Great Movie Villains

Submitted by ejones on Mon, 12/11/2006 - 07:54
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  1. Spoiler: Highlight to view
    Orson Welles as Harry Lime
    in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949): Really a very brief role, but one that casts a long shadow over the rest of the film.
  2. Robert Mitchum as the Preacher in The Night of the Hunter (Robert Laughton, 1955)
  3. Henry Fonda as Frank in Once upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)
  4. Hugh Millais as Butler in McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971): An oft-overlooked character, with only a few minutes of screen time, but a genuinely scary one, whether he is lecturing miners on sending Chinese workers to their deaths or impassively watching the murder of Keith Carradine's Cowboy.
  5. Spoiler: Highlight to view
    John Huston as Noah Cross
    in Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974)
  6. David Prowse, James Earl Jones (voice) as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977, George Lucas), The Empire Strikes Back (Irwin Kershner, 1980), Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983): "Empire" is what really makes this character, revealing him not just as a one-dimensional incarnation of evil, but as a character with his own agenda.
  7. M. Emmet Walsh as the Detective in Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984): Sleaze incarnate, with an old yellow Bug that's like an extension of his personality.
  8. Mieko Harada as Lady Kaede in Ran (Akira Kurosawa, 1985)
  9. Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth in Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986): Hopper's performance as the diminutive, leather-jacketed, drugged-out fetishist drug dealer Frank Book more or less singlehandedly created the tradition for well-known actors to give their all in virtuoso turns as cillains.
  10. Michael Rooker as Henry in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986): The best ever depiction of a serial killer, played without phony glamour or grandeur but with a core of humanity by Rooker.
  11. Michael Gambon as The Thief in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989)
  12. Willem Dafoe as Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990)
  13. J.E. Freeman as Eddie Dane in Miller's Crossing (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1990): An intriguing character who's simultaneously the scariest and the most moral person in the movie.
  14. Joel Pesci as Tommy Devito in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
  15. Gary Oldman as Stansfield in Leon (Luc Besson, 1994): No great psychological nuance or subtlety here (or any, for that matter), just a fine actor having a lot of fun with a theatrical role of a Beethoven aficionado/crooked narc.
  16. Eihi Shiina as Asami Yamazaki in Audition (Takashi Miike, 1999)
  17. Ben Kinglsey as Don Logan in Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2001)
  18. Leandro Firmino as Li'l Ze in City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002): This Brazilian gang leader is one of the scariest characters you'll see in any movie, all the more so because he's recognizably human.
  19. Danny Huston as Arthur Burns in The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005): John Huston's son is one of the best character actors working today, and here he turns his bandit chief into a monstrous sage worthy of Apocalypse Now's Colonel Kurtz and Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden.
  20. Ray Winstone as Mr. French in The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)
ambient12/12/2006

This one tops a few lists... Jack Palance as Jack Wilson in "Shane".

ejones12/14/2006

Good thought. I saw "Shane" a few years ago and wasnn't particularly impressed by it, but I do recall being impressed by Palance.