For the next entry in our Year by Year series, I proposed a list of Best Villain Death scenes. This idea proved problematic because what we would have, in effect, is an entire list of spoilers. So we went back to the drawing board for the next Year by Year feature. However, that idea of bad guys still appealed to me.
There is nothing like alliteration. The dearly departed musician Vic Chesnutt called it the "spice of life." So as a death list of villains went out the window, it morphed into a list of Bitches, Bastards and Badasses.
Some of the more interesting characters in our filmic history fall into one of these categories. Do people really like the sweet and straitlaced Dorothy? Fuck no, it's the Wicked Witch that runs away with The Wizard of Oz. I am pleased to present this new feature as we celebrate the biggest Bitches, Badasses the cinema world has thrown at us. - David Harris
1949: Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man, Bastard
Before Quentin Tarantino, and even before Enzo G. Castallari, cinema had produced some inglorious bastards of its own, and perhaps none as downright despicable as the deceptively and dastardly Harry Lime. Considered by some to be Orson Welles' finest moment, even above his other bastardly characters, Charles Foster Kane and Hank Quinlan, Harry is a textbook example of a self-serving, manipulative son-of-a-bitch.
The Third Man concerns Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a pulp novelist, who arrives in post-war Vienna to visit his friend Harry Lime, only to discover Harry has died in a horrific accident. Holly is persona-non-grata, especially because of Harry's reputed underground connections. As the film unravels, Harry turns out to not only be alive, but masterminding a scheme that unwittingly involves Holly. Their conflict comes to a head in the infamous "Cuckoo-Clock" scene, where Lime confesses his war-profiteering, remarking that for the Swiss, 500 years of neutrality had produced nothing of note but a cuckoo clock. The speech is well steeped in vitriol and contempt for the character, and Harry's true colors shine well through the delightfully noir black-and-white cinematography.
Harry Lime is truly one of cinema's biggest bastards because he clearly is a master of false emotions. He preys on the kindness of friends with the same intensity he musters with his intolerance of disobedience. He constantly emasculates Martins throughout the film, a character that already is portrayed as weak and ineffectual. Harry Lime is a man with juice, who wrings people out. He is a cruel, thoughtless bastard, and his death at film's end in the sewers of Vienna is only a fraction of what he deserves. Lime's the kind of guy who should die twice, or even thrice. - Rafael Gaitan
1950: Margo Channing (Bette Davis), All About Eve, Badass
There are some natural archetypes in the world, and the tough-talking, hard-drinking woman of a particular age is a prime one. In a practically definitive role in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, Bette Davis as Margo Channing chain-smokes, cattily makes bon mots and transcends mere stereotype. In a narrative filled with schemers, cynics, blackmailers and other such necessary peoples of the theater, the most immediately dislikable and vain character, the aging Broadway grande dame ultimately ends up the most human and the most badass for it. Where Anne Baxter's titular Eve ends the film by beginning the road to bitchery and calcification and George Sanders (as the malevolently charming critic, Addison DeWitt) shows himself ultimately to be a monster, Margo grows as a person, both recognizing and moving past her limitations.
Rather than cling to a role as the queen bee of an increasingly artificial hive, Margo bows out of the game with grace and confidence, finally surrendering her carefully crafted toughness for the satisfaction of having a personality, not a persona. And she's all the more badass for it- even after keeping her pride on her own terms, she's still the one who can scald her nemesis with a single backhanded compliment. - Nathan Kamal
1951: Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), Ace in the Hole, Bastard
The blackest film of Billy Wilder's bleakest period, Ace in the Hole is the second in a trio of films that play out in stiflingly enclosed circumstances, between the mansion-as-tomb setting of Sunset Boulevard and the prison within a prison of Stalag 17. Even more than those two classics, the crack between which it has unfairly disappeared, this film is a withering declamation of opportunism, the media, society, hell, everything. Leading that charge is Chuck Tatum, portrayed by Kirk Douglas with characteristically hard-driving aplomb.
Douglas inhabits Tatum as a character we would love if he didn't so convincingly dare us to hate him. He's the film's undeniable driving force, a disgraced journalist who, having drunk and slept his way into the Podunk nightmare of a small New Mexico paper, tries his damndest to scamper back up on the backs of others. He succeeds with the help of trapped miner, whose misfortune he shapes into a tool for recovering his career, setting off the media fiasco that spawned the film's unfortunate original- release title (The Big Circus). Under Tatum's conniving direction, which involves throwing around bribes to ensure the miner stays where he is, the circus and his reputation swell steadily. A human cyclone of sleazy tricks and immorality, even a mortal scissor wound to the gut can't distract him from his mission. - Jesse Cataldo
1952: Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), High Noon, Bastard
Villainous Frank Miller's impending return to the sleepy town of Hadleyville constitutes the bulk of the plot in Frank Zinnemann's controversial western High Noon. Indeed, without Miller, there pretty much wouldn't be a movie: the town's celebrated marshal would simply get married, retire and ride off into the sunset for a life of peace and order. Yet despite his centrality to the story, the outlaw himself only manages about 10 minutes of screen time and, when he finally does show up, he's pretty unremarkably evil. What, you may well wonder, is all the fuss about then? What is it about Miller that convinces Gary Cooper's stalwart Marshall Will Kane to abandon his stunning new bride (played by a very young and utterly exquisite Grace Kelly), return to Hadleyville and stand up to a notorious killer hell bent on bloody vengeance? The answer, together with High Noon's very mixed reception, lies within the political context of the film's 1952 production. Frank Miller's lawlessness so terrifies the good people of Hadleyville that they would rather succumb to his tyranny than stand up for justice alongside Marshall Kane - a scenario which, when considered alongside the House Un-American Activities Committee's (HUAC) current blacklisting of left-wing thinkers and suspected communists throughout Hollywood (including High Noon contributing screenwriter Carl Foreman), smacked of pointed political commentary and threw certain HUAC supporters into an uproar. Kane's enemy as represented by Miller is thus the specter of controlling fear; and it is Zinneman's timely depiction of such power - the power to turn the hearts and minds of honest men against freedom - that renders Miller the ultimate bastard in a year overshadowed by McCarthyism. - Lauren Westerfield
1953: Shane (Alan Ladd), Shane, Badass
For its time, Shane was a relatively edgy Western, one where the good guys only sort of won and at tremendous costs, where the hero is a mysterious stranger with unknown motives who may or may not be trying to steal his patron farmer's wife, and where that wife's kid seems to think such theft would be a great thing. But of course, everyone knows the film for its titular hero and Brandon De Wilde's Joey, the obnoxious kid who gets Shane hurt or worse and can't stop shouting his name over and over like some deranged parrot: "Shane! Shane! Pa's got things for you to do!"
Joey alone makes Alan Ladd's Shane some kind of superhero, capable of not just tolerating the world's most annoying farmboy but putting his life on the line for him. You see, Shane is that rarest of badasses, the one with the golden heart. Ladd plays Shane as a weapon that you get the sense could go off at any moment, full of danger and menace, but he also makes it clear that Shane lives by some kind of moral code, a samurai of the desert, who little boys idolize and women can't help but fall for. As long as Shane has something to aim himself at, in this case evil cattle barons and their own hired gunslinger (an incredibly young Jack Palance), his power can be utilized without harming innocents.
Of course, the drawback of this is that the people Shane is protecting are decidedly meek and stupid. Whether Shane is forced to knock out the homesteader he's protecting before he goes and gets himself killed, or cleaning up after the mess of a different homesteader who got himself killed, or saving some idiot farmboy before he can get himself killed...the point is all too clear. Those Shane saves barely deserve it and in a different world, it's not that difficult to imagine that he'd wipe them out himself. - Morgan Davis
1954: Seven Samurai, (Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Daisuke Kato, Minoru Chiaki, Isao Kimura, Seiji Miyaguchi), Seven Samurai, Badasses
Seven Samurai is the ultimate group of badasses, cold, lethal, principled, but would just as soon cut you as look at you. When they roll into the small village they're hired to protect, the merest sight of them sends people scurrying inside for safety, old ladies bury their fortunes in cellars, fathers hide their daughters. The villagers are more terrified of the samurai than they are of the bandits, and at one point, the samurai are moments away from slaughtering the whole town for perceived disrespect. There's something inherently foreboding about violent men unable to form familial attachments and Kurosawa's ragged group of aloof killers became icons, as the director gave each character their own moment in the famed recruitment scenes. Seven Samurai formed the basis of a whole host of movies, from the almost frame by frame western remake of The Magnificent Seven, to The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, both of which borrowed heavily on Seven Samurai's concept of violently specialized men on a mission of spiritual redemption. - Sean Marchetto
1955: Tony le Stephánois (Jean Servais), Rififi, Bastard/Badass
The heist film is practically a cliché in of itself and you may think you've seen every variation of it, but if you haven't seen 1955's Rififi ("rough and tumble"), you're missing what may be the king of the heist film. Made by expatriate American director and blacklist victim Jules Dassin, who also plays one of the thieves, Rififi is a film where everything feels superbly calculated and necessary. Its highlight is a meticulous, tense, nearly silent scene where the men rob a jewelry store. Calling it just a heist film is like calling The Godfather just a gangster film. Jean Servais plays Tony le Stephanois who, along with the protagonist of Bob le Flambeur, is a prototypical aging, veteran criminal out for one last score. Just out of jail and looking like a cross between Bogart (he even wears a fedora and trench coat) and Jean Gabin, Servais is marvelously understated as the jaded, weary crook, who nonetheless elicits loyalty and respect from his younger accomplices. He seems to know he's doomed-his cough indicates he's on his last legs-but he goes through with it anyway. Despite his age, he's a tough and sometimes ruthless character, one who visits his ex-girlfriend (now with a rival gangster) and makes her strip and then beats her with a belt and later shoots a companion for squealing. "You know the rules," he tells him. I don't want to spoil the ending, but it is in the final act where he shows what an old badass he is, single-handedly gunning down a few men, rescuing his kidnapped godson and driving the boy to safety despite blood running down his leg. There are distressing plans to remake this, but I don't see why as it is a near perfect film, with Servais as its rumpled, chain smoking, fatalistic soul. - Lukas Sherman
1956: Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), The Searchers, Bastard
One of the common criticisms of John Wayne is that he was never a good actor because he always played John Wayne. One doesn't need to look any further than The Searchers to see that this just isn't true. In one scene Wayne shoots the eyes out of a dead Comanche. He explains with a perverse smile that a Comanche believes that a person without eyes must wander in the spirit world "without peace or rest, forever." Talk about cold-blooded. This isn't John Wayne, the all-American hero we've all grown up with. This is Ethan Edwards, one of the darkest anti-heroes ever to grace the screen.
A middle aged Civil War veteran, Ethan's racism is so ingrained that he's even contemptuous of his adopted nephew, Martin, just because he's a quarter-Cherokee.
After his niece, Debbie, is captured by the Comanche, Ethan vows to find her. But his hatred is so deep that it feels more like a mission to kill her. Throughout the film, Ethan explains that he would rather kill his niece, Debbie, than have her live "with a buck" and that "living with a Comanche ain't living." One of the film's gentler characters, Laurie, pleads with Martin to protect Debbie because "Ethan will put a bullet in her brain." We actually fear Ethan more than we do the Comanche villain, Scar.
The director, John Ford, explains Ethan's racism by showing the atrocities committed by the Comanche. Ford tries to be fair by showing that Scar's cruelty is also as a result of crimes committed against him. As Scar explains, "Two sons killed by white men. For each son, I take many ... scalps." But as we all know, it is Ethan's racism that will eventually lead to genocide. - James Shelledy
1957: General Mireau (Paul Macready), Paths of Glory, Bastard
With his aquiline features, high brow Shakespearean diction and suspicious scar on his right cheek, George Macready was the perfect incarnation of elitist Machiavellian evil. In Paths of Glory, Macready plays General Paul Mireau, a field general tasked with an impossible mission that will kill most of his men. Initially, Mireau refuses, but when the possibility of promotion dangled before him, he has no problem sacrificing his soldiers for one more star on his uniform.
Of course, the mission proves to be a complete failure. Wave after wave of soldiers are mowed down before they can reach the German trenches and one-third of the soldiers refuse to leave the trench because they're pinned down by heavy enemy fire. An incensed Mireau accuses them of cowardice; an easy accusation to make from a relatively safe distance. But what really enrages the cultured barbarian is the soldiers' audacity to disobey orders. It's an affront punishable by death ... literally. Blinded by ego, Mireau orders his own artillery to open fire on them to force them onto the battlefield. "If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones!" he exclaims. In an attempt to save face and to shift away blame, Mireau orders 100 soldiers to be publicly executed. It is only after a talk with his superior officer that he relents and reduces the number to three, one from each company. What a guy. The process of choosing the sacrificial lambs is purely political and the ensuing trial is a joke. Afterwards, he comments, "This sort of thing is always rather grim, but this one had a kind of splendor to it, don't you think?
Mireau is so full of himself that even when it's clear that he gave the order to fire artillery on his own men, he declares, "You're making me the goat. The only completely innocent man in this whole affair. I have only one last thing to say to you, George. The man you stabbed in the back is a soldier." - James Shelledy
1959: Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles), Touch of Evil, Bastard
Hank Quinlan's probably my favorite Orson Welles character, an unequivocal bastard. Like most villains, he's got a sort of pathology, but it only functions to abstractly explain, in here's-the-gist-of-it kind of way, why he turned out the way he did, but not how; the how - that moment of transformation, a mental leap, a tragic event, anything - is withheld from us. Welles' treatment of the character doesn't buy him any grace; his wretchedness is sealed in stone and Quinlan knows it. His nihilistic resignation is, according to him, due partially to a lifetime of working the streets of Los Robles, a Texas border town, but of course that's a cop-out, his actions are the result of nothing more than bad character.
It's interesting to look at Quinlan in light of the circumstances surrounding Touch of Evil's production. Here's a man who doesn't have a whit of goodness in him; who's framed hundreds of people, some of them guilty but almost certainly many innocent, who goes around acting like a paragon of justice. Witness, in contrast, one of the cinema's greatest artists, Orson Welles, finally being given a chance to direct in Hollywood again after their cruel and rough-handed treatment of him in the past. He makes a stone-cold masterpiece and then has it taken away from him, cut apart and permanently disfigured, footage lost forever, eventually reanimated 30 years later by the great editor Walter Murch from a 58-page memo Welles typed up in a single evening after being shown the butchered version of his film once - a memo that didn't even request Universal change it back to what he made, but rather which contained advice on how to make their version of his film better! Good god. Even in death Quinlan stays dirty, floating face down in a giant pool of muck. His greatest accomplishment is getting someone else, Marlene Dietrich, to say the film's haunting closing lines - "He was some kind of a man, what does it matter what you say about people?" - Andrei Alupului
