The Screengrab : vanessa redgrave

Natasha Richardson, 1963 - 2009

Phil Nugent — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Natasha Richardson, who has died, at 45, after a well-reported accident on a Canadian ski resort, was born into it. Natasha, like her sister Joely, was the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who in turn was the sister of Lynn Redgrave and the daughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson). Natasha made her movie debut at four in her father's 1968 The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which her mother played the female lead. After studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Richardson began her career in earnest at the Old Vic, where she played such roles as Ophelia and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1986, she appeared with her mother in a production of Chekhov's The Seagull. Although a famous name can help someone get a foot in the door in the entertainment business, it is not automatically a guarantee of a successful career, something that could be attested to by any number of people who probably owe me a dinner for not mentioning their names. But by the time Richardson made her mature movie debut, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's 1986 Gothic, it was clear that she had the talent to back it up. Her first real chance to show what she could do on-screen came in 1988, when Paul Schrader cast her in the difficult title role of Patty Hearst. In her review in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote that Richardson had "been handed a big unwritten role" and added, "She feels her way into it, and she fills it" and "always has something in reserve--you keep waiting for what she may show you next."

In the next few years, Richardson appeared in the movies Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers (1990), and Widows' Peak (1994). She also appeared on TV in a 1987 production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and in 1993 in production of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, the political drama Hostages, and the TV film Zelda, in which she played Zelda Fitzgerald. She also married the producer Robert Fox in 1990. In 1993, she won great acclaim in both London and New York for a production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie, in which she co-starred with Liam Neeson. The two were much praises for the intensity of the sexual chemistry their characters displayed, a chemistry that was apparently not entirely, in the words of Jon Lovitz, acting! Richardson, was was divorced from Fox in 1992, married Neeson in 1994. They appeared together that same year in the Jodie Foster movie Nell.

Although Richardson continued to appear in movies, ranging from the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap and Maid in Manhattan to the 2005 Patrick McGrath adaptation Asylum and 2007's Evening, co-starring her mother, she seemed less interested in really pursuing a career than in taking her challenges wherever they appeared. The most notable ones appeared on the stage, where she won a Tony for starring in Sam Mendes's 1998 revival of Cabaret, appeared in the 1999 Broadway production of Patrick Marber's Closer, and played Blanche DuBois in a 2005 production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She also starred in the 2001 CBS miniseries Haven. She was also known as a prominent supporter of charities devoted to fighting AIDS, the disease that killed her father in 1991. She and Neeson had two sons, Micheál, 13, and Daniel, 12.

Breaking News: Natasha Richardson Hospitalized, in Critical Condition

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:15:00 GMT

Natasha Richardson is reportedly in critical condition after being hospitalized after a skiing accident. The 45-year-old actress, part of a distinguished and sprawling theatrical dynasty that includes her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, as well as her sister Joely Richardson, aunt Lynn Redgrave, and her grandfather, the legendary Michael Redgrave, was rushed to Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal with what reports have described as a serious injury to the brain. Redgrave's husband, Liam Neeson, who was in Toronto, working on Atom Egoyan's Chloe, has left the set of that film to be at her side. A rep for that film issued a statement saying that "We do not have any details at this time but we hope for the best and our thoughts and prayers are with Natasha and Liam and their family."

The wildly gifted Richardson made her film debut in 1986, playing Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's Gothic; she later appeared in A Month in the Country(1987), Patty Hearst(1988), The Handmaid's Tale (1990), Widows' Peak (1994), and Nell (1994), where she co-starred with Neeson. (They had appeared together the year before, to famously sizzling effect, in a Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Although Richardson has continued to make movies, appearing with her mother in 2007's Evening, in the last several years her film career seemed to be taking second, or maybe third place, to her family (she and Neeson have two sons) and her stage career. Richardson won a Tony Award in 1999 for her performance in Sam Mendes's revival of Cabaret.

Set Your DVR!: February 14 - 16, 2009

Hayden Childs — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

What promising movies, you may well ask, does TV have to offer this weekend? Well, I may well answer, there's the second part of a samurai epic, there's Tom Stoppard's deconstruction of Hamlet, and then there's a meditation on alienation in Swinging London! Wowee!, you may exclaim. Keep it down, I might reply, people are trying to blog in here. Perhaps you could tell me more, you may ask. Pushy, I might think, aren't you? But I would tell you anyway. And, as long as we're speaking in hypotheticals, this is what I might say:

First up is Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple on IFC Saturday morning (that's 2/14) at 7 am central/8 am eastern. If you caught Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto last week, you know that this is a must-watch trilogy. If you missed it, go ahead and start here. I think you can pick the story up easily enough. Starring Toshiro Mifune. I should point out that the above clip is far murkier than the cinemascope colors in the actual movie.

On Sunday, IFC is showing Tom Stoppard's comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead twice: first at 7 am central/8 am eastern and then again at 1:05 pm central/2:05 pm eastern. I'm sure you're aware of this movie or the play behind it, but just in case you need a refresher, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Hamlet who are convinced by Claudius (that's Hamlet's uncle, the King) to transport him to England, where Hamlet is to be executed. Hamlet escapes, but not before modifying the letter to the King of England so that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will be executed in his stead. At the end of the play, a messengers arrives at the Danish court to inform Claudius that R & G are dead, only to find the Hall full of bodies (uh, spoiler?). Anyway, Stoppard's play and movie assume that the viewer has more than a passing familiarity with Hamlet and Beckett's Waiting For Godot. The events in the story are greater than R & G can understand, leading them to muse on life and fate and roles that people must play as they rush headlongs towards their fates.

Finally, on Sunday night (technically Monday morning) at 1 am central/2 am eastern, TCM is showing Blow-Up, Antonioni's strangely meditative film about the nature of reality. As in other Antonioni films, the central mystery of the film is unanswerable, but it causes an existential crisis in the lead character, who in this case is a fashion photographer who believes that he has photographed a murder. Antonioni injects an extra layer of cool by setting the time and place in mid-60s Swinging London, and the cast includes David Hemmings, a shockingly young Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Birkin, and the Yardbirds in full swing with Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, who steals Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing schtick for the film. The clip above appears towards the end of the film, but I had to include it because of the lovely symmetry with the fake tennis match in the clip from Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead. Tennis matches: with a ball, they're only a game, but with no ball, they are metaphors for life.

Honorable Mention: The Top Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

LOUISE BROOKS (1906-1985)

It may seem odd to include an actress whose career spanned little more than a decade and whose reputation rests almost entirely on two movies on a list of the greatest leading ladies of all time. Yet in the case of Louise Brooks, no explanation should be required. A former Ziegfeld Girl, Brooks came to Hollywood at a time when the biggest female draw was “American’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, who continued playing girlish characters well into her thirties. With her trademark black bob, pouty mouth and decidedly adult sensuality, Brooks couldn’t fit the type if she tried, and her outspoken nature and resistance to the narrow range of roles offered her led her to walk out on her Paramount contract. Effectively blackballed by the studios, she quickly fell in with German filmmaker G.W. Pabst, a collaboration that resulted in her two most famous films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Thousands of miles from Hollywood, Brooks was finally able to play roles perfectly suited to her persona -- sexually-liberated, independent, and defiant. Her two films with Pabst finally brought her real big-screen stardom, and surely enough, Hollywood lured her back. Alas, the studios still didn’t know what to do with her (turning down the female lead in The Public Enemy probably didn’t help) and Brooks’ career fizzled out by the end of the 1930s. But big-screen stardom was only one chapter in Brooks’ fascinating life -- after her retirement, she worked as a ballroom-dancing teacher and a salesgirl, and for a time she was the mistress of CBS founder William Paley before becoming a call girl. But perhaps Brooks’ greatest post-fame role was as a writer and vivid raconteur of the classic era of Hollywood, whose witty memoirs of her younger days contain some of the best writing in the genre. Even in her written work, she remained defiant and unapologetic -- unmistakably, quintessentially Louise Brooks.

VANESSA REDGRAVE (1937 - )

For more than forty years, Redgrave has kept surprising audiences. For a few years there in the late sixties, in such movies as Blow Up and Morgan, she seemed to be a budding movie star and sex symbol, albeit one who was an uncommonly tall drink of water. For most of her career, though, she's been undefinable: you might call her an institution, except that she's not boring. On the contrary, in many of the prestige literary adaptations of which she's been a part, she's often been the lonely pulse still beating in a work of taxidermy. Her primary concern in choosing her projects seems to be whether they give her the chance to try something new and challenging, which has led her to such unexpected choices as playing the transsexual tennis player Dr. Renee Richards on TV. And she makes great daughters.

SUSAN SARANDON (1946 - )

Sarandon aged as beautifully as anyone in the history of movies, both as a woman and as an actress. The Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn't all she did during the seventies, though it might be a mercy to pretend that it was. (She also took a bath with a hippie and got shot in the back by her hippie-hating dad in Joe, fell off the wing of Robert Redford's plane in The Great Waldo Pepper, sired Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby, and was the last woman standing at the end of The Other Side of Midnight.) Her real career began in earnest with her wide-awake performance in Atlantic City, applying lemons to her skin and giving Burt Lancaster something to think about in the winter of his years. Bull Durham and her string recital in The Witches of Eastwick solidified her standing as a tempestuous cloud of a romantic sex object, though her most distinctive role, in such movies as Lorenzo's Oil and Safe Passage and Little Women, may be that of the fieriest mother in pictures, in every sense of the term.

EMMA THOMPSON (1959 - )

In most of her earliest screen roles (Henry V, Dead Again, Peter's Friends, Much Ado About Nothing and the TV miniseries Fortunes of War), in which she was directed by and and co-starred with Kenneth Branagh, Thompson, who was married to Branagh at the time, was widely taken for a charming adornment to her husband's second-coming-of-Laurence-Olivier act. Today, thirteen years after the marriage ended, Thompson is an international treasure who appears too seldom in roles too small for her, while Branagh is recognized as that douchebag who thought it would be a good idea to cast Robert De Niro as Frankenstein's monster and model his makeup after my uncle Lido, the guy who fell off the construction site beam and landed on his head. Liberated, Thompson did fine work in The Remains of the Day, In the Name of the Father and Carrington, though she arranged for her own best opportunity by adapting Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility for herself to star in and Ang Lee to direct.

DEBRA WINGER (1955 - )

In the early 1980s, in Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentlemen, Terms of Endearment, and the too-little-seen Mike's Murder, Winger made direct contact with audiences in a way that made it seem as if nothing could slow her career down, let alone stop it. In fact, she was slowed down, and stopped for a while, by an industry that lured her into lucrative traps like Legal Eagles -- for an actor like Winger, the cinematic equivalent of the La Brea Tar Pits -- until she felt that she had to withdraw to keep her sanity. Many of her daring big tries, such as her stab at incarnating Jane Bowles in The Sheltering Sky, broke down on the runway, and many of her most remarkable performances got tucked into movies like Everybody Wins that nobody saw. Between 1993 and 1995, she was paired onscreen romantically with both Anthony Hopkins and Billy Crystal, a new definition of flailing. In 1996, she married the actor Arliss Howard and began a long break from acting in movies. It was during that dry spell that Rosanna Arquette directed a documentary about the never-ending frustrations of being an actress and called it Searching for Debra Winger. It's nice that she's become a symbol of something; she's also started gingerly sneaking back onscreen (as in the current Rachel Getting Married), which is a damn sight nicer.

JEAN SIMMONS (1929 - )

She was one silky number. At seventeen, she played the young Estella in David Lean's Great Expectations, and dealt the movie an awful blow when her character grew up and had to be replaced in the latter half by Valerie Hobson. A year later, she played Ophelia to Olivier's Hamlet. Her luck in Hollywood was less steady, and she arrived in time to get sucked into a lot of dull epics, such as The Robe, The Egyptian, and Desiree, in which she got into romantic clinches with Marlon Brando, which might not have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that he was supposed to be Napoleon. (At least it wasn't like their later pairing in Guys and Dolls where she had to put up with him singing at her.) Still, if you ever find yourself too hung over to change the channel when one of these movies comes on, you might find yourself inordinately grateful that she's there, looking just embarrassed enough about what's going on around her to earn your sympathy but not so mortified that you feel kind of stupid for watching. Her best epic was certainly Spartacus, where the scenes in which Kirk Douglas is denied her company by the guy holding the whip serve as concrete evidence that it would really suck to be a Roman slave. (Her best performance in a Hollywood movie may be in the smaller scale but still hokey Home Before Dark.) In more recent decades, she turned up in enough network miniseries (The Thorn Birds, North and South Books One and Two, not to mention her role in the 1991 revival of Dark Shadows) to establish that her sense of humor was still in good working order.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Eight

Contributors: Paul Clark, Phil Nugent

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part II

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

THE FUGITIVE (1993)

The Fugitive might not have been the first TV series remade for the big screen, but it was almost certainly the one that proved how bankable- and even respectable- such adaptations could be. The film took as its inspiration one of the most influential series of its day, a four-season cat-and-mouse story of an escaped, convicted killer out to clear his name. While The Fugitive remains true to the spirit of the series, director Andrew Davis and his screenwriters do so in a way that reconfigures the formula for the big screen, beginning with a famous, still-impressive bus crash. The film also benefits from placing nearly equal emphasis on the pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) as it does on pursuer, U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerrard (Tommy Lee Jones, who in a rare display of Academy affection for a genre performance won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar). The Fugitive also has a sense of place that’s rare for a big-budget thriller, utilizing Chicago so perfectly that the story becomes unimaginable in any other setting. But the best scenes in the film are the ones that remain truest to their television inspirations, specifically the near-miss suspense sequences in which Kimble barely manages to evade capture through a combination of luck and formidable intelligence. Of all the TV adaptations up to that time, it was The Fugitive that showed that films of this kind, when done right, could be much more than a simple grab for nostalgia-driven box office, and in doing so became more or less the standard by which big-budget TV-to-film translations are judged.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996)

Yes, really. A huge hit on its original release, Mission: Impossible was mostly dismissed by critics as a dopey Tom Cruise action movie, while being criticized by many viewers for having too much plot, not enough stuff blowing up. But a second look at the film reveals what a gripping suspense movie it really is, translating the formula of the TV series- gadgets, undercover missions, realistic masks, and the like- into the form of a summer tentpole release. Mission: Impossible contains at least three or four wonderfully tense scenes- the opening operation gone fatally wrong, the tête-à-tête at Prague’s Akvarium, that awesome Rififi-esque break-in at Langley- more than most Hollywood thrillers can claim. In addition, the film represents the most successful attempt by director Brian DePalma to fuse the silky-smooth cinema-saturated style of his most characteristic work with a big-budget blockbuster, and in the process becomes a surprisingly lean and satisfying thriller. If nothing else, Mission: Impossible deserves respect as the only film in the series to date that’s remained true to the team-centric nature of the show, with subsequent efforts becoming increasingly focused on Tom Cruise saving the world. Supporting players like Jon Voight, Vanessa Redgrave and Henry Czerny make such a strong impression here that it’s a shame that Cruise has become so intent on hogging the spotlight in later films in the franchise.

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980)

Netflix, video stores and pay cable movie channels are littered with the toxic waste spew of that very special category of cinematic detritus: the SNL movie. Sure, the never-as-funny-as-it-should-be/ never-as-bad-as-its-rep Saturday Night Live has produced more than its share of legitimate comedy stars and second bananas over the years, from Chevy Chase and Bill Murray to Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. But one-dimensional SNL characters, barely tolerable in five minute doses, can be downright unbearable in full-length features (i.e., It’s Pat, A Night At the Roxbury, Coneheads, etc.). Wayne’s World is one notable exception, but to my way of thinking, The Blues Brothers is far and away the best of the SNL films (and, for the purposes of this list, one of my favorite TV-to-movie adaptations), transforming a recurring, ego-driven musical duo (whose routine and appeal I never really understood) into iconic figures in a John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Akroyd phantasmagoria that bends over backwards in its efforts to entertain: car crashes! cast-of-thousands musical numbers! more car crashes! Illinois Nazis! country and western! rhythm and blues! John Candy! Aretha Franklin! Carrie Fisher with a machine gun! (And did I mention the car crashes?) I mean, fuck! The endless, mind-boggling demolition-derby pile-up of police cars in the climactic car chase alone is worth the price of admission (take that, CGI!), but the musical numbers (by Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway, John Lee Hooker, et. al.) are even better, and introduced me and countless other white people to a whole bunch of talented black people we’d never fully appreciated before. And if all that weren’t enough, The Blues Brothers is endlessly quotable (“We’re on a mission from God,” “Three orange whips,” etc.) and spawned a pretty damn tasty jambalaya at the late-lamented Cambridge House of Blues...and how many movies can you say that about? True, The Blues Brothers also spawned the execrable Blues Brothers 2000...but the original, indispensable 1980 version will forever stand as the Cadillac Ranch of movies, a bizarre, fascinating, coke-fueled white elephant at the crossroads of cracked genius and howling oblivion.

HEAD (1968)

It was 1968 and the studio chiefs were very confused. There was something called “youth culture” or “the counterculture” or whatever – you know, dirty smelly hippies who wanted to see weird shit at the movies! Hopelessly out of touch, these suits had to turn to the scruffy people for help. The kids seemed to like that TV show The Monkees, so Columbia Pictures hired the show’s producer Bob Rafelson, and he teamed with that really weird Jack Nicholson dude from the Corman pictures, and they smoked a bunch of weed and they came up with Head. Surreal, satirical, self-referential, psychedelic and pretty much plotless, the movie bore little resemblance to the kiddie show that spawned it and failed at the box office. In retrospect, it never had a chance; the heads wouldn’t be caught dead seeing a Monkees movie and the young fans of the show wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of it. But there’s enough inspired weirdness, bizarre cameos (Annette Funicello, Frank Zappa, Victor Mature and Sonny Liston) and good music (notably the Michael Nesmith-composed “Circle Sky”) to make it a worthy cult object, if not a great movie.

THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD! (1988)

The Naked Gun has very little competition as the least likely TV-to-movie transition of all time. It’s derived from a series that only yours truly and four other people watched, one that lasted six episodes and went off the air six years before the movie reached theaters. But Police Squad! had a pedigree; the Airplane! team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker created it, star Leslie Nielsen was nominated for an Emmy for his deadpan turn as Lt. Frank Drebin, and the show became a cult favorite through reruns and home video. Even so, The Naked Gun was an unexpected smash hit, spawning two lousy sequels and an entire craptacular genre of Leslie Nielsen parodies. Don’t hold those sins against it, though. The Naked Gun is a well-oiled laugh machine – from the slapstick stylings of the always hilarious O.J. Simpson to the climactic baseball game honored in an earlier Screengrab list, it’s like a MAD magazine come to life, complete with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it marginalia crammed into every corner of the screen. It’s really the last time Nielsen was ever funny, and that goes triple for the ZAZ triumvirate, who have separately and together foisted the likes of Brain Donors, Rat Race and Scary Movie 4 on their once loyal fans.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

The second and final season of Twin Peaks ended in a flurry of bizarre cliffhangers, so when rumors of a movie began to circulate, those few of us who were still watching shared a brief moment of hope that at least some resolution would be forthcoming. Then we heard that Fire Walk with Me would be a prequel covering the last seven days of Laura Palmer’s life and, well, so much for that idea. Presumably the reasoning was that a reboot of the story would draw in a larger audience than a continuation, or at least that’s how we imagine David Lynch explained it to the suits at New Line. It’s a safe bet that 99% of any potential new audience fled the theater within the movie’s first 30 minutes, set in a deliberately alienating bizarro Twin Peaks called Deer Meadow, where the cops are unfriendly, the waitresses are hags and the FBI is represented by Chris Isaak as a pale echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s Special Agent Dale Cooper. (MacLachlan makes only fleeting appearances in the movie, unaware that his career is Showgirls-bound.) But those who left early missed out on one of Lynch’s most intense and emotionally charged fever dreams. Stripped of the quirky humor that had soured into tiresome shtick long before the series ended, Fire Walk with Me unwraps Laura Palmer from her plastic for a one-of-a-kind descent into hell. Sheryl Lee burns through the screen in a shoulda-been star-making performance and Lynch cooks up some of his most indelible set pieces, most notably the subtitled “Pink Room” sequence set in what appears to be Satan’s roadhouse. Just don’t ask us about the David Bowie cameo.

- Paul Clark, Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak

READ PART I

The 10 Greatest Psychiatrists in Movie History, Part 2

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

6. DR. EUDORA NESBITT FLETCHER (MIA FARROW) in ZELIG (1983)

For much of his film career, Woody Allen usually showed his full intensity when he applied himself to two kinds of scenes: those dealing with his search for the perfect woman, and those dealing with his search for the perfect therapist. He reached an apex of some sort in the parody documentary Zelig, where Allen's human-chameleon character finds the perfect woman in his psychiatrist, who helps him deal with his condition, and even rescues him from Nazi Germany. This paragon, who eventually marries her patient and lives happily ever after with him in wedded bliss, is of course played by Mia Farrow, who at the time was auditioning for the role of the director's idea of the perfect woman in real life.

7. DR. SIDNEY SCHAEFER (JAMES COBURN) in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST (1967)

Dr. Schaefer is the embodiment of the hip shrink in the swinging '60s era, a strutting, phallic super-intellectual who is the psychiatrist as member of the Best and the Brightest. Lured away from his hepcat bachelor pad, he is brought into the halls of Washington power to serve his country as best he can--by giving the President of the United States someone to unburden himself to. Unfortunately, Dr. Schaefer grows increasingly paranoid as the president shares more and more secrets of his office with him in the course of his treatment. Even worse, it turns out that he's not paranoid at all: foreign powers are out to abduct him to find out what he knows, and government agents are ordered to assassinate him so that he won't be a potential threat. In the end, Schaefer endears himself to the smartest of the American agents (Godfrey Cambridge) and Russians (Severn Darden) on his trail by helping them deal with their neuroses, and together they bring down the ultimate threat, a sinister, monopolistic telephone company.

8. DR. ROBERT ELLIOTT (MICHAEL CAINE) in DRESSED TO KILL (1980)

In what's widely acknowledged to be the lamest and most interminable scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, psychiatrist Simon Oakland helpfully explains Norman Bates' split personality by positing that whenever Norman was aroused by a woman, the Mother side of his personality would take over and kill the object of his lust. Leave it to apt Hitchcock pupil Brian De Palma to turn this already perverse idea on its ear in his most Psycho-like film, Dressed to Kill. The pitch: "what if Norman Bates and Simon Oakland were really the same person?!?!?" By day, Dr. Robert Elliott is a psychiatrist catering mostly to bored Manhattanites. Dr. Elliott's couch-side manner is sound, somewhat distant but always professional, even when the occasional patient comes on to him. But all is not right in Dr. Elliott's life- he keeps getting menacing calls from a former patient named Bobbi, by his/her own admission "a woman trapped in a man's body." And what's happened to the doctor's straight razor? In case you hadn't guessed, Bobbi is Dr. Elliott, and vice versa, and like Norman Bates, the Bobbi personality takes over whenever Dr. Elliott gets turned on, like when hot-to-trot patient Angie Dickinson comes on to him. He deals with the situation by stalking her as she enjoys a hot afternoon with an anonymous pickup and knifing her to death in an elevator. Dr. Louis Judd would be regard the outcome as a welcome victory for his side.

9. DR. SIGMUND FREUD (ALAN ARKIN) in THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION (1976)

Herbert Ross’ appealing adaptation of Nicholas Meyer’s winning novel is chock-full of tall orders in the casting department. Ross scored big right off the bat by getting Nicol Williamson to play the role of the world’s greatest detective in his revisionist Sherlock Holmes yarn, and followed it up by getting heavy hitters like Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave to round out the cast. But who would he feature as Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychology and the rogue physician to whom Holmes appeals to cure his insidious addiction to cocaine? Would you believe. . . Alan Arkin? And would you further believe that Arkin is damn near the best thing about the movie? It would have been easy enough to play his hand as one of the most towering cultural figures of the 20th century entirely as a goof, delivering some variant of his then-current New York sharpie persona. But instead, he’s downright charming, underplaying the man from Vienna nicely, which allows his interactions with the histrionically intense Williamson as Holmes to become wondrous little bits of acting. The movie’s plot is a bit woozy, but Arkin – who, twenty years later, would play a somewhat less adventurous shrink in Grosse Pointe Blank – is still a delight.

10. [TIE]: DR. STIRLING (ANNE HECHE) in PROZAC NATION (2001) and DR. GIBBON (MEL GIBSON) in THE SINGING DETECTIVE (2003)

To tell the truth, these are both terrible movies — Prozac Nation didn't even get released theatrically — and neither of these characters is especially notable. But we just get a kick out of the fact that somebody thought it would be a good idea to cast these particular actors as mental health professionals.

— Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Click here for Part 1.