder the monstrous Lecter ultimately struck audiences as so enjoyable as to be strangely endearing, to the point that Hopkins would not only reprise the role in Hannibal, the movie version of the sequel that author Thomas Harris felt obliged to write in response to the success of the Lambs picture, but in a paralyzingly unnecessary remake of Manhunter (filmed under Harris' original title, Red Dragon), in which, adding insult to injury, he had more screen time than Brian Cox did back in 1986. By then, Hopkins had become Hollywood's go-to guy for a leading role as a classy middle-aged or older male in a prestige film, be it Nixon or Picasso or Van Helsing or (in The Human Stain) an African-American professor passing for white. But Hopkins had never had the range this kind of resume suggests, and he could still be a dull lump when he was too much at the center of things and wasn't cast just right. (And, having been richly rewarded for having laid it on thick as Hannibal, he was now as much in touch with his inner ham as William Shatner.) He's still an ingenious actor who has his moments, and after his long apprenticeship, it feels churlish not to wish him well. But after he and Antonio Banderas co-starred with Catherine Zeta-Jones in 1998's The Mask of Zorro, the young Zeta-Jones informed a TV interviewer that she couldn't decide for sure which of her two leading men was sexier. And by God, that shit ain't right.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

The Albert Popwell Collection

Phil Nugent — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The release this week of all five "Dirty Harry" movies starring Clint Eastwood on DVD and Blu-ray gives fans the chance to settle in for a long weekend spent admiring the charismatic intensity and skillful range of a familiar but sometimes underappreciated American actor--Albert Popwell. Popwell, who died in 1999, goes way back in the Dirty Harry franchise: he has a small role as a hippie in the movie that many see as a precursor to the Harry Callahan character (as it was molded by Eastwood and director Don Siegel in the 1971 Dirty Harry) and TV's McCloud to boot: the 1968 Coogan's Bluff. In that film, the first collaboration between Siegel and Eastwood--they'd later team up for The Beguiled, Two Mules for Sister Sara, and Escape from Acatraz--Eastwood plays a shitkicker cop from Arizona who hits New York City at the height of the counterculture era to track down an escaped hood and inspires everyone's reluctant admiration for the effectiveness of his uncivilized approach enforcement. Popwell would go on to appear in a small but key role in Dirty Harry and return, in a different role each time, in the first three of its four sequels. Grady Hendrix recently noted that Popwell "twice the actor Mr. Eastwood is in the series;" his repeat appearances also serve as a handy guide to what possibilities were open--and closed--to talented African-American character actors in movies of the period. (I don't necessarily mean to imply that things have changed a whole hell of a lot.)

In Dirty Harry, Popwell has perhaps the movie's most memorable scene, albeit one that he has to spend lying on the sidewalk with a gun in his face. He plays the survivor of a bank robbery that interrupts Harry's lunch. A crackerjack action set piece peerlessly directed by Siegel in his knuckle-cracking prime, it establishes Harry's unearthly cool and mastery of the violent approach to crime-solving; he figures out what's going from one look at the getaway car and proceeds to foil the robbers by shooting their car. He then proceeds to fake out Popwell, who's lying within reach of his gun, by taunting him with the famous speech about just what Harry's gun could do to him if he had any bullets left, which he may or may not--"Do you feel lucky?" After backing down, Popwell calls out to the departing Harry in raspy-voiced desperation--"I gots to know" he says, with as much dignity as imaginable under the circumstances--and Harry points the gun in his face, pulls the trigger--click!--then walks away chuckling. The audience is meant to cheer Harry for not only defeating the fallen criminal but messing with his head and rubbing his face in it, and most of them do cheer, but Siegel's inclusion of a small grace note--a close-up of Popwell muttering, "Son of a bitch" as Harry walks away--can perhaps be taken as the director's covert acknowledgment that, for all his bitching and moaning about the things he's forced to do to compensate for the ineffectual lily-livered politicians and other liberals who would shackle the lawgiver, there's a big part of Harry that enjoys his job way too much.

There are no such grace notes in Popwell's flashy, repulsive scene in 1973's Magnum Force; he plays a pimp who brutally murders a hooker. But by then, grace notes in the "Dirty Harry" franchise were already getting to be few and far between. (Magnum Force is itself conceived as a raised middle finger to those who criticized the first film as a reactionary endorsement of vigilante police power. It pits craggy old Harry against a secret police death squad consisting of fresh-faced young up-and-comers--Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, David Soul--and their fearless leader, Hal Holbrook.) In 1976's The Enforcer, made in the wake of the SLA kidnapping of Patricia Hearst and other manifestions of the last insane, dying ripples of "revolutionary" counterculture politics, Popwell turns up as "Mustapha", a troubled-looking black militant who slips Harry some information that will help him bring down the "People's Revolutionary Strike Force", a bunch of pimps and hookers posing as a terrorist cell. (Like the Mothers of Invention, they're only in it for the money.) However we're meant to view his character, he does again manage to suggest a much deeper and more complicated range of thought and emotion than Harry. Popwell made the full jump to good guy in 1983's Sudden Impact, the only film in the series directed by Eastwood himself. By now, the tensions of the sixties are fully submerged and the movie is in total action-cartoon mode. There isn't much Popwell can do to leaven it, but he does get more screen time than ever before. He plays Harry's partner, which is the series equivalent to being the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is a role traditionally assigned to representatives of "minority groups", such as the Hispanic rookie detective played by Reni Santoni in Dirty Harry and the woman cop played by Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, so that Harry can show that for all his angry-white-male bluster, he can respect and work with the unwhite and the unmale when they prove to him that they have the right stuff. Paradoxically, they invariably prove it by getting taken out of the action by getting injured or killed, so that Harry can also show that only he is tough enough to single-handedly prevail in the end. Popwell's role does not break the cycle.

Popwell's career was hardly limited to his association with Clint Eastwood. He was a very active presence in TV, appeared in Siegel's Charley Varrick, and left a fond impression among fans of family-blacksploitation films with his role as Matthew Johnson, who, with his brother Melvin (Caro Kenyatta), lent their martial-arts skills to the efforts to keep heroin out of the neighborhood in two films starring the late Tamara Dobson as the amazon avenger Cleopatra Jones. But he deserves to be remembered for being to Dirty Harry what Frankie Faisan has been to Hannibal Lector. Faison, it will be remembered, appeared in all the movies featuring everyone's favorite cannibal psychiatrist--Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon--up until the more recent and less successful Hannibal Rising. It would be nice to surmise that Popwell's absence from the last Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool, was closely connected to that film's disappointing returns, but it did have, mmmmmmmmmmm, other problems. Eastwood himself was 58 at the time, and the appearance of this box set, twenty years later, can probably be taken as a declaration, should anyone have been in doubt about it before now, that we have indeed seen the last of Harry Callahan and his big phallic killing device. Eastwood may not be the master filmmaker and great actor that a number of critics have insisted on taking him for in his dotage, but, give him a little credit: he's less shameless than Sylvester Stallone.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

For a movie that’s made so many people laugh for over 30 years, the people who made Monty Python and the Holy Grail didn’t have a very good time. The first big-screen effort from arguably the greatest sketch comedy group of all time was plagued with problems: they were frequently denied access to filming locations they thought they’d secured; Graham Chapman, playing the part of King Arthur, was plagued with psychological and physical problems as a result of his recovery from alcoholism; the entire production was plagued with budgetary problems and probably wouldn’t even have been made if members of Pink Floyd (huge fans of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show) hadn’t have stepped in and pumped money into the film; the troupe was working on an incredibly strict filming deadline and nerves were frayed to the breaking point trying to get the production in on time; and much of the filming was done in locations that left the cast and crew cold, wet, and miserable much of the time, when they weren’t almost dying from falling off of a cliff. And in the end, what did they have to show for it? Nothing more than the purest distillation possible of their absurdist, kitchen-sink comic sensibilities. Decades of abuse at the hands of geeks who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone still haven’t managed to sink Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its hard-earned reputation as one of the funniest movies ever made. And if filming it was fraught with peril, that just means that it had even more in common with the original TV show: Monty Python’s Flying Circus faced censorship battles, ratings problems, drug and alcohol abuse from a cast who were often at each other’s throats, a network that completely failed to understand the show and scheduled it in the most ham-handed way possible, and, of course, a miniscule budget and a ruthless production timeline. So it’s no surprise that Holy Grail so effectively captures the postmodern comic brilliance of Flying Circus; they’d all been there before.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

For all the hype that went into the release of the big-screen version of Our Favorite Family, you’d think something exceptionally earth-shaking was going to happen. But really, what was the big deal? It wasn’t the revival of a beloved but long-lost franchise; The Simpsons is still on the air and is likely to remain so until the apocalypse. It didn’t promise any major changes in continuity, since The Simpsons doesn’t have any. (They did kill off at least one supporting character, but it’s not like the entire future of the series hinged on the actions of Dr. Nick Riviera.) And with the exception of a hilarious “goddamn” from Marge and a brief glimpse at Bart’s hand-drawn doodle, it didn’t even take much advantage of the creative free space of a theatrical release. All it did was deliver, essentially, a triple-length episode of The Simpsons. But that’s pretty much what the show’s fans wanted, and the producers, writers and directors gave them an extremely high-quality triple-length episode for their money. The animation is terrific, and one of the few ways in which the filmmakers do take advantage of the big screen is in a gorgeous color palate and some cinematic storytelling that uses up every inch of the space allotted. The writing is top-notch, with tons of funny lines and despite a bit of a sag near the end, it’s one of the tightest comedies in recent memory; while the show’s latter seasons aren’t as dismal as some embittered fans would have you believe, measured against the product on TV, The Simpsons Movie is a lot funnier, more controlled, and better at what people value in the show. The gimmicky guest stars are (literally) disposed of early on, leaving Albert Brooks – a veteran of the series who’s provided some of its most memorable moments – to nearly steal the show from then on. Sure, it’s just a long episode of the show, but that’s good enough for me.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

The 1979 Star Trek--The Motion Picture was many years' worth of stops and starts in coming, and remains a very expensive project that no one involved with looks back on proudly. But despite its being regarded as a disappointment, it did make enough money that Paramount decided to burn off whatever good will remained among fans of the TV series by making a much less pricey sequel for the summer trade. It was actually the sequel that rejuvenated interest in the property and launched the long-running movie franchise. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who had previously demonstrated a flair for playing with other people's characters in his Sherlock Holmes novel and screenplay The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was brought in late and given a short window in which to prepare a shooting script, and managed to do it by cobbling together the best elements of the many already-discarded attempts by other writers—including the idea of a sequel to the old TV episode "Space Seed" with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the regal, megalomaniac villain Khan. He also had the masterstroke of supplying Leonard Nimoy with a gorgeous death scene as Mr. Spock, which was reportedly a key factor in persuading Nimoy to go back on his vow to never put his ears back on after the first movie. The results were greeted with rapturous gratitude by long-time fans and non-Trekkers alike despite attempts to sabotage the release by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, whose displeasure with something that someone wanted to do with his baby was almost infallible proof that it must be a step in the right direction.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Most "movies" spun off from still-current, ongoing TV series are just stretched-out TV episodes, sometimes with pricier special effects or guest stars. (The last straw may have been the over-hyped 1998 X-Files movie, which tarted up a subpar script from the series' "conspiracy" with a fireball explosion, a Martin Landau cameo, and the threat of the two leads kissing, then ended with a series-impacting plot twist designed to make those smart enough to have stayed at home feel left out when the fall TV season began.) The South Park movie, a genuine act of pop outrage with its mock-Disney-cartoon-musical score (written by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, who later brought Hairspray to Broadway) and its Colorforms-meets-Photoshop images of Saddam Hussein and a weirdly sympathetic Satan getting it on, is the rare example of someone bringing their hot, pre-sold property to the big screen and seeing it as a reason to step up their game. At a time when movies are getting smaller and smaller and moving more and more to TV and computer screens and even cell phones, Parker and Stone felt an old-fashioned obligation to enlarge their vision for the theater version. What's more, their discovery of just how much they could do with their little freak hit informed and improved the subsequent seasons of the TV version, now on its twelfth season and going strong. In fact, it was with the movie that South Park made its real transition from giggly fad to one of the cornerstones of our civilization.

MIAMI VICE (2006)

The '80s TV show co-created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich was very much a product of its time, so much so that Manhunter, the 1986 movie that Mann made while the show was still on the air, looks a lot more like the movie called Miami Vice that he made twenty years later. The movie doesn't have the high-contrast visual scheme or the pastel threads or the distracting celebrity cameos of the series; it does have the tropical setting and some character names in common with the series, but what it mainly has is the hopeless-romantic atmosphere and the coiled-spring bursts of action that the show reached for in its proudest moments, executed by a gifted director who had had a couple of decades to work on his moves. The movie, which required significant rewriting to satisfy the whims of one of its stars, Jamie Foxx, has been released in a "director's cut" DVD version, and neither it nor the theatrical release can be said to be free of lulls or to consistently make a world of sense. But when it's at its most intoxicating--especially when Gong Li points her sad headlights at the camera as the cinematographer Dion Beebe is adjusting the light on the horizon just so while God, looking over his shoulder, takes notes--it can get you higher than all the coke in Colombia.

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

READ PART II

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 1

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Cinema, a form that makes it possible for the artist to actually devise and stage his own dreams and record them for posterity, has always had a fascination with psychiatrists, explorers of the mind who endeavor to delve into their patients' subconscious for clues as to how to better understand and regulate their conscious behavior. The new HBO series In Treatment is remarkable for how accurately it captures the droning frustration of a session with a typical modern shrink, whose concern that he not appear judgemental or nonobjective leaves him with little to do but sit there grunting noncommittally while the person who's paying for his time sits there tearing his hair out. But it wasn't always that way. As depicted in movies, psychiatry was once a dashing profession, inhabited by risk takers who jumped into their patients' lives with both feet and made a real effort to make a difference. More often than not, the differences they made were scary, destructive, and hair-raising. Still, it must have been nice for their patients to know that they were sharing their problems with someone who cared. Such as these worthies:

1. DR. CALIGARI (WERNER KRAUSE) in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)

Dr. Caligari (Werner Krause) runs the laughing academy in the picturesque German mountain village of Holstenwall. As the film's narrator tells it, Caligari has been using hypnotism to control his charge Cesare (Conrad Veidt), and has also been trying to help the patient to find a place for himself in society by exhibiting him at the local geek show. When Caligari invites members of the crowd to test Cesare's omniscient powers by asking him an unanswerable question, the narrator's friend, being German, asks him not when Chinese Democracy is going to be finished but when he, the friend, will die. Cesare tells him that he will die the next dawn, and because the doctor has taught him that words must be backed up by action, makes sure that the prophecy comes true by tracking the fellow down and throttling him to meet the deadline. At the end of the movie, all this is revealed to a delusional fantasy of the narrator's, who is in fact an inmate in the asylum where Caligari really is chief of staff. The film ends with Caligari's happy announcement that, now that the narrator has gone to the trouble of envisioning a landmark work in the history of silent German Expressionist cinema, Caligari now has the key to his treatment. Maybe if a few more of the people in analysis had cared a little more about breaking new ground cinematically, the success rate among those in therapy would skyrocket.

2. DR. YEN LO (KHIGH DHIEGH) in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

At first glance, Dr. Yen Lo seems to be the ideal psychiatrist. He has a wife he dotes on, an easy bedside manner, an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest medical and behavioral techniques, and a quick wit. “Always with humor!”, he tells a colleague, with a beaming smile on his Chinese face. It’s only when you realize that the joke he’s just told his nervous compatriot involves using him as the test dummy on which to unleash his newly reprogrammed assassin, and that his gregarious, friendly bedside manner only comes after he has completely rewired your brain and turned you into a remorseless killer that the bloom starts to come off the rose. And sooner or later, you’re going to realize that he may have gotten you to lose weight and play a mean game of solitaire, but he’s also gotten you hooked on yak dung cigarettes. To sum up, Dr. Yen Lo isn’t the kind of doctor who is going to get a lot of referrals through the HMO. But he is, as played by omnipresent character actor Khigh Dhiegh in the immortal 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, the man who made an unstoppable, relentless killer out of war hero Raymond Shaw, and one of the most sinister psychiatrists in cinematic history. (Dhiegh specialized in portraying menacing Chinese – he was also Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-0 – but he was actually not east Asian at all, but of North African Arab origin.) It’s his jolly, disarming manner that makes his aptitude at destroying innocent men’s minds so particularly monstrous; and worst of all, he gets off scot-free in a movie soaked with bloody murder: the last time we see him, he’s tottering off to Macy’s to tick some items off of Madame Lo’s shopping list.

3. DR. LOUIS JUDD (TOM CONWAY) in CAT PEOPLE (1942)

When you think about how many overpaid chin-scratchers are using their psychiatry degrees as a license to tap into the bank accounts of people who have abandonment issues or wished that daddy had hugged them more, you have to feel a certain admiration for Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), who bravely agreed to take on the more difficult case of a deeply troubled young woman (Simone Simon) who was reluctant to consummate her marriage because she was convinced that if she did, she would turn into a sharp-clawed, fang-toothed jungle cat, with dire effects for any naked man who happened to be embracing her at the time. Dr. Judd's breakthrough method of treatment for her condition--i.e., putting the moves on her--remains controversial; some feel that he violated the boundaries of the doctor-patient relationship, while others, pointing out that it was the patient's husband who retained him, argue that anyone who puts his confused, hot young wife in the hands of a guy with a pencil line mustache and a family resemblance to George Sanders is begging for whatever happens. In the end, Dr. Judd surprised himself, if no one else, by establishing that if anyone hit on his patient hard enough she really would turn into a murderous jungle cat, and in his last moments on Earth he wrapped up the case by shooting his client, thus making himself a hero figure to therapists everywhere.

4. COL. VINCENT KANE (STACY KEACH) in THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

“I’m telling you, Billy, Kane is Gregory Peck in Spellbound,” says Lt. Frank Reno (who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs) to the depressed astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw. “It’s just like that movie. He comes to take over the nuthouse and he’s nuts himself.” Cutshaw responds to this news by requesting that Reno drop out of a tree like an overripe mango, but the lieutenant is right: Col. Vincent Kane, the Marine Corps psychiatrist sent to take charge of an insane asylum staffed by disturbed Vietnam veterans, is in fact the craziest man in the joint. The actual extent of his insanity is slowly teased out over the course of this gripping, underrated movie written and directed by The Exorcist’s William Peter Blatty; it begins as a surreal, endlessly quotable comedy, and, as Kane’s madness is revealed, becomes a dark, deep philosophical drama. Colonel Kane is played by Stacy Keach in what can only be described as the role of a lifetime, and he meets it with gusto. At first, he’s full of quiet compassion and boundless sympathy, but with the right provocations and the slightest circumstance, he’s fully transformed into the raging, lethal “Killer” Kane. One of his most memorable scenes comes when his subordinate, Major Groper, cavils at having to play dress-up as part of the inmates’ role-playing therapy; demanding love and compassion from Groper, Kane morphs, werewolf-like, from an impossibly kindly shrink to a seething, hissing, screaming maniac of a Marine drill instructor who’d just as soon see someone dead as insubordinate. Groper, by the way, gets one of the movie’s funniest lines earlier in the movie: warning the men – who he considers to be goldbricking fakers – that the asylum will soon be taken over by the formidable Kane, he hollers: “Too bad, boys! Tough shit! Because guess who’s coming? A PSYCHIATRIST! The best! The best in uniform! The greatest fucking psychiatrist since Jung!” Naturally, he pronounces it with a hard J.

5. DR. HANNIBAL LECTER (BRIAN COX) in MANHUNTER (1986) and ANTHONY HOPKINS in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), HANNIBAL (2001), and RED DRAGON (2002)

In many ways, this is an atypical entry for this list, as in the four films set during Dr. Hannibal Lecter's adult life, we almost never actually see him working with patients. Yet I doubt anyone would contest his inclusion here. Formidably intelligent, impossibly cultured, and certifiably wacko, Lecter's appetites take him all over the world and into many realms of human experience. Yet even more than his taste for human flesh, what makes him truly scary is the way he uses that great big brain of his to toy with those he perceives as being beneath him. As a character explains in Hannibal, Lecter preys on what he calls "the rude," and his most severe mind games are reserved for those who offend his cultivated sensibilities. Think of the way he talks Multiple Miggs into swallowing his own tongue after Miggs insults Clarice. Or the way he drugs Mason Verger and convinces him to carve up his own face. But even when he's dealing with people he respects more, he can't help himself — consider his conversations with Clarice, in which he drops hints about the case she's working on, but in the form of riddles rather than as straightforward clues. One almost feels sorry for him after a while — after all, what else does he have left to enjoy in life but his mind?

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 2.

The Top Ten Movies With Alternate Cuts, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 15:00:00 GMT

MANHUNTER (1985, Michael Mann)

I've got four cuts of Manhunter on my shelf: the original theatrical version, a re-cut for broadcast on TCM, another cut allegedly for a preview, and then Mann's final definitive cut. Anything significantly different about these cuts? It's basically trimming down a few scenes and putting one or two back in, most of them documented on this excellent fan website. Mann has gone back to his movies before, re-cutting Last of the Mohicans (in the process removing a Clannad song that dated the flick), Ali, and even preparing a three-hour cut of Heat for a TV broadcast that never happened. Here, though, was an instance where a director's revisionist tinkering harmed the flick, removing dialogue from William Peterson that actually showed how much he empathised with the serial killer he was hunting. Though it might not be Mann's preferred cut, for me the original theatrical release is the definitive cut of the film so far.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY (2001-2003, Peter Jackson)

Peter Jackson had made it clear during pre-production of his adaptation of Tolkien's trilogy that an extended cut would be coming out, and so it did, and the fans lapped it up, thus putting even more cash into New Line's coffers. But were these cuts any good? It depends on what you're looking for. I always thought the theatrical releases were pretty rushed and the extended versions did have a more relaxed pace about them, but did Tolkien fans really want to see hobbits getting tall from Ent juice or a bit of extended battle butchery? Apparently so. I thought these were a mixed bag. (I mean, do you really want to see an extended ending for Return of the King? Wasn't it long enough anyway?) All credit for Jackson for giving consumers the options, but was it really that much of an improvement?

THE STAR WARS TRILOGY (1977-1982, George Lucas, Irvin Kersher, Richard Marquand)

Han fired first. Among all the extra tidbits that were included in the trilogy, the one that angers the fans most is George Lucas changing the infamous Han vs Greedo confrontation from this:

To this:

And its downhill from there. Yes the special editions made a bundle when re-released. Yes, most people probably have them on their DVD shelf, but if you just give audiences one option, that's what they have to go with. It was only last year that Lucas relented and finally released the original, unaltered films on DVD and even then, they were non-anamorphic transfers. Does the additional material add to the films? Nope.

THE NEW WORLD (2005, Terrence Malick)

Terrence Malick is notorious for taking a long time with the editing of his movies, so it wasn't a surprise to hear that his last film, The New World, wasn't going to make its original November 2005 release date. A month later though, a 150-min cut was screened for critics with hopes that it would qualify for a few Academy Awards. In 2006, the film went into general release with a shortened cut, which Malick considered his best version; a log of the changes can be found here. The only place to get a copy of the first cut is if you have a copy of the Academy screeners or you get the special edition Italian DVD. Never fear though, as according to producer Sarah Greene, Malick has started work on another cut of The New World. Though considerable work had been done on it, its still up in the air when it may come out, though I suspect this may be due to the director mulling over what HD format he should release it on. After this, one hopes he can get back to finally finishing his alternate cut of The Thin Red Line, which is rumored to be a completely new film altogether. But then, even a re-edited Malick film is better than no Malick.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci)

The Last Emperor is one of those old-style epics that needs to be seen on the big screen. No amount of CGI could have the power to surprise and astonish like this scene:

It was the original 160-minute cut that picked up the Academy Awards, but Bertolucci preferred his director's cut and until recently, you could only get a decent copy of both cuts from the U.K. But when Criterion recently announced its special edition containing both cuts, it quietly noted that the cinematographer, Storraro again, once again applied his Univisium concept by re-formatting the film to now be shown at 2:1 aspect ratio. It's unimaginable to see a film like this in a compromised halfway-house aspect ratio, but in this case, fans of The Last Emperor at least have a choice.

RUNNERS UP:

REVENGE (1989, Tony Scott)

Most alternate cuts have stuff being put into the film, Tony Scott went one better by chucking stuff out of Revenge. He waited eighteen years to remove twenty-four minutes out of Tarantino's favourite flick. Do we get to see more Madeleine Stowe in her prime? Disappointingly, not really, but we do get a much tighter and meaner story of two men who are righteously pissed off with one another because of a bitch in heat.

LEGEND (1984, Ridley Scott)

There are about four cuts of this flick flying around the world. Do any of them improve Scott's flawed fairy tale? They try. Until the 2003 DVD release, U.S. viewers were only familiar with a Tangerine Dream-scored cut of the film. The film's devoted fan base resulted in the release of a director's cut that revealed that even with the director at full control, the film may have had little chance at the box office but now was held together by the late Jerry Goldsmith's more sumptious score. Tim Curry as Darkness steals the show from everyone.

ALIEN 3 (1993, David Fincher)

David Fincher's debut nearly killed off the director's career, and until the release of the special edition, the only other version of the film was a leaked three-hour bootleg. The new cut is a revelation, even though it was done without Fincher's collaboration. A completely new version that makes you re-assess an otherwise neglected and flawed contribution to the Alien franchise. And if you disagree with that, I got two words to say to you: Alien: Resurrection.

TERMINATOR 2 (1992, James Cameron)

Cameron first got alternate cut success with the release of Aliens: Special Edition. T2 got a bunch more footage thrown in, most of it of the type that filmmakers refer to as "character development". To his credit, Cameron's DVD producers were the first ones who used "branching" DVD software, where extended footage would be seamlessly intergrated within the original cut.

SUPERMAN 2 (1992, Richard Lester, Richard Donner)

An alternate ending to Superman 2.:

Watching Donner's cut of Superman II is painful. The additional Marlon Brando footage really adds to the film, as do his conceptions of the scenes, but unfortunately, Richard Donner was kicked off the film after only two-thirds of it had been completed. The rest of it was re-shot by Richard Lester. Donner's insistence on using as little of Lester's footage as possible creates a curious discontinuity, but it's the repeat ending that really lets it down. If Donner had been allowed to finish the sequel, he may have come up with something that didn't rehash the first film, but in this case the Lester film is more complete.

— Faisal A. Qureshi

Click here for Part 1.