The Screengrab : the ninth configuration

Dear Santa: Cinematic Comebacks We’d Most Like To See (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NATASHA LYONNE

As a jailbait Jewish American Princess with the voice and delivery of a wised-up, middle-aged dame, Natasha Lyonne was the tough-tender soul of the priceless coming-of-age dramedy Slums of Beverly Hills and the best thing about the first two American Pie movies (well, aside from Alyson Hannigan, I mean). She even managed to bring a surprising amount of relatable dignity to her role as a bulimic escaped convict on the lam (and in love) with a psychopathic gal pal in what otherwise might have been the even campier and trashier Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby. Actresses frequently complain about the dearth of good roles for women in film, but in her too-brief above-the-radar career, Lyonne’s bright, bemused persona made even underwritten roles compelling, the clear mark of a comeback-worthy talent. Bland contemporaries like Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson are considered A-list, but I’d rather hear Lyonne read the back of an Oxycontin bottle out loud for two hours than watch Good Luck Chuck or Bride Wars. Unfortunately, booze, heroin and other substances have derailed Lyonne’s life and career in recent years, leading to hospitalizations and legal troubles (one involving threats of dog molestation...even Lyonne’s criminal record is fascinating)! But if Robert Downey, Jr. and Mickey Rourke can make it back from self-inflicted career immolation, here’s hoping Lyonne’s recent stint on Broadway (in the play Two Thousand Years) and busy upcoming film slate (including, according to the Internet Movie Database, projects called Goyband, Heterosexuals, Jelly, Outrage and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle) are good signs that Lyonne has cleaned up her act, quit the dog molestation and will soon return to us in some decent roles (though, to be honest, the fact she’s co-starring with Michael Madsen in Outrage is less than comforting).

KATHLEEN TURNER

Following a scorching debut in the neo-noir Body Heat in 1981, Kathleen Turner – who was already in her late 20s when she made her big-screen debut – did as much as she could to establish herself as more than just a great body, a pretty face, and one of the screen’s sexiest voices. She soon established herself as a versatile and engaging actress, and had a strong career in the 1980s, but Hollywood is notoriously unforgiving of the reality of aging, and she began a slow decline in the 1990s. A combination of personal tragedy, ill health and the general lack of good roles offered to women over forty in Hollywood have caused her to be nearly invisible in the last decade or so, but she’s remained busy on the Broadway stage, and some reports of her savagely controlled performance as Martha in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? suggest that she may have plenty of surprises left in her. If given the chance – and if she has the inclination – Turner could still have a late-period career like that of one of her idols, Katherine Hepburn. Time will tell.

WILLIAM PETER BLATTY

Okay, this one’s probably a bit much to hope for, considering that the man is eighty years old and not in the best condition in the world. But we’ve always believed that William Peter Blatty – best known as the author of the jillion-selling religious thriller The Exorcist – was a great filmmaker trapped inside a good novelist’s body. When he couldn’t find anyone interested in making a big-screen adaptation of his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, he decided to do it himself, with no formal training as a filmmaker – and the result was the astounding The Ninth Configuration, a genuine cult classic and one of the most surprising directorial debuts of all time. Likewise, when he became understandably unsatisfied with the direction the Exorcist franchise was taking after the rotten Exorcist 2: The Heretic, he took matters into his own hands again with The Exorcist III. And while that’s a deeply flawed film, it’s at least an imaginative one, with terrific glimpses of mood and tone that suggest the kind of thing its director might be capable of with more money and a better cast and crew. Blatty probably has neither the time nor the desire to make another movie, but as both a writer and a director, he’s shown more than once that he’s got greatness in him, and if he never has a Sidney Lumet moment and directs a great movie at the age of 83, we’ll at least always wonder what might have been.

GENE HACKMAN, SEAN CONNERY & WARREN BEATTY

When considering the later careers of many of cinema's most beloved actors, it's difficult to say which is worse -- taking role after role in a string of unworthy projects just to keep busy, or turning your back on acting altogether. In the case of the three actors listed above, we suppose it's understandable that after decades in the business, they would want to put acting aside and enjoy a nice retirement, and given the work they've done, we certainly don't begrudge them that choice. However, it's their most recent films that make us question their decisions. Hackman, always the busiest of the three, usually appeared in several movies a year prior to his decision to retire from acting after starring in 2004's Welcome to Mooseport -- Lord knows that playing second banana to Ray Romano might sour us on acting too. Connery, on the other hand, was still capable of carrying a movie well into his seventies, a gift which, alas, was usually squandered on subpar projects like Finding Forrester and his most recent film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And Beatty, never the most prolific actor to begin with, has been absent from screens since 2001's noxious Town & Country. While Hackman has busied himself writing books and doing voiceover work for Lowe's and Oppenheimer Funds, Connery and Beatty have been content to rest on their laurels and turn down project after project -- Connery declined to reprise his role in the latest Indiana Jones (yet another disappointing aspect of the film), whereas Beatty memorably bowed out of Kill Bill in favor of David Carradine. Still, hope springs eternal. As long as they're still alive and healthy, there will be the possibility that one can't-miss role will come along to lure these guys out of retirement for one final hurrah. After all, they deserve some time for themselves, but they also deserve to take one last triumphant lap before retiring for good.

Click Here For Part One, Two & Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

Famous Last Words: Round 2, Week 9

Paul Clark — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

I could almost hear the joyful noise coming from my Screengrab colleague Leonard Pierce due to my selection of last week’s Famous Last Words quote. The line came from William Peter Blatty’s irresistibly nutzoid The Ninth Configuration, a favorite of Leonard’s that he takes every opportunity he can to shoehorn into our weekly lists (of course, I’m one to talk, given the disproportionate number of Brian DePalma films that get included). Sadly, very few of the Screengrab readers appear to share Leonard’s enthusiasm for Blatty’s directorial debut, and that’s a shame. Based on Blatty’s novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the film boasts a memorably intense lead performance by Stacy Keach, as well as a killer supporting cast headed by That Guy! extraordinaire Scott Wilson, who gives his all to memorably unhinged dialogue like “the man in the moon tried to fuck my sister!” If you haven’t seen it, Leonard and I both urge you to give it a look. Congrats to the few who got it.

This week’s quote comes from a film that’s about 180 degrees removed from The Ninth Configuration. Here’s the quote:

“Oh, if only you could have recognized what was always yours… could have found what was never lost…”

Name the film. Remember, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern on Wednesday. Good luck!

Taverns on the Screen: The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part Deux)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:30:00 GMT

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a fine example of the way lazy, excessive reliance on ridiculous CGI (and CGI monkeys) can ruin an otherwise passable movie. And there’s no finer argument for the good ol’ fashioned non-CGI pleasures of real world filmmaking than the Nepalese bar sequence in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. To recap: winsome badass Karen Allen (oh, Hollywood, HOW did you ever let her get away?) drinks a yak-herder under the table, then her flaky ex-boyfriend shows up while she’s all full o’ rotgut and she slaps him in the face and sends him on his way. And THEN, creepy Nazi torturer Toht (a.k.a. Mr. Melty-Face) shows up with a bunch of evil minions and things really get interesting. What follows is a master class in cinematic action, pacing, camera placement, stuntwork, pyrotechnics, performance and editing...all without a bluescreen (or hangover) in sight.

ON_LINE (2002)

Okay, so maybe I’m biased, given that I co-wrote this one (with director Jed Weintrob), but I’ve always had a soft spot for the scene in this under-the-radar internet sex comedy where neurotic shut-in John (Josh Hamilton) goes to an odious, overpriced Manhattan nightclub on a disastrous double-date with Jordan (Vanessa Ferlito), the wild cybersex enthusiast he picked up on the internet, his oversexed roommate, Moe (Harold Perrineau, Jr.) and Moe’s pill-popping, manic-depressive girlfriend (Isabel Gillies). But don’t take my word for it: in a Salon review that (almost but not quite) made up for any number of really quite nasty reviews of the film, the extremely cultured and discerning Andrew O'Hehir summed up the appeal of the scene thusly: “John's nightclub internal monologue, as he watches Jordan dance and reflects on how hot she is, how shallow he is for thinking that and how little chance he has of actually getting in her pants in the off-line world, is probably the movie's high point.” Thanks, Mr. O’Hehir...I couldn’ t have said it better myself!

BLAZING SADDLES (1974)

Before that dastardly Hedley Lamar (played with nefarious gusto by the late Harvey Korman) decided to run the railroad through it, the hamlet of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles had everything an Old West town needed: a church, a hoosegow for when Mongo came to town, and proximity to the Hollywood Hills. And, of course, it had its own saloon. But unlike most of the filthy, rowdy joints in the history of westerns, this particular saloon was always kept nice and clean, thanks to the stewardship of the unfortunately named Anal Johnson. All that came to an end, however, with the arrival of the Teutonic songbird Lili von Shtupp, played with Dietrichian élan by the Oscar-nominated Madeline Kahn. Lili’s world-weary act, sweet set of curves, and foul-mouthed stage patter (“Why don’t you get your friggin’ feet off the stage?”) brings every rough rider in the county, but it’s her love of that delicious schnitzengruben that leads Lamar to hire her to seduce and abandon Bart, the new sheriff in town. In one of the most memorable scenes ever set in an Old West saloon, Lili sighs out “I’m Tired” before being carried off, James Brown-style, by her backup dancers and deposited in the arms of Sheriff Bart – who, it turns out, has more schnitzengruben than she can handle.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

It’s a scene we’ve watch play out a million times in a million action movies: a nameless bar in the middle of nowhere is taken over by a generic group of bikers, who wreak havoc in the place until they push the wrong guy just a little bit too far. But William Peter Blatty’s disturbing cult hit The Ninth Configuration is no typical action movie, and the bar fight won’t play out in a typical way. The set-up to the scene is more complex than it seems: mentally disturbed former astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), disillusioned that sensitive psychiatrist Col. Vincent Kane (Stacy Keach) has turned out to be a blood-soaked Marine Corps commando, escapes from an asylum and seeks refuge in liquor at the nameless biker bar. A combination of booze, despair and a smart mouth enrages the boss bikers (the unstable brute Stanley and the cunning, sadistic Richard, played by the gaunt, devil-faced Richard Lynch), who abuse Cutshaw until Kane arrives to rescue him. Kane, who has forsaken violence and taken up the mantle of the caring, well-meaning shrink in order to bury his own murderous past, attempts to come to a peaceful resolution, but finally he can take no more. The scene that follows is one of the most stunning bar fights every captured on film – although to call it a fight ignores what truly happens: Kane utterly annihilates the biker gang in a matter of seconds, killing a number of them. It’s an astonishing scene, and even more astonishing is the fact that it’s not even the climax of The Ninth Configuration.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

In an audio commentary track recorded for the French Connection DVD, Gene Hackman described Eddie Egan, the real-life model for Hackman's obsessed narc "Popeye" Doyle, as having been "flippant" to a degree that he'd never encountered before in a human being. It's easy to imagine the conversation among the patrons of the Harlem bar that Popeye raids after he's stormed in and out like a hurricane: "That fellow was certainly flippant, wasn't he? I'm a fervent supporter of our boys in blue, but speaking as an amateur observer of the law enforcement process, I can't help feeling that some of that flippancy was unwarranted! Here, help me tie off this tourniquet?" The raid, which is actually a cover for a meeting in the men's room between Popeye and an informant, establishes Popeye's adversarial relationship to the city's civilian population, his casual racism, and the gleefully sadistic tinge to his brutality. (Obliged to rough up his informant so that no one will suspect the guy is a rat, Popeye asks him, "Where do you want it?" The man thinks about it for a second and points to his right cheek, and Popeye slugs him on his left. The blow looks hard enough to crack the guy's jaw, but this is Popeye when he's just playing.) In a recent interview in Reason, Ed Burns, the twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department turned TV writer whose HBO series The Wire dismantled the logic behind the nation's "war on drugs", called the scene "iconic" and blamed it for instilling the wrong mindset in a generation of cops by "put[ting] out the idea of this guy who cracks heads," Popeye set police work back by reinforcing the idea that cops should act like swaggering badasses instead of establishing a functional relationship with their communities. So if you're a fan of The Wire -- a not uncommon condition among Screengrab writers -- then give it up for Popeye Doyle; without him, The Wire might not have been necessary.

Related Stories:

Tavern On The Screens - The Top Ten Barroom Scenes of Cinema (Part One)

CGI Must Die: Five Reasons Why

Harvey Korman, 1927--2008

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part One)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Two)

Screengrab Pub Crawl - The Top 15 Bars of Cinema (Part Three)

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

That Guy!: Scott Wilson

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:30:00 GMT

That Guy! tends to focus on beloved or quirky character actors, but there's a different species of That Guy! who's just as worthy of attention: the so-called "working famous". These are actors and actresses who aren't especially noteworthy for character parts, quirky looks, or distinctive voices; they're normal-looking men and women who seem like they're perfectly capable of filling leading roles, but never quite make it to the upper echelons of stardom and spend long and often rich careers constantly working in Hollywood without ever becoming household names. Scott Wilson, one of our favorite examples of the working famous, seemed like he was destined for superstardom; after taking up acting more or less on whim after hitch-hiking to Los Angeles from his native Georgia, he starred in two groundbreaking films at the age of twenty-five (In the Heat of the Night and In Cold Blood). Somehow, though, despite starting his career with two breakout roles in blockbuster films, never quite crossed the threshhold into movie stardom. Handsome and versatile, with a laconic Southern drawl and a sad demeanor, Wilson could have been a huge star; but he's never allowed the fact that he didn't go on to become a household name to get in the way of working constantly and making himself a consummate professional. Wilson has gone one to become one of the most reliable actors in the business, capable of delivering terrific, emotionally rich performances even in small roles (such as in the 1974 Robert Redford adaptation of The Great Gatsby). Capable of light, breezy comic performances as well as intense, explosive dramatic roles, he's seemingly up for any challenge as long as it gives him a chance to stretch, and he's never shied away from playing against type. While he's mixed in a decent amount of family films and television work to pay the bills, he's been drawn for over forty years to dark, compelling, risky character roles, and his reputation as a reliable pro has attracted a number of well-known younger actors to working with him. His career has undergone a mini-renaissance of late, with some of his most memorable performances coming after he hit age sixty. His next role (in the Philip K. Dick adaptation Radio Free Albemuth) will be as the President of the United States, and he's been married for twenty-five years to a woman named Heavenly, so he must be doing something right in his life.

Where to see Scott Wilson at his best:

IN COLD BLOOD (1967)

Wilson is so polished and natural in the film adaptation of Truman Capote's infamous non-fiction novel about the senseless murder of the Clutter family in Texas, it's hard to believe it was only his second film role ever. Having previously wowed audiences as the murder suspect in the well-received In the Heat of the Night, Wilson is absolutely dynamite as the confused, wheedling killer Dick Hickock. He's paired opposite the veteran actor Robert Blake in one of his most memorable roles, and the two of them take the movie to a higher level almost by themselves. It also helps that the young Wilson bore an almost eerie resemblance to the actual Hickock.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

In one of his most emotionally intense roles, Wilson was cast by William Peter Blatty as the mentally fragile ex-astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw in this cult favorite. It's a demanding role, not only because of its depths of sorrow and need, but because it requires Wilson to make the transition from broad comic delivery early on in the film to cynical aggression in its middle passages to vulnerable despair late in the movie. It's pretty close to being the performance of a lifetime, and while the movie wasn't a commercial success, he was rewarded by those who did see it with a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

JUNEBUG (2005)

In the middle of enjoying an exceptionally rewarding late-career comeback over the last decade, Wilson found himself playing a small-town Southern patriarch in this acclaimed indie drama. Although Amy Adams rightly captured the attention of moviegoers and critics in her role as the impossibly hopeful pregnant sister of the male lead, it's Scott Wilson's performance that seems to anchor the film from the moment he steps on the screen. Showing how far he's progressed as an actor, he manages to dominate every scene he's in with his very presence — nearly silent, but holding impossible, hard-earned wisdom on his lined face whenever we see him.

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.

That Guy! Classic: Joe Spinell

Peter Smith — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to pick legendary character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age to profile in this feature; much harder is selecting actors who died too young and who, by all rights, should still be with us, making movies. Joe Spinell is one of those. Born Joseph Spagnuolo in 1936, the burly Manhattanite changed his name to make things easy on the casting directors who called him all too infrequently, making him reliant on low-paying night jobs like driving a taxi or working the counter at a seedy liquor store. There was nothing calculated or contrived about his Spinell’s frequent portrayals of tough-guy New Yorkers; he grew up hard and worked for a decade with the Theater of the Forgotten, a troupe that performed exclusively for prison inmates. Spinell’s first big break came in 1972, when he was cast (based almost exclusively on his thuggish looks and his inimitable accent) in a very minor role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Coppola liked him so much that he specifically expanded the role of Willie Cicci to give Spinell more screen time in the sequel. A few years later, Spinell landed one of his most memorable roles, playing opposite his good friend Sylvester Stallone in Rocky as Tony Gazzo, the two-bit loan shark who employs Rocky Balboa as a legbreaker. Never a big star, even by the diminished standards of character actors, Spinell was a working actor his entire life, constantly struggling to support a large family by taking whatever roles came his way; while the gems in his catalog are broken up by a great deal of dross, when he was on screen in a good role, it was easy to see why talented directors like Coppola and Martin Scorsese took to him. He had a lazy, insouciant delivery that could turn on a dime into violent intensity, and he had a particular way of making even the simplest lines entirely his own. Towards the end of his career, Spinell was financing horror movies (exemplified by the grotesque but successful Maniac) that he wrote and directed himself, and had the dubious honor of being John Wayne Gacy’s personal choice to play the serial killer in a movie. Unfortunately, we’d never have the opportunity to see how he’d do in the role, or where else his career might take him: Joe Spinell died in 1989 of a heart attack, not yet fifty-two years old.

Where to see Joe Spinell at his best:

THE GODFATHER, PART II (1974)

The minor character of Willie Cicci, Frankie Pentangeli’s bodyguard, was never meant as anything more than a bit part. But Francis Ford Coppola liked Joe Spinell enough to expand the role into a Joe Valachi-type character in the sequel to The Godfather, and Spinell paid him back by turning in a fantastic, scene-stealing performance. Cicci brings down the house at a Senate committee investigation into organized crime, explaining to the movie’s fuddled stand-in for Estes Kefauver that the Corleone family "had a lot of buttons."

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Francis Ford Coppola wasn’t the only Italian-American director from New York who took a shine to the louche, dangerous Spinell. Martin Scorsese also found his demeanor and delivery worth showcasing, and gave him a small but key role in his 1976 masterpiece of New York as a lower circle of Hell. Here, Spinell plays the dispatcher who makes the mistake of giving Travis Bickle a job driving a hack; suspecting (not unjustly) that Bickle has a bit of an attitude problem, he unfortunately gives him the job anyway. Probably because he’ll work Jewish holidays.

THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Joe Spinell didn’t often have the chance to show off any comedic chops, but when it did, it could be devastatingly effective. In William Peter Blatty’s remarkable film about a military psychiatrist assigned to rehabilitate officers suspected of faking insanity, he plays the cleverly named Lt. Spinell, casting director to Jason Miller’s Lt. Reno, who is adapting Shakespeare’s plays for dogs. In one of the movie’s most memorable, and hilarious, scenes, Spinell offers deadpan, and devastating, opinions on Reno’s casting choices.

— Leonard Pierce