Top 10 movie villains

[DB7]

Philip French's top ten movie villains

Sunday February 3, 2008
The Observer

From the start, the movies welcomed into their midst the mustachioed villain of Victorian melodrama, leaving subtler antagonists to literary fiction and the so-called legitimate theatre. 'The man you love to hate' (a term coined by publicists to describe Erich von Stroheim) became a cinematic staple. Some actors have never, or only rarely, played genuine villains.

But some never escaped being typecast as bad guys. In most Westerns bland heroes have helped the colourful villains occupy the dramatic high ground: every heavy, for instance, in Randolph Scott pictures appeared positively baroque when confronted by Randy's Easter Island features. Arguably the cinema's finest line-up of villains is to be found in The Usual SuspectsStig Jarrel is unforgettable as the sadistic schoolmaster in Alf Sjoberg's Frenzy (1944), the first film scripted by Ingmar Bergman, as is Jules Berry as the equally sadistic music-hall performer in Marcel Carné's Le Jour se lève (1939). The following 10 villains have made a special and indelible impression on movie history.

Joseph Wiseman Ian Fleming published his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953, and the 007 phenomenon peaked when the newly elected Jack Kennedy declared himself a fan. Wiseman, a subtle stage and screen actor, played the original megalomaniac Bond baddie in Dr No (1962), pictured. I have always thought the ur-version of the Bond villain is Leslie Banks's mad recluse in The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

Jack Palance Before he became an actor, he was a miner, a boxer and a WWII pilot whose conventionally handsome face was altered by plastic surgery following a plane crash. The black-clad, soft-spoken gunslinger Wilson facing up to buckskin-dressed Alan Ladd in Shane (1953), pictured, turned him into an icon.

Max Schreck As Count Orlok with his bat's ears, rodent teeth, claw-hands and hideous profile in Murnau's seminal Nosferatu (1922), pictured, Schreck created the monster against which all such villains have been measured, from the Draculas that succeeded him to Elm Street's Freddy Krueger. Schreck's name was borrowed for loveable cartoon monster Shrek.

James Mason One of the screen's greatest actors, he became (after honourably refusing military service as a pacifist) our local equivalent of Stroheim in the Gainsborough movies that fed the romantic yearnings of WWII Britain. In North By Northwest (1959), pictured, he got together in Hollywood with fellow émigré Hitchcock, as Phillip Vandamm, the ultimate Hitchcockian upper-middle-class villain: cool, suave, quietly spoken, lethal and competing for a deadly blonde.

Orson Welles Was Welles always more interested in evil than in good? 'Discuss!' as they say in exam papers. His last contemporary role before leaving Hollywood after the war was a Nazi in The Stranger; his next major role was Harry Lime in Reed's The Third Man (1949), pictured, the ultimate charismatic villain of postwar Europe. In the last film he directed in Hollywood, Touch of Evil (1958), his crooked cop Hank Quinlan was one of his finest achievements.

Barbara Stanwyck On the strength of her cold, cruel, irresistible Phyllis Dietrichson luring weak insurance agent Fred MacMurray to his destruction in Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), pictured, she's the ultimate femme fatale and leader of a villainous sisterhood that includes Marlene Dietrich, Joan Bennett, Yvonne De Carlo, Ava Gardner and Gloria Grahame.

Peter Lorre Lorre became an international figure as the sad serial killer in Fritz Lang's first talkie, M (1931), pictured, pursued by both police and the underworld, and the role was echoed through every sinister part he played in Britain (the gang leader in Hitchcock's 1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much) and the States, starting with a virtual reprise of his 1931 role in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), the first authentic Hollywood film noir, and The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Dan Duryea No screen heavy has sneered, leered and intimidated as often or as effectively as Duryea, chosen by Lang to play the schemer who humiliates the formidable Edward G Robinson in both Scarlet Street (1945), pictured, and Woman in the Window (1944). In Siodmak's masterly Criss Cross (1949) he destroys Burt Lancaster, and in Allan Dwan's 1954 political western Silver Lode he's a witch-hunting vigilante with the emblematic name McCarthy.

Anthony Hopkins Brian Cox was the first actor to play Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter (1986), but Hopkins made the role of this super-intellectual cannibal, the very incarnation of seductive evil, his own in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the sequel Hannibal (2001) and prequel Red Dragon (2002). Hannibal hypnotised everyone and The Silence of the Lambs was the first time the Oscar for Best Actor went to an out-and-out villain (in the 1932 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1965 Cat Ballou the winners had dual roles as good and bad men.

Richard Widmark He became an overnight star in his first picture as grinning psychopathic killer Tommy Udo, a role he was forced to reprise with slight variations by 20th Century Fox for the next six years. Thirty years later he played the evil Mr Ratchett, murderer and victim in Murder on the Orient Express.

[stevie boy]

Dan Duryea was a fine actor and played some nasty people, he died quite early and is not that well know, but he was a class act.

[batman]

Dan Duryea is one of my favourite US actors .... great in both noir thrillers and westerns.

Wiseman was also excellent as the 'three time loser' in Detective Story.

The one glaring omission for me is Robert Ryan. Ryan was terrific when playing straight forward bad guys, but give him something a little bit different (Bad Day At Black Rock, Clash By Night, Crossfire, On Dangerous Ground, Beware My Lovely, The Naked Spur) and he was simply magnificent.

Max should also have have got a mention for The Dark Man .... ho hum.

[CaptainWaggett]

How can one give serious consideration to a list of movie villains that doesn't include Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood?

[batman]

Originally Posted by CaptainWaggett How can one give serious consideration to a list of movie villains that doesn't include Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood?

... and Captain Blood, Mark of Zorro, David Copperfield etc.

[suzepulcheria]

Boris Karloff for my money. Villainous but always rounded. One ended up sympathising with him.

[dremble wedge]

I agree about Robert Ryan and Basil Rathbone.

Henry Fonda should be in there for Once Upon a Time in the West alone.

Robert Mitchum, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Christopher Walken, Oliver Reed, Rutger Hauer and Herbert Lom never disappoint in villainous roles either.

[CaptainWaggett]

The best villain of recent years (though he's only done one British film) is Sergi Lopez. I'm amazed he hasn't been snapped up as a Bond villain.

[dremble wedge]

On the distaff side Kathy Bates in Misery, Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction.

[billy bentley]

Surely Robert Newton's Bill Sykes would have to be in there, especially if we knocking up a British list !

[DB7]

Charles Gray as the suave satanist in The Devil Rides Out. A good Bond villain too.

[Third Man]

There’s not enough women in that list for me, so how about Cruella De Vil in 101 Dalmatians i’ll go for the Disney version with the voice of Betty Lou Gersion .

Simon

[billy bentley]

When it comes to the ladies, I feel Bette Davis is in a class by her self. What other film star had such complete disregard for courting a likeable on screen "personality" ?

[GRAEME]

Dennis Hopper. Blue Velvet. "Why are there people like Frank?" Quite.

[Santonix]

What about Clifton Webb, as villainous as they come in Laura and The Dark Corner.