TOP TEN ANTI-HEROES NO-ONE ELSE SEEMS THAT BOTHERED ABOUT (BUT WE REALLY LIKE)

TOHT off of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
Raiders of the Lost Auk is of course stuffed to the gills with baddies but on the whole they're a pretty cartoonish lot. Paul Freeman is far too Belgian to be menacing (although he at least doesn't go out in this like a raspberry ripple) and the myriad naughty Nazis play, for the most part, like a combination of extras from Smiley's People and guests at Fawlty Towers. On the whole, Nazis in the various Jonesian epics tend to be no more than comedy stormtroopers who are there to be punched loudly and prove themselves to be remarkably bad shots. Even Michael `Hitler' Sheard, in The Last Crusade, only ever manages to look like Mr Bronson in a hat. They might as well have booked Mel Brooks. Ronald `Horrible Harris' Lacey on the other hand provides a character that is genuinely threatening and scary, slinking around in his leather greatcoat and black fedora, his little round glasses glinting in the desert light or reflecting the glow of the white hot poker he's quite prepared to scribble on Karen Allen's keyster with. If Herr Flick had been a character in Scanners, he couldn't have been more alarming. Of course, he gets it in the end - as is only proper - but where Freeman's character is involved in the whole escapade just to get his mits on the Ark for himself thereby - providing him with an excuse to wear an outfit like a children's entertainer at the end - and the rest of the Gerries are only there to provide dressing, it's easy to believe that Lacey's unnamed character (at least we don't ever recall hearing his name) is along for the ride just because he's enjoying it. And that makes him very disturbing indeed. But let's face it, if there's not some really vicious bad guy in a black hat after you, it's hardly worth running is it? And for all the other wrong `uns who turn up in Raiders of the Lost Ark it's Ronald Lacey who makes us shiver most. And that's what we want, isn't it?

MING THE MERCILESS off of FLASH GORDON
The term anti-hero might have been coined for the Emperor Ming, a man - as portrayed by Max von `Kremlin Letter' Sydow - so good at being bad that he wipes everyone else off the screen with a glance. Flash Gordon by comparison is nothing more than a plot-hanging blond dullard on screen to provide an excuse for Ming to wear his red velvet catsuits and gold jaggy collar and be nasty in a very big way. Indeed, so evil is Ming that in that genre-defining lunacy by Dino de Laurentiiiis! it takes in the end a whole spaceship (a whole spaceship!) to kill him. And even then he makes it to the credits for an enigmatic chuckle. He stabs his own subjects, presides over the torture of his daughter, blows up entire planets and has a robotic drone with his own voice. All hail Ming! The anti-hero's anti-hero!

DR ANTON PHIBES off of THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES
My God, what a film. And what a hero. Yep, Vincent Price's disfigured doctor, out to off the surgeon's who bungled his late wife's operation in assorted archly biblical manners, is no villain. For a start, anyone who, supposedly spending years in hiding devising an overly-elaborate revenge plan, takes time off to build a giant underground Art Deco dancehall complete wth Wurlitzer and robot orchestra, can't be all bad. Second, the doctors he and the delightful Vulnavia off thoroughly deserve their fates (especially the blood-drained Terry-Thomas). Price, though he never really "acts" on camera, is never less than magnificent too, peeling off his rubber face, vouchsafing cod-antiquated prophecies ("Nine eternities in doom!") through a gramophone to a picture of Caroline Munro, and drinking pureed Brussels sprouts through the back of his head. Actors these days approach serial killer roles with months of research, but somehow all end up doing the same old cross between Alec Guinness in Smiley's People and Bobcat Goldthwaite. Price, just doing Price, outclasses them all. Oh, for a brass unicorn attack during the interminable Se7en!

THE BLACK CROWS off of DUMBO
Dumbo may seem like the least likely place to find any memorably nasty characters let alone anti-heroes (aside from the hugely alarming pink elephants in the famous Screen Test-fuelling sequence) but when you bear in mind it's about a baby taken from its mother who is then committed to an asylum (sort of) and then abandoned, you begin to appreciate it on rather a different level. Normally we're not terribly fond of this sort of analysis of films we like and would prefer just to enjoy them on a flying-elephant level but it does at any rate allow us to recognise the Black Crows in Dumbo as the genuinely nasty sods they really are. After all, here comes this poor, defenceless junior pachyderm all alone in the world except for a mouse dressed like a Quality Street who likes a tipple and what do they do? They laugh, that's what. The swines. Not only that but they then sing an entire song - in close harmony - taking the piss out of him. Not only *that* but they then persuade him that by wearing a scraggy feather he can actually fly thereby inviting him to plunge to a thinly spread death. We're sure there's some terribly informed sociological or anthropological point to be made here about the use of negative characters in contemporary children's fiction, but we just like someone to boo at in a film, simple souls that we are. Of course, in the end Dumbo *does* fly, no thanks to the Crows who went on to a successful recording career covering Joni Mitchell records badly. So Dumbo may be light Disney Time-type viewing but it's made just that little bit darker by those bastard Black Crows.

ELI CROSS off of THE STUNTMAN
How many times have you watched a clean cut cipher of an adventure "hero" make his way from tribulation to tribulation while hurling abuse at the screen and willing him to cop it in the next few minutes? We know we have, and Peter O'Toole's messianic, bullying film director is our patron saint (though it's doubtful he'd put up with so lowly a ranking). A robber (OK, so he's not so clean cut, but who is this bloke? He's so bland we can't even recall the actor's name without looking it up, which we can't be bothered to do) stumbles onto O'Toole's WWI film drama and kills the stuntman, willingly agrees with Cross to take his place to cover up their respective crimes, and basically spends the rest of the film trying to take on the role of action hero only to have the omnipresent Cross humiliating him physically and verbally at every turn. It's fantasy time for anyone who's ever wanted to give Mark Hammill a slap, basically. O'Toole's always good in these sort of roles, but we're picking this one as he's just on your side, ie. against stunt boy, all the while. Oh, and twenty-odd years later, we *still* desperately want a go on his flying director's chair.

FRANKIE BARROW off of STEPTOE AND SON RIDE AGAIN
The Godfather of Shepherd's Bush may not have had the muscle of his New York contemporaries but the diminutive bad guy in Steptoe and Son Ride Again was quite bad enough to manage to intimidate an entire borough with only two badly dressed henchmen and a Cadillac. He's never going to be rated alongside Scarface or Little Caesar but in his own way he was their equal and, well, if you don't have a really bad bad guy then you never know just how good the good guy is, do you? But just how evil can a character in a Steptoe and Son film be? Well, let's look at the evidence. At the outset, Frankie Barrow cons Harold into buying a myopic greyhound instead of buying a new horse, thereby depriving a poor man of his livelihood. Then he tells him that if he doesn't produce the balance of what he owns on Hercules The Second, both he and his Dad will have their faces slashed with razors. Then, upon finding out that Old Steptoe has died, he stops his henchmen from battering Harold's head off the doorway and says he'll wait a few days for the insurance to cough up at 10% a day. The he turns up at the funeral. Make no mistake, Frankie Barrow is as vicious a crim as yer Corleones or yer Barzinis or yer Tattaglias any day. He might not have all the judges and politicians of New York in his pocket but we bet he could get a drink after closing time anywhere he wanted. Now *that's* power.

MICHAEL RIMMER off of THE RISE AND RISE OF MICHAEL RIMMER
Yes, yes, Peter Cook can't act for toffee, and saying that his glassy-eyed panic stare happens to be perfect for the role of the malevolent charmer doesn't fool anyone. And yet. Unlike many anti- heroes, this one doesn't get the best lines, doesn't get to dispatch of anyone in any exquisitely gory ways (well, apart from pushing the PM of a North Sea rig) and, well, doesn't do anything much except become very successful with a bit of well-placed manipulation of the various fools who orbit around him. He's meant to be David Frost, of course, and that's possibly the key here - grasping, media exploiting people like this are a genuine pain in the arse in the real world, but elevated to the status of a genuinely evil menace (Rimmer starts as a time and motion clipboard holder at Arthur Lowe's ad agency, and ends up dictator of Britain) the usual overweening dislike melts away, and a strange admiration creeps in. If only Denholm Elliot, thanklessly cast as shifty arch rival Peter Niss, was playing the main part...

GEORGE CALDWELL off of SILVER STREAK
You knew it was coming! But other than shoehorning yet another mention of the finest (and, not altogether unrelated to that, funniest) Hitchcock spoof, there's genuine reason to stick Gene Wilder's character in here. Familiarity has long since bred contempt for our man's eternally baffled schtick, but for our money 1976, and this film in particular, was the time he perfected his anti-heroic persona. That's "anti" not in the sense of "evil" but in the sense of "doesn't want to be here", and no that's not cheating. Mild- mannered, quietness-hankering publisher George Caldwell takes the wrong train and is subsequently shat on by events, like the nominal lead in The Stuntman, but the weary befuddlement with which he greets every challenge - from holding Clifton James' redneck sheriff at gunpoint, to enduring Lucille Benson's aerobatics, and of course the infamous transistor radio and shoe polish escapade, is a guaranteed audience winner. This time, you're firmly on the side of the man being thrown off the train, beaten up etc., and it's all thanks to Wilder. Sadly, that put-on bankability was milked dry several times over during the following decade, but put all thoughts of See No Evil, Hear No Evil out of your mind and this is still the ultimate reluctant hero comedy.

GRAND MOFF TARKIN off of STAR WARS
Darth Vader might seem the obvious choice for this sort of thing, but it would be rather disingenuous of us we feel to include him since in Star Wars Draught Evader is far from being the nastiest, most menacing presence on the screen. Oh no, in that first instalment (we're just not going to call it A New Hope, George) there is someone far more frightening, and far more engaging, on show than Dark Helmet and that is the spindly and dastardly figure of Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin. What's not to love about Tarkin? Not only does he tell the very-obviously-bad Darth Vader what to do, not only does he blow up planets even when he says he won't, not only do we recognise him as the man who has dispatched Dracula over a dozen times on a Saturday night but he is also in charge of the Death Star! And when you're about seven, that means you rank pretty highly in anyone's juvenile estimations. The down side to Tarkin is that you don't get to see him nearly enough and that he also gets blown up at the end. But when he is on screen he manages to embody the entire power of an evil Galactic Empire just by furrowing his brow and enunciating every syllable in the phrase "a military target" and by rolling the word "reasonable" around his mouth like a big glass marble. They say that Tarkin is going to feature in the new Star Wars film, The Comeback of the Kid or something, but it won't be Peter Cushing so it won't matter. You can take your Emperor and your Sith and your whatever and have them pull the ears off a gundark for all we care. They didn't get any nastier than Grand Moff Tarkin.

JUST ABOUT EVERY CHARLES HAWTREY CHARACTER off of THE CARRY ON FILMS
Of course, every Carry On regular always played themselves (and when they tried not to it always fell apart - cf. Sir Rodney Ffing), so we're not copping out by lumping the likes of Pintpot, Eustace Tuttle, Pvt. Golightly, Dr Stoppage and Dan Dann the Sanitary Man together. Oh, no! We've always loved the erstwhile Angel-Voiced Choirboy's appearances, which somehow fit in with the whole 'On millieu while remaining entirely self-contained. Hawtrey's characters exist in a camply deranged world of their own, usually wandering into the action at a late stage when everyone else has got thoroughly wound up, only to laugh dementedly and often fall on his arse. Of course, this is pretty much how it was in real life on-set, so this is method acting in excelsis. De Niro couldn't be arsed to even shave his head for Taxi Driver, but Hawtrey *was* Seneca. Evening, cock!

 

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