A while back, author Adam-Troy Castro commented on Facebook that he keeps seeing posts on different pop culture sites with titles like “All-Time Greatest Movie [whatevers]” — best villains, sexiest stars, costumes, vehicles, etc. — and almost never do the lists include any movies made before 1980, and often not even from before 1990. It’s like a whole lot of people think nothing existed before they did.
If you were to go back and look at our mission statement from when Atomic Junk Shop launched four-and-a-half years ago, you’d see that we’re really big on remembering the old stuff; not in a crotchety old man “things were better in the old days” way, not even a “you kids today, no sense o’ history” way, but simply because the new stuff is built on the old stuff, and knowing about the old stuff gives you a deeper appreciation for the new stuff. History is fun and interesting.
So, in the spirit of what we started this site to be, you might just be one of today’s “Lucky 10,000” and discover something from decades before you were born that might just be your new favorite thing ever. Welcome to the latest Atomic Roundtable!
We’ll start with the topic that kicked off this topic in the first place: Toughest Movie Characters of All Time, only we’ll say that the Popular Mechanics list covers the modern era and we’ll look at what came before. Toughest movie characters from before the Internet…
Toughest Movie Characters
Jim: I’m going to go ahead and claim the 1960s here, with the casts of The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Any list of “All Time Toughest” that does not include Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Yul Brynner, Lee Marvin, Robert Vaughn, Jim Brown, and the rest of these hard-boiled guys is sorely lacking.
Edo: You listed a bunch of actors rather than characters; for characters, I’d say Shaft (as played by Richard Roundtree in several movies, but mainly the first one), Coffy and Foxy Brown (as played by Pam Grier in the eponymous movies), ‘Mr. T’ (as played by Robert Hooks in Trouble Man) and, of course, pretty much any character portrayed by Bruce Lee (like, say, the one who kicked the butt of Chuck Norris). Although looking over my selections, I think they almost belong in a separate category: tough AND cool in equal measure.
Jim: Fair enough. So I’ll narrow those down. From The Magnificent Seven, Chris (Yul Brynner) is a stone-faced killing machine, a character he reprised/parodied when he played the robot gunslinger in 1973’s Westworld. Steve McQueen as Vin Tanner is just so frigging cool, as he is in everything he ever did. So yeah, I’ll just say that Steve McQueen is one of the all-time toughest movie characters, no matter which one he’s playing. In 1967, every boy and man in America wanted to be him. Britt (James Coburn) is “that guy,” the one you just know to keep a respectful distance from and try to stay on his good side, because nobody on his bad side lives long.
Jim: From The Great Escape, yeah, Steve McQueen is the man. From The Dirty Dozen, I’ll narrow it down to Wladislaw (Charles Bronson) and Jefferson (Jim Brown), but Lee Marvin is also a real hardass as Major Reisman.
Greg H.: Considering all the beatings he took over the course of his career, I think you really have to give it up for Philip Marlowe. Whether it was Humphrey Bogart or William Powell or Robert Mitchum or James Garner, he was a punching bag for every thug in L.A. along with a fair number of crooked cops, and still outsmarted everyone and pulled out the win.
And the movies are nothing compared to what he went through in the original novels. By all rights after all that head trauma he should have been a brain-damaged drooler in a home long before we ever got to The Long Goodbye.
Jim: Going further back, among the classic movie gangsters, you have to give it up to Jimmy Cagney. Two in particular are standouts: Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949), bellowing “Top o’ the world, Ma!” as he goes to his execution, and the contrasting character, Rocky Sullivan in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), a gangster even tougher than Cody. Rocky (SPOILER) goes to his execution crying and begging for mercy so that the local kids would be ashamed of him, think him a coward, and not try to emulate him. That takes guts.
Corrina: I’ll go all the way back too, to Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday. The minute she sweeps into the newsroom, she owns the place. She outtalks Cary Grant and outsmarts a killer. She’s way too tough to ever settle down to a quiet life with Ralph Bellamy. Barbara Stanwyck made a career of playing tough, smart women, never more so than in Double Indemnity. She may not outlive her con, but she takes everyone down with her.
This just comes in under the wire but Denzel Washington as Pvt. Trip in 1989’s Glory could stand up against any of the movie tough guys. Another more recent tough-guy performance is Eddie Murphy in 48 Hours (1982). The scene where he takes over the redneck bar is proof all by itself.
Edo: Not sure if I’d put Murphy on the tough guy list for that bit (he could expect Nolte’s character to have his back), but I absolutely love that scene. And the whole movie for that matter…
Coolest Vehicles
Jim: A big shout-out to the great cars of The Great Race, particularly the Leslie Special and Professor Fate’s Hannibal Twin-8.
Edo: I don’t think there’s any car cooler than the original Batmobile; otherwise, I’m not much of a car guy, but I’ll say I thought the car in Vanishing Point looked really cool, although that may be due to the overall cinematography. Also, that friggin’ awesome-looking car in Superfly – the original pimped-out ride.
Greg H. Emphatic second on the 1966 Batmobile.
But if there is any vehicle I lusted to ride in, in all my years consuming pop culture, it’s Admiral Nelson’s FS-1… the Flying Sub.
Jim: Going back to Steve McQueen, maybe his motorcycle in The Great Escape wasn’t that cool a vehicle, but that jump over the barbed wire fence was one of the coolest vehicle moments. At least if you were a kid at the time.
Jim: Does The Time Machine (1960) count as a vehicle? Because that Victorian styling basically invented steampunk.
Corrina: What about the bed in Bedknobs & Broomsticks! That travels into cartoon worlds and under the sea!
Sexiest Actresses Stars
Jim: Jean Harlow in Red Dust (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), and anything else she ever did. And of course everyone loves Audrey Hepburn, but I’ll say that if Breakfast at Tiffany’s is your favorite Hepburn film, you’ve most likely never seen any others. I recommend Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954), and Funny Face (1957). In the related category of “Best Romantic Banter,” you have to check out her performance in Charade (1963), but we’ll get to that. Finally, if you’ve ever wondered about Marilyn Monroe’s appeal, look no further than Some Like it Hot. She is incandescent in that one. (Tony Curtis was being sarcastic in answering what he thought was a stupid question when he said doing a love scene with her was like kissing Hitler.)
Edo: Yvette Mimieux in 1960’s The Time Machine. Vonetta McGee in several roles, but particularly Blacula and Shaft in Africa. Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Jim: I’ve changed the title of this category because it’s long past time to change the discussion. And let’s face it, you don’t have to be a woman or gay to recognize the sex appeal of Clark Gable, Errol Flynn or Harrison Ford.
Corrina: I thought Steve McQueen was the original guy crush, the guy that other guys were like “yeah, well, Steve McQueen. Whew.”
He’s a classic but a forever one, and that’s Cary Grant, who can do suspense, banter, comedy, and, well, everything. Of more recent actors, I mentioned Denzel Washington as a tough guy in Glory, but I first crushed on him in the detective story Mighty Quinn. I haven’t watched it in years but after seeing that movie, I wanted to see everything he was in. I also have a forever crush on Real Genius-era Val Kilmer. How could you not?
With Paul Newman and Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the hotness is off the charts and if that movie were released today, it would give birth to so much slash fanfic.
I first saw Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley on television. She was older then but she commanded the screen, and the younger version in all those great classic movies? HOT. Angela Bassett didn’t really get started in movies until after 1990 but she started her career before then, so I’m counting her. She’s currently commanding the small screen on 9-1-1 and my only small complaint about Black Panther is that they did not give her enough to do.
Edo: No argument from me about Angela Bassett. I just figured she wouldn’t count because she only became a star well after 1990. Speaking of Black Panther, though, you reminded me of the guy I always thought would have been a perfect T’Challa – if a Black Panther movie had been made back in the 1970s, and someone who is, I believe, a shoo-in for this category as well: Calvin Lockhart.
Jim: One more. Gene Tierney as the title character in Laura (1944) makes you think it’s perfectly reasonable for Dana Andrews to fall in love with her even after he knows she’s dead. Meanwhile, my bride points to Humphrey Bogart as a candidate for this category.
Best Fight Scenes
Jim: You mean aside from the world’s greatest pie fight in The Great Race?
Edo: The alley fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live.
Greg H. I have two…. the Baseball Furies in The Warriors…
…and Longstreet versus the dockworker in “The Way of the Intercepting Fist.” I know, it’s television, but the whole episode is built towards that fight, and it’s got Bruce Lee, even.
Interesting fact: the creator of Longstreet, Stirling Silliphant, was actually taking martial arts classes from Bruce Lee at the time, which is how he ended up writing this episode around him giving the same training in jeet kune do to Mike Longstreet as well.
Also? Speaking of classic tough guys and martial arts instruction, not too many people know that James Cagney was a black belt in judo. He actually got to use it on screen in an otherwise unremarkable (and mildly racist) piece of World War II propaganda, Blood on the Sun.
Jim: You want a fight scene? I’ll give you a fight scene! How about a plumber battling conjoined twins joined at the beard… on rollerskates! in Dr. Seuss’ hallucinatory fantasy, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953).
Coolest Music
Edo: Since I added this category, I should say at the start that it can mean anything: a soundtrack, a theme song or just an individual song or instrumental piece played during the course of the movie. Anyway, my top pick would probably be the whole soundtrack to Superfly (but especially individual songs like “Pusherman”), composed and performed by Curtis Mayfield. That’s just an awesome album, independent of the movie it’s attached to.
Jim: Erich Korngold’s score for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). I’ll also mention James Horner’s soundtrack for The Rocketeer (1991), especially Melora Hardin’s lovely rendition of “Begin the Beguine,” even though it violates the “before 1990” rule, because the CD is out of print and currently selling for upwards of $360 on Amazon. (Go ahead and click that link and buy it, won’t you? I’ll get a commission on it.) But my absolute favorite movie soundtrack is Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie score for 1968’s original Planet of the Apes.
Greg H: Honestly, I will never get tired of the groovy guitar jazz sound that lay beneath so much of the sixties superspy craze. I’m sorry we seem to have moved away from it. I would really have loved to see something like that in the score for, say, Winter Soldier or Daredevil.
It was most fully expressed in the scores John Barry did for the Bond films…
But you found it all over the place from the early sixties up through 1975 or so. And there were all these amazing jazz guys behind it. In the new movies Tom Cruise redid everything else but he knew better than to fuck with Lalo Schifrin’s theme for Mission: Impossible. Check out Schifrin on the piano, here. You’ll see that what you heard on the TV was barely half of what the real thing sounds like as he wrote it.
Likewise, check out the full version of Dave Grusin’s seductive theme for It Takes A Thief…
And Oliver Nelson on The Six Million Dollar Man. You almost never got to hear the full version with the bitchin’ piano solo, but here it is.
The point is, when you heard the bass and bongos kick in, you knew shit was going to get real. It’s practically baked into my DNA now, after fifty years…I have an automatic visceral response to it. The only guy working that turf today, I think, is Michael Giacchino. You can really hear it in his score for The Incredibles.
Best Romantic Banter
Jim: The best of these are going to be from the 1930s and ’40s, but as I mentioned above, I’m going to cite 1963’s Charade, because it’s one that flipped the script. Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) gets involved in international intrigue involving a lot of stolen money, her dead husband, and con artist named Peter Joshua, AKA Brian Cruikshank AKA Alexander Dyle AKA Adam Canfield (Cary Grant), with a lot of flirting and sexual innuendo passing between them. At the time the film was made, Grant was 59 and Hepburn was 33, and he was hesitant to make the film, thinking that the age difference made his character’s constant romantic overtures kind of creepy and predatory, so the writer and director rewrote it to make Hepburn the flirt and Grant the reluctant subject of her pursuit, which makes the movie a whole lot more entertaining. Cary Grant, for all his elegance and sophistication, was always at his best when he was uncomfortable and on the brink of panic. Bringing Up Baby (1938, with the other Hepburn, Katharine) comes to mind.
Corrina: I love Charade! Sometimes it seems like recent movies have lost the art of banter. I would also recommend Philadelphia Story with Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart trading quips, and I second the wonderful Bringing up Baby, with Hepburn and Grant again. (Confession, I may have a thing for classic movies.)
Jim: I’ll also point back to one you mentioned earlier, His Girl Friday. The rapid-fire back-and-forth between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant is pretty top-notch. My favorite, though, has to be Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934), a movie neither of them wanted to do. Of course, It Happened One Night was just one example of the work of Frank Capra, one of the directors who popularized the snappy banter form.
Edo: Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Sure, half of the time they were bickering, but they really had chemistry and made such a good couple – as I noted in a piece I wrote here a few years ago (in which I posited that every movie after Raiders should have featured both characters, and not just Indy).
Best Villains
Jim: For sheer creepy, you can’t beat Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, M (1931). Beckert is such a creepy serial child-murderer that the entire Berlin criminal underworld goes after him and holds their own trial before the police can find him. His speech in self-defense is riveting. Lorre later phoned in so many cliche villain roles that people forget what a solid actor he was before the years and booze took their toll. (Prior to M, he was best known as a comedic actor.) M is noteworthy for being possibly the first film in which sound is an essential plot point; it literally could not have been made as a silent film.
Corrina: A villain needs an iconic line and is there a more iconic one than “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave?” in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Staying with science fiction, Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner. (who also belongs in the Tough and Sexiest categories.) As for Bond villains, no one is more memorable than Grace Jones in A View to a Kill, who is redeemed (sorta) when she sacrifices herself to stop a bomb.
Edo: Damn, Corrina, you beat me to Roy Batty. Agreed on all points (and Blade Runner is just one of my all-time favorite movies).
I’ll add – as an obvious choice – the one and only Khan, played by the peerless Ricardo Montalbán, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Right at the beginning of this clip, you can see him delivering one of my favorite lines (‘There she is! …”), which cements his status as awesomest adversary ever in the history of cinema:
Another one who comes to mind is Peter Ustinov as Emperor Nero in Quo Vadis. The movie as a whole is a pretty typical mid-20th century, big-budget Hollywood historical epic, but every time Ustinov is on the screen he just chews up the scenery. He’s just so deliciously, almost comically, corrupt and evil.
Greg H: I don’t mean to keep banging on this sixties spy thing, but you can’t not mention the great Bond villains. Certainly Goldfinger and Oddjob. They’ve been stolen so often that it feels like a cliche now, but they were the template for so many other smug geniuses and hulking henchmen who followed.
To say nothing of the greatest Evil Speech of Evil ever committed to film…
But really Bond villains and their knockoffs could be a whole column of its own.
Apart from that? My favorite villains are the megalomaniac true believers who’ve deluded themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing. The smug sociopaths indulgently chuckling at the horrified hero who just doesn’t have the vision to see the big picture. Those are the best, especially coupled with the explanatory Evil Speech of Evil. Christopher Lee was great as that guy in any number of movies. Here he is in his own favorite take on it: Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man.
Also, let’s not forget kids’ movies. The sheer incongruity of the Child Catcher suddenly showing up in the middle of the saccharine Chitty Chitty Bang Bang still feels like a total WTF thing to me; as though someone behind the scenes was thinking, You know what this sappy overproduced musical needs? More nightmare fuel for six-year-olds. Tell me this guy isn’t planning on cooking and eating the kids he hunts.
Jim: Most of the movie villains of the first 60-odd years of Hollywood were just terrible people acting out of greed, jealousy, fear, or narcissism, so the memorable ones really stand out due to their personality. Syndey Greenstreet as Guttman (“The Fat Man”) in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Conrad Veidt as Major Strasser in Casablanca (1943), and John Huston in Chinatown (1974) are three good examples, but if you want complete irrational over-the-top cartoon villainy combined with a melodramatic personality, you can’t beat Hans Conreid as Dr. Terwilliger, from the aforementioned The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.
So that’s Round One of the Atomic Roundtable “Greatest (whatevers) from before the internet”; what categories should we tackle next time? Tell us in the comments!
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“knowing about the old stuff gives you a deeper appreciation for the new stuff.”
I recently (re-)watched The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and The Magnificent Seven, and realised just how big an influence they had on Star Wars.
I’d add the ’89 Batmobile (yes, the ’66 one is cool, too).
The Star Wars movies will top my ‘coolest music’ category, but The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly has an awesome score. No wonder Metallica covered it!
Also, Shaft. And a bunch of stuff from before 1990.
I could probably find something from Star Wars to make a good show in every category, tho’. The Princess Bride, too.l
“As for Bond villains, no one is more memorable than Grace Slick in A View to a Kill,”
I think you mean Grace Jones? (Who could’ve made an awesome Storm in her day, but I’d have preferred Tina Turner.)
I’ll go ahead and throw out Lauren Bacall as “Sexiest Star” and Bogie and Bacall’s repartee in “The Big Sleep” as Best Romantic Banter.
Sydney Greenstreet was brilliant in The Maltese Falcon. But then the entire cast was brilliant.
Ennio Morricone’s music for Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” is a triumph. Leone timed a large number of his shots to Morricone’s music which is almost unheard of in cinema. An absolutely brilliant collaboration.
A few picks I’ll throw out there for consideration:
– I don’t know if they were the “sexiest,” but after getting on a mild Hitchcock binge this summer, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman have to be among the 1% of the 1% of beautiful actresses. An oddball pick: Shirley Jones as the hardly-bashful hooker in “Elmer Gantry.” Hoo boy.
– I wish the Prisoner had been a movie so I could say the Lotus 6 was the coolest movie vehicle… but no love for the original Bond car? (The Batmobile is certainly a great choice).
– Among the greatest villains: Ann Savage in “Detour” leaves no scenery unchewed. Norman Bates is no slouch, either.
– Toughest protagonist might just be The Man With No Name/Blondie. I think that the strong, silent archetype may be TOO prominent in our ideals of masculinity, but a man can’t watch the Dollars trilogy without a little part of him wanting to be Clint Eastwood.
Great shoutouts from the Junk Shop and commentors re: Lalo Schifrin, Morricone, “It Happened One Night,” “2001,” and so many other classics.
People keep mentioning the “Dollars” Trilogy.
I only know A Fistful Of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More. Or are we counting The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly as part of it?
If Schifrin can be counted, so can the Lotus – Schifrin wrote that theme for TV, after all, and it wasn’t a movie theme until after the 90s.
(I’ve been noticing a The Prisoner influence in some of the older comics I’ve been reading lately.)
Generally, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is counted as the third of the trilogy, yes.
“Generally, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is counted as the third of the trilogy, yes.”
Thanks, Greg!
I have to go to work; so I will comment, in full, later. However, I just wanted to say, in regards villains: when Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was first shown on tv, I was a little kid. When the Child Catcher came on screen and leered towards the camera, I ran from the room, screaming. The actor was primarily a dancer, from Australia, which probably added to what made him so sinister, as he puts a lot of body language into things. I still think he should have been beaten to death by the children of the village, at the end, just for some cathartic release.
Right there with you.
Julie adds that he was scarier than Margaret Hamilton in THE WIZARD OF OZ, which from her is pretty damn serious. That puts him in the first rank.
Interesting, I remember watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang a number of times when I was a wee one, and that character doesn’t stick in my memory as being particularly scary or disturbing. I do vividly recall, however, that Margaret Hamilton in the Wizard scared the living crap out of me.
Okay; the full menu.
Toughest movie characters: Can’t argue much with the Magnificent 7; but, I would also throw out Michael “Guns” Donovan (John Wayne), Thomas Aloysius “Boats” Gilhooley (Lee Marvin) and Sgt Monk Menkowitz (Mike Mazurki) from the film Donovan’s Reef. A pair of weathered Irishmen with fists like hammers and a gendarme, played by an ex-pro wrestler. As an honorable mention, I would throw out Sean “Trooper” Thornton and Squire “Red” Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen), of The Quiet Man. Danaher was a bully and a blowhard; but, he could back it up with his boulder sized fists. Thornton took him down a peg; but, it was a tough fight. Still, neither one stood a chance against Mary Kate Danaher Thornton (Maureen O’Hara). O’Hara was as tough as she was beautiful, swinging on John Wayne and giving Brian Keith a black eye (in The Parent Trap), while in real life telling off Errol Flynn and taking down Confidential Magazine, when they tried to blackmail her with a phony scandal.
Coolest vehicles: James Bond’s Aston Martin DB6 and Max Rockatansky’s V-8 Police Interceptor. I’m there with Prof Fate’s Hannibal 8, in The Great Race.
Sexiest Stars: Myrna Loy (check her out in Mask of Fu Manchu, as Fah Lo Suee) and Liam Neeson. Neeson, is tall, broad, powerful, handsome and the quiet Irish brogue. Seriously hate that guy; there should be some kind of flaw, like webbed toes or something. And by all accounts, he is super nice! Also add his former lover, Helen Mirren. 75 and still smoking hot and one of the best actresses in any venue, stage, film or television.
Best fight scenes: Sammo Hung vs Bruce Lee, at the beginning of Enter the Dragon, James Bond vs Red Grant on the Orient Express, in From Russia With Love, Daniel LaRusso vs Johnny Lawrence in Karate Kid, Black Belt Jones vs the hoods in a car wash.
Coolest Music: Ennio Morricone’s score for Diabolik
Best Romantic Banter: Nick & Nora Charles, in the Thin Man series. It’s mostly quips and put downs; but, they are so impish that you can see the love there, behind the play.
Best Villain: Dr Mabuse, in the German film series. He is mostly an unseen menace through all of the films, manipulating things from afar.
Re: Helen Mirren. 100 percent agreed. I’m a bit ashamed that I forgot about her (and I resisted the temptation to go back and edit the post to add her).
Well, Liam Neeson decided that saving carriages in New York was a hill he was willing to die on, and that’s kind of weird, so maybe you can hold that against him? 🙂
We just watched ‘To Catch a Thief’; a Cary Grant film I hadn’t seen, and actually the first Grace Kelly film I’ve ever watched. (I know, I know…) For some reason I expected her to be an Ice Queen; she’s got that nordic look, and I’ve always thought of her as “Princess Grace of Monaco,” but damn. So much warmth and presence there, and beautiful, and what do you know, she can act. She and Cary Grant are really good together.
She’s very warm, and in fact something of the sexual aggressor opposite Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window.”
[Edited to restore lost text]
Toughest characters? Feh! A buncha wimps, is what you mean.
The toughest characters on screen were played by:
Buster Keaton
Harold Lloyd
Moe Howard
Larry Fine
Curly Howard
Shemp Howard
Oliver Hardy
When Oliver Hardy goes up the ladder to install a radio antenna in Hog Wild, the question is not will he fall off the roof but HOW MANY TIMES will he fall off the roof.
(And they were tough not just on screen but in real life. Moe Howard fell off a table and fractured his ribs AND FINISHED THE SCENE before asking for medical help!)
As for best villain dialog, I agree Goldfinger uttered it, but as good (evil?) as his masterpiece of crime speech is, it doesn't compare to:
"Do you expect me to talk, Goldfinger?"
"No, Mr. Bond — I expect you to DIE!"
Finally, several excellent fight scenes, but this is the absolute best fight ever put on film:
Y’know, I didn’t watch the linked youtube Goldfinger video, and just assumed it was the ‘I expect you to die’ bit.
Well, don’t know if I’d call that the *best ever* fight scene, but it’s certainly one of the funniest, and certainly quite awesome.
You’ve reminded me, though, what a great movie that is in general, and that I haven’t watched it in ages. I’ll need to remedy that.
For some reason the system ran two paragraphs together above (perhaps it misread two symbols I was using for emphasis). They were supposed to read “the question is not will he fall off the roof but HOW MANY TIMES will he fall off the roof.
(And they were tough not just on screen but in real life. Moe Howard fell off a table and fractured his ribs AND FINISHED THE SCENE before asking for medical help!)
That’s exactly what happened. It was looking for code. Anyway, I edited your comment and put the missing stuff back. Because I’m a giver.
I’m more of 1930s fan, so many of my picks will reflect that, but…
Toughest Movie Characters:
I’m going WAY off the board with this one, but every time I thought about this one I always come back to “The Sergeant” from the forgotten Boris Karloff film “The Lost Patrol” (1934). A patrol gets trapped at a desert oasis in unfriendly territory, and what he has to survive is positively harrowing.
Coolest Vehicles:
How did nobody mention the DeLorean from Back to the Future?
Sexiest Stars:
Cary Grant. I’ll admit it – Cary Grant in The Bishop’s Wife made me question my sexuality. At 40! The man is so perfect in that movie it is unfair.
Fred Astaire. The definition of class and simple grace.
From childhood to today I have always had a crush on Lea Thompson.
Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn are two of the most beautiful women I have ever seen in my life. Even in old age they were absolutely stunning.
There is a scene in the movie Athena where Debbie Reynolds is (literally) hanging from the rafters that is, bar none, the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life.
Oh, and I have to mention Lena Horne here. The woman was absolutely stunning, and race restrictions of the time prevented her from ever being able to do anything meaningful. (She either had to be cast in an all black film, or come in as a specialty, because she wasn’t allowed to interact with her white co-stars.)
Best Fight Scenes:
This one is hard for me, because most 1930s fight scenes are punches that come nowhere near hitting, and people throwing things at each other.
So, instead, I’m going to go with Rocky vs. Apollo Creed (1). This is another one so obvious I’m surprised nobody mentioned it.
Coolest Music:
Anything Judy Garland sang is magical.
Theme from Shaft (duh).
György Ligeti’s music in 2001. It genuinely sounds like music from another planet, and that’s impressive.
Best Romantic Banter:
Anything between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. One look at them on the screen interacting and it is clear that they were very much in love. They (mostly she) could deliver the most heinous barbs, but just in the delivery it was clear that it was given with love. Adam’s Rib springs to mind, here.
Best Villains:
The Invisible Man (1933) – There’s a moment, as the serum drives him mad, where Claude Rains looks at the sky and declares “even the moon fears me!” It is a powerful moment of megalomania and encroaching insanity.
The Mummy (1932) – I had to get Karloff on here somewhere. People forget that the original mummy was an intelligent, cursed man. Here is a man (somewhat wrongfully) cursed, and his curse breaks him. Karloff had a unique ability to bring a simple humanity to any role he played, so that even his most vile characters could evoke some sense of sympathy.
Ok, that’s enough. Suggested future categories:
Best Movie Hero/Heroine
Best Movie Theme Song
Scariest Movie Monster
Cutest Movie Couple
Most Beautiful Movie Destination (Where would you like to vacation?)
On the DeLorean in Back in the Future, the only thing that made it cool to me is the fact that it travels through time. Otherwise, I’ve always thought DeLoreans were kind of ugly – like a failed attempt to make something look cool and futuristic.
As for the Shaft theme, there is no doubt that it’s one of the coolest songs ever, but – as I said in my post – nothing tops Mayfield’s “Pusherman” and the rest of the Superfly soundtrack.
“The Mummy (1932) – I had to get Karloff on here somewhere. People forget that the original mummy was an intelligent, cursed man.”
So much so, I’m not sure if I can count him as a villain. 🙂
I mean, he was part of modern Egyptian society for ten years and everything was fine until the events of the movie set him off.
Well, if you want 1930s fight scenes (and fudge into the 40s, too) then you have to mention Republic Studios. My personal favorite is Spy Smasher, where Tom Steele and Kane Richmond are battling all over the place, with monkey flips, nip ups, throws, punches, furniture fighting….you name it. Adv of Captain Marvel has a good early one, where an outlaw bedouin group attacks the archeological expedition with Billy Batson. At one point, Dave Sharpe, doubling for Tom Tyler, does a backflip and kicks two of the outlaws at once. Tyler later has a fight on a rooftop, where he tosses a guy over the side and there is no cut to him landing on anything. Dick Tracy and Fighting Devil Dogs have some good ones and Daredevils of the Red Circle is just filled with great stunts and such, especially since Dave Sharpe was one of the principle actors, rather than just a stunt man (though he was doubled on some things, in case he got hurt and would halt production). Also, the two Rex Bennett serials: G-Men vs the Black Dragon and Secret Service in Darkest Africa, are filled with great stunt fights, including copious furniture fighting.
Of the two Rex Bennett serials, I prefer Secret Service In Darkest Africa: Good cast, solid script, and lots of action!
I can only comment on toughest character:
Robert Redfords character in A Bridge Too Far in the awesome scene where he´s looking for the MIA rookie and rescues him in a jeep driving straight through the German lines.
Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare.
My bride and I went on an old movie binge this week. We watched the aforementioned ‘To Catch a Thief’, the original ‘Thomas Crown Affair’ (my nominee for “Most WTF Theme Song”), ‘How to Murder Your Wife’, and ‘North By Northwest’.
‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ has a clever bank robbery setup, but the investigation that follows quickly becomes background noise to the romance between Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, who are both fascinating to watch. I have no idea what “The Windmills of your Mind” is supposed to be about, except for pretentious pseudo-philosophical blather trying to sound profound, like a circle in a spiral….
‘How to Murder Your Wife’ because misogyny is hilarious. I love Jack Lemmon, but this one does not age well. Virna Lisi is very pretty.
I had absorbed so much of ‘North By Northwest’ by cultural osmosis that I felt like I’d actually seen it before. It’s been suggested that it is actually the first James Bond movie, the template those films followed.
It’s now pretty clear that Hitchcock had a type. Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Kim Novak… were there any blonde actresses he missed?
Tough guys: John Garfield, absolutely. Hard as Cagney but a whole lot colder. Body and Soul, Force of Evil and more.
Edo, agree on Trouble Man.
Corrina, complete agreement on Stanwyck, whom I adore. To Russell’s Hildy I’d add Glenda Farrell as Torchy Blaine from the B-Movie Torchy Blaine (well, obviously) series.
The highpoint of “the Great Race” was the exchange: “A friar helped Leslie out of prison.” “WHAT? Leslie escaped with A CHICKEN!”
Vehicles: Resounding yes! on the Time Machine.
Sexiest stars. Stanwyck of course. Errol Flynn — in college when they screened Captain Blood I could hear the gasp sweeping the audience when he got his first close-up.
And yes, Lena Horne. I first saw her in an episode of “Sanford and Son” in the 1970s and had no idea why everyone was so excited about her. Then I caught her 1930s films and shit, I get it.
Fight scene: the climactic swordfight between Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in Scaramouche.
Music: Singing in the Rain.
For romantic banter, no argument with the choices, particularly “Philadelphia Story.” I’ll add “What’s Up Doc?” with Barbra Streisand — a brain who constantly drops random factoids — stalk-seducing Ryan O’Neal. Includes the line (not spoken by her) “Snakes, as you know are deathly afraid of …. tile!”
Villains. Charles Laughton in “Island of Lost Souls,” talking about man-animal hybrids as casually as if it were an appendectomy. AND Peter Cushing in his Hammer Frankenstein films is an absolute monster, totally cold-blooded about conducting his experiments. And you know, he’s Peter Cushing, so it works.
“the climactic swordfight between Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer in Scaramouche.
Music:”
Sure, they can fight, but will they do the fandango?
A tough character that comes to my mind is “Walker” played by Lee Marvin in Point Blank (Based on the Westlake/Richard Stark book the Hunter) – so tough he didn’t need to read out all his lines, but could instead sit there silently
on Best fight scenes the one that comes to my mind is from The Living Daylights where bad guy Necros fights the Government agent protecting the safehouse – typically , such a fight with the hero in absence is over in seconds, but not in this case. Here the man on guard is shown as quite capable.
Still on fights,, I’m a fan of Hong Kong cinema – preferring Jackie Chan to Bruce Lee – the problem is which film to pick – maybe the big climax of Dragons Forever.
Another Hong Kong Film (from 1989) In the Line of Duty 4: Witness (or Key Witness or Yes Madam 4) with great fight choreography by Yuen Woo-Ping. For me the best fight was the one involving Cynthia Khan in an ambulance, on top of the ambulance, down the side of the ambulance , etc with the ambulance moving throughout the fight
Of course, a proper list of great fight scenes from Hong Kong Cinema before 1990 would more than fill an article.
I love that fight in The Living Daylights! THAT guy should have been a double-0.