Just for fun, I wanted to share a small handful of what I consider to be the most perfectly cast roles of all time—the kinds of characters that simply couldn’t be played by any other actor, because some essential aspect of the performance would be lost in translation. This list is far from comprehensive, of course; I may update it later. Feel free to respond with your own picks!
I was recently invited to participate in a “10 Days, 10 Movies” meme over on another social media platform. Unfortunately, my unpredictable work schedule would have made it difficult to stick to the proper format… so I decided to just lump all of my choices into one big post. I’m actually fairly pleased with the result, and thus felt it would be worth sharing. Without further ado, here is my list of the ten films that most significantly shaped my cinematic tastes, in more or less chronological order:
Plot: Intent on throwing a wrench into the gears of Hitler’s war machine, British general Ed Fenech (Mike Myers) offers a ragtag group of long-imprisoned Irish dissidents (Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Pierce Brosnan, Cilian Murphy, and others) the deal of a lifetime: full pardons in exchange for their expertise in guerrilla warfare. Their mission (dubbed “Operation: Chuculainn”), which involves infiltrating Nazi-occupied France and sabotaging the enemy at every available opportunity, quickly brings them into contact with a rowdy band of Jewish American soldiers. After clearing up a brief misunderstanding, the two teams join forces, launching an audacious assault on a heavily-fortified Gestapo stronghold in order to rescue one of the Americans’ captured comrades.
Set between chapters in Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist World War II epic, this rollicking adventure film reveals how the British military first learned of Lt. Raine’s clandestine activities and sheds light on the previously-unknown fates of the “missing” Basterds.
A good action scene does not exist for its own sake; rather, it is the culmination of the screenwriter's meticulously-laid groundwork. Shootouts, fistfights, and car chases represent the ultimate payoff, the thundering crescendo that releases the viewer's pent-up tension; if one of these stock story beats ever falls flat or feels boring, it is because the film lacks adequate buildup--without tension to alleviate, there can be no genuine stakes, no emotional investment.
The very best cinematic storytellers know exactly how to wind the watch tighter and tighter, straining the springs until they inevitably, satisfyingly explode. Quentin Tarantino has perfected the formula in recent years: collectively, his past two films play as a thesis statement on how to construct a suspenseful game of verbal cat-and-mouse. In Inglourious Basterds, Michael Fassbender's cool, cultured Archie Hicox, undercover behind enemy lines, finds himself caught up in a silent battle of wills between a shrewd, suspicious SS officer and Til Schweiger's insatiable Nazi slayer. Similarly, the two protagonists of 2012's Django Unchained (the eponymous freed slave and his German companion/mentor, Dr. King Schultz) must match wits with sadistic slaveowner Calvin Candie--whose casual cruelty (of particular note: feeding a would-be escapee to a pack of ravenous dogs) makes it increasingly difficult for the bounty hunters (especially the kindhearted Schultz) to keep up the charade. Both scenarios can only result in a sudden eruption of violence--and each and every gunshot and blood spurt only amplifies the viewer's sense of catharsis.
South Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-Woon (The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, I Saw the Devil), too, excels at this delicate art. In The Last Stand, his English-language debut (and Arnold Schwarzenegger's big comeback vehicle), the director deftly juggles several disparate narrative threads--a bloodthirsty drug kingpin races toward the Mexican border in a souped-up Corvette, a beleaguered FBI agent desperately tries to cut off his escape route, a small-town sheriff (and retired badass--this is Arnold, after all) rallies his troops for the impending battle--as they gradually converge on an explosive climatic showdown in the sleepy streets of Sommerton Junction. And the sight of the former Governor of California mowing down dozens of mercenaries from the back of a moving school bus is hardly the only moment of triumph the movie has to offer; the film's most effective sequence, by far, is the first encounter between our ragtag band of heroes and the villain's nefarious henchmen. Two woefully inexperienced sheriff's deputies (Zach Gilford and Jaimie Alexander) find themselves pinned down by gunfire after inadvertently stumbling across the villain's super-secret bridge construction project. A garbled voice on the other end of the radio promises that backup is on the way, but any comfort that those words might provide quickly fades when the bad guys kill the work lights, slip on night vision goggles, and advance with guns ablaze. We unconsciously slide to the edge of our seats: previous scenes devoted a lot of precious screen time to establishing these characters' goals and ambitions and dreams, and while those beats felt somewhat slow and unnecessary in the moment, they served their purpose--they got us to care. So when Arnold rides in like a knight on his noble steed, firing his shotgun one-handed and splattering mooks across his windshield like so many mosquitoes, the audience is compelled the cheer: this is the emotional release we've been craving since the first muzzle flash, and it is glorious.
Kim Jee-Woon understands. Tarantino understands. The Coens, Beat Takeshi, and Takashi Miike all understand: action scenes work best when used as punctuation. After all, exclamation points are meaningless unless they appear at the end of a properly structured sentence.
With Quentin Tarantino, it's never about the story.
When the maverick director chooses a premise, he leans towards the audacious, the irreverent, the exploitative--but only on the surface. Django Unchained, his latest effort, utilizes the tropes and conventions of the blaxploitation genre (drawing particular inspiration from sleazier productions, such as Goodbye Uncle Tom and Mandingo) to create a stylized impression of the shameful history of slavery in America (similar to his depiction of World War II in Inglourious Basterds). Spike Lee can object to this subject matter all he wants, can deride the film as "offensive" and "disrespectful," can refuse to watch a single frame of it until both he and Tarantino are dead and buried, and it will never mean a Goddamned thing. Because it's not about the story. It's about the fullness of the characters, the rhythm of the dialogue, the effortless tension which pervades every scene.
In other words, it's about the storytelling.
Tarantino's mastery over his craft is apparent in every minute of every movie he makes. He seems to know instinctively how to manipulate and misdirect audience expectations, how to deftly orchestrate situations in order to generate maximum suspense. The quintessential example of his slow-simmer approach to constructing set pieces occurs in Inglourious Basterds: Michael Fassbender's cool, cultured Archie Hicox, undercover behind enemy lines, finds himself face to face with Major Dieter Hellstrom, a shrewd operative of the SS; by adding Hugo Stiglitz (who made a hobby of murdering Gestapo agents even before joining Aldo's merry band of Nazi-scalpers) into the mix, Tarantino concocts a potent recipe for one hell of a taut game of cat-and-mouse.
The second half of Django Unchained follows the same basic formula. With the help of kindhearted bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the newly-liberated Django (Jamie Foxx) tracks his long-lost love (Kerry Washington) to Candie Land, a sprawling plantation owned by the sadistic Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). In order to avoid arousing suspicion, our two heroes infiltrate the property under false pretenses: Schultz poses as a showman hoping to break into the bloodsport of "Mandingo fighting," while Django reluctantly adopts the role of a black slave trader acting as Schultz's consultant. But as they witness one atrocity after another, both men find it increasingly difficult to keep up the charade--and their discomfort catches the attention of Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), Candie's fiercely loyal house slave.
Such a volatile setup can lead only to a blood-soaked payoff--and Tarantino has never been prone to squeamishness. In a previous post, I discussed how much the filmmaker enjoys deconstructing the nature of violence, examining the myriad emotional responses it evokes and provokes--and Django Unchained continues that proud tradition. The camera observes the brutal, dehumanizing indignities (both "real" and embellished) suffered by the black characters with sober, unflinching detachment, inspiring horror, disgust, and anger at the sickening injustice of it all; at the other end of the spectrum, the gleefully-gory action sequences--which invite the viewer to cheer as the protagonists mow down their white tormentors by the dozen--are zealous, cathartic, and gut-bustingly hilarious.
And then there's the anomaly, the shockingly somber exception to the rule. Django, still in the early stages of his Hero's Journey, stares down the iron sights of his rifle. His target plows the dry, empty field below--shadowed closely by a little boy, no older than ten. "I can't," the newly-minted mercenary mutters. Schultz berates his companion for hesitating: this man, he argues, may have chosen the life of a simple farmer, but he left countless corpses in his wake, earning the $7,000 price on his head. Django sighs, steadies his aim, and squeezes the trigger. The crack of the gunshot rolls over the hills like distant thunder. The retired criminal collapses, sending up a cloud of dust. The echo of the child's laughter quickly fades as he comes to a grim realization: daddy isn't just fooling around. He can only choke out a single word to express his disbelief: "Papa?"
Perhaps the "pursuit of vengeance" is less noble and clean in practice than it is in theory.
When Nazi propagandist Dr. Fritz Hippler wrote his article “Film as a Weapon,” he was referring not to the medium’s capacity to destroy, but rather its ability to create ideas and shape perceptions—he referred to it as a “mirror in which the broad masses of the world see Germany.” He even outlined a battle plan detailing how to increase audiences and maximize “public enlightenment”—how to “…[win] people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that they succumb to it utterly and never escape it.”
Though Quentin Tarantino mocks the Nazi party’s political beliefs in Inglourious Basterds, he agrees with this view of film. In his vision of World War II, Allies and Germans fight not on battlefields, but in cinemas. Faced with the faltering war effort, Joseph Goebbels, the “number two man in the Third Reich,” plans to boost morale with an inspirational movie. Tarantino never frames a traditional skirmish. He deemphasizes Hitler’s battlefront strategy, focusing almost solely on Goebbels’ cinematic efforts.
Tarantino portrays this cinematic battleground as a vital front. One character explains that Goebbels sees his work as the last line of defense against Hollywood’s Jew-controlled productions. His film-within-the-film, A Nation’s Pride, sculpts soldier Frederick Zoller into a near-mythic national icon, known even to the Allies as “the German Sergeant York.” While Zoller turns away from the reproduction of his own exploits, recalling the horror of his actual experience, the German audience cheers as the valiant young hero triumphs to a swelling orchestral score.
Tarantino creates a figurative filmmaker to mirror Goebbels: Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter.” Early in the film, Landa revels in his nickname, but as the Allies close in, he bemoans it as “just the name that stuck.” When Landa learns of the Basterds’ approach, he discreetly works to ensure their success. Once he has all the players completely under his control, he blackmails the Basterds, changing his own role in history: the Allies agree to officially state Landa was their double agent from the beginning, and that his cooperation directly enabled the fuehrer’s assassination.
Landa, then, is a “filmmaker” because he manipulates history in order to influence how future generations perceive him—he will be the man who ended Hitler’s reign, rather than the savage murderer of countless Jews. Goebbels, too, manipulates history in A Nation’s Pride, softening the violence of Zoller’s exploits so that his story will inspire rather than revolt. Even Tarantino himself radically alters history to demonstrate the devastating potential of his celluloid weapon: the Basterds ultimately succeed in killing Hitler.
Tarantino is not always so direct in his argument. Central to the narrative is “Operation Kino,” an Ally plan to cripple the Nazi High Command by attacking the premiere of A Nation’s Pride. The British choose Lt. Archie Hicox to command the mission—not because of his extensive counterintelligence experience, but due to his credentials as a film critic specializing in German directors. The operation is partially masterminded by Bridget von Hammersmark, a beloved German starlet. Steeped as it is in film, Operation Kino becomes more than an attack on the High Command: it is an attack on Goebbels’ very cinematic ideals. As Operation Kino propels Inglourious Basterds to its climax, Tarantino envisions a literal cinematic battleground as the premiere goes up in flames—the blaze fueled, appropriately enough, by nitrate film.
Previous Cinemagic Posts
1. Hugo
2. Fish Story
Ever since Edwin S. Porter had his great train robber fire directly at the camera, the landscape of cinema has been drenched in blood.
Attitudes have shifted since those morally-simplistic early days. Watching The Great Train Robbery now, it’s difficult to distinguish between the wild bunch of outlaws and the “righteous” posse that guns them down—as smoke swallows up the falling bodies, the line between good and evil blurs, until only the violence remains.
The best filmmakers working today refuse to glorify acts of violence simply because they are perpetrated by the “hero”; they contemplate violence, scrutinize violence, question the nature and purpose of violence. Quentin Tarantino, for example, frequently examines the myriad contradictory emotional responses violence can evoke and provoke. Consider Inglourious Basterds, which dances a merry jig all over the razor thin line between slapstick (all the scalping) and horror (the chilling scene in which Landa strangles Bridget von Hammersmark): we’re shocked when the Nazis applaud the senseless slaughter in Nation’s Pride (the propaganda film within the film), yet minutes later, we’re laughing and cheering as Donnie and Omar wantonly fire into the crowd, reducing Hitler’s face to a mound of crimson pulp.
Japanese director “Beat” Takeshi Kitano takes a less sensationalistic approach; he’s more interested in exploring the repercussions of violence. In his films—the dreamlike Dolls, the unflinchingly bitter Hana-bi (or Fireworks, if you prefer the translated title)—death usually occurs just beyond the edges of the frame, emphasizing the aftermath: a wheelchair-bound police officer pouring his grief and trauma onto a canvass, a woman saving a spot on her favorite park bench for the lover who will no longer be joining her, a cleanup crew scrubbing dried bloodstains off the asphalt.
While Kitano ponders the results of violence, Scorsese focuses on the causes—the forces that motivate men to resort to bloodshed. His most iconic characters—Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, Tommy DeVito—are ticking time bombs; “as the earth moves toward the sun, [they] move toward violence” (paraphrased from Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay). These are men driven by fears, anxieties, and insecurities they can neither comprehend nor verbalize; they can only express themselves, can only resolve their conflicts, by spilling blood. Thus, every scene is a taut, suspenseful countdown to the inevitable explosion.
The conversation between Travis and his street smart fellow cabbie “Wizard” outside the Belmore Cafeteria epitomizes Scorsese’s slow-burn recipe. At his lowest point after Betsy (his Madonna) rejects his advances, Travis is desperate to forge a meaningful relationship with somebody, anybody. But when he tries to open up to Wiz, to confess the dark urge “growing in [his] brain”—to use “true force” to “wash all the scum of the streets”—the words tumble out in an incoherent tangle: “I just want to go and really… really do something. I just want to go out and… I really… you know, I really want to… I got some bad ideas in my head, I just…” Wiz can only offer frustratingly generic advice (“Go out and get laid, get drunk”). Devastated by his latest missed connection, Travis purchases the arsenal he’ll ultimately use to liberate Iris. Moments like this pervade Scrosese’s body of work. Vickie innocently comments that Jake’s opponent is “good looking.” The inebriated Billy Batts teases Tommy about his old shine box. A match ignites, lighting the fuse.
When violence finally occurs, it is sudden, savage, and senseless. Rapid editing strips away all pretense of “motivation” or narrative context, breaking the action down into a disorienting—almost abstract—series of gunshots/punches/stabs. As the gore trickles down the wall, any semblance of meaning dissolves; all that’s left is pure imagery, movement, rhythm—the repulsive, captivating poetry of violence.
