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Release date: July 1, 2004 What Makes For a Successful Movie Villain?With the evil Doc Ock clamoring across movie screens this week in pursuit of Spiderman with the release of "Spiderman 2," Emory film professor Matthew Bernstein reflects on what makes for a successful movie villain. "The best Hollywood villains followed Alfred Hitchcock's principle of making the villain appealing and seductive, morally more complex than a straight 'bad guy' who is despicable for obvious reasons," says Bernstein. "I think of James Mason as the suave spy Van Damn in North by Northwest (1959). Another is Claude Rains in Notorious (1946) as the affectionate, attentive lover/husband--who happens to be a Nazi--to the emotionally needy Ingrid Bergman, who pines for the restrained, controlling CIA agent Cary Grant. In that film, when Alex Sebastian (Rains) walks in to meet his suspicious fellow Nazis at the end of the film, we have a tinge of concern at his imminent death--much as Hitchcock forced us to identify on some level with the monstrous Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). "Hitchcock's ability to manipulate our emotions made for a much richer experience of the movies. For example, 'the monster' Godfather playing in the garden with his grandchildren in Francis Ford Coppola's film (1972), or our sympathetic and repellent responses to the decent Michael Corleone's descent into the mob. In other words, nearly every successful film villain has some element of contrary complexity or sympathy that contrasts with his or her moral nature. Think of Hannibal Lechter's supreme cultivation and sophistication in Silence of the Lambs (1991). But a fully incarnated, less complex villain like Major Strasser in Casablanca (1943) can be successful on a few occasions on the basis of the actor's full-blooded performance, in this case, the German émigré Conrad Veidt." Bernstein is associate professor of film studies. His expertise includes the American film industry, classical and contemporary Hollywood cinema, the social problem film, segregated film-going and African-Americans in film, Japanese cinema and post-war European cinema. For more about him, go to the faculty page www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/FILM/ |
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