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Top 10 Film Villains

The Observer's new Film Quarterly magazine is chock full of all kinds of candy that's bad for you, but that seeks to sell, deliciously, mainstream industrial cinema (I mean, that Hollywood stuff we love and love to knock, us Art Housed). Okay. And it has a very fun and quite considered Top 10 of Film Villains, selected by their best critic, Philip French. I was very pleased to see Joseph Wiseman's Dr. No (many might have thought Goldfinger the best Bond baddie), Lorre's M, Palance's killer from Shane, Welles in non-cuckoo-clock mode, and Hopkins as pure sociopathic evil. - etc. Some of the great villains were not included, including: Mr. Bates from Psycho; Darth Vader; Malkovich's weird assassin in In The Line of Fire; and Brando's Kurtz (Mister Kurtz, He Bad). Who else? Well, The Jackal in the film of the same name (original version). One pleasant, refined choice: James Mason in North by Northwest (a subtle choice, that).
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Steven Waling said…
Just to say that there's at least one fan of Wallace Stevens in England. Namely, me.
Mon Feb 04, 12:28:00 pm 2008
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