The Single Dumbest Thing Yet Written In Tribute to Alan Rickman
Posted on January 15th, 2016 by Adam-Troy CastroLook. I am second to no one on my love for the screen work of the late Alan Rickman. I saw Die Hard in preview, before anybody knew it would become a classic of its kind and a model for many inferior films, including its own sequels, that came after it. I knew he was a star the second he opened his mouth. Some of you who had seen his stage work already knew it.
So fine; I am perfectly willing to tolerate people who think Hans Gruber was the greatest screen villain of all time, even if I think that’s a bit much. I think it’s saying a lot to put him in the top ten.
But comes the point where somebody says something that you have to be an ignorant know-nothing to even want to say, as in this VULTURE tribute by Adam Sternbergh.
And I’ve got to tell you, this article embodies the bane of the movie-journalism internet, the article that seems to be written by people who know nothing about movies, prior to about 1990.
We have all seen movie lists that purport to tell us the scariest movies ever, the greatest movie villains ever, the best fight scenes ever, the word “ever” always a part of the title even though no entry in them dates back to — if you’re lucky — 1970; it’s usually more like 1980.
That is because movie list articles are often written with the care lazy students give to term papers they didn’t study for and yet have to hand in for an hour: i.e. whatever knowledge the writer already has, whatever arguments they have read by others, whatever thoughts don’t warm the insides of their skull.
But this one kind of digs a new sub-basement.
I quote, “What distinguishes Rickman’s performance {in Die Hard} is simple: Rickman is an excellent actor. This had never been a qualification for movie villains before.”
Seriously, what the fuck?
What part of your ass are you blowing that out of?
Claude Rains in The Invisible Man, or in Notorious? Laurence Olivier, in Marathon Man or Spartacus? James Mason, in North by Northwest? Movie villains were never played by excellent actors before?
Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time In The West? Really?
Let the paragraph play out.
“What distinguishes Rickman’s performance is simple: Rickman is an excellent actor. This had never been a qualification for movie villains before. It had certainly not been a qualification in the nascent genre of American action thrillers.”
That depends on how you define “action,” of course; there were always movies that ended in gunfights, movies that contained or climaxed with action set pieces, but for many years after the evaporation of the silent, what you got instead was something I find superior, the drama or thriller with action in it, where character and performance joined with action in the creation of fully-rounded, exciting stories. Because action scenes are hard to film and because the audiences of the past were expected to have attention spans greater than that of a gnat, most movies didn’t go from action scene to action scene for most of their running time; other elements had to have their turn. And so there were fully-rounded, understandable villains, played with nuance, all over the place: Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, Robert Ryan in Bad Day At Black Rock, Humphrey Bogart in The Desperate Hours; all movies that at their key moments revolved around life or death situations, and in many cases whether it was the good guy or the bad guy who got to shoot first. You want to praise Alan Rickman in Die Hard, you can go ahead, I won’t stop you. I will help you carry that banner. But to argue that he represents the first time an American movie bad guy was required to be a great actor is to visibly demonstrate a knowledge of film that is about one finger wide and once micron deep.
More: “We’d seen oleaginous European bad guys, sure, and trigger-happy psychopaths, but never a character whose elegance and savagery are so convincingly and dexterously intertwined.”
Okay, so this sentence is less crazy-making, because it’s represented as a matter of degree, not kind. You could argue that Rickman’s Hans Gruber was the high-water mark to that date; I wouldn’t necessarily agree, but I do concede that “best” here is within the margin of error. But by God are there certainly movies that present room for debate, at the very least. Orson Welles, in The Third Man, for instance. Cultured, brilliant, charming, a guy you immediately wanted to have a nice long talk with — but a monster. Joseph Cotten was pretty damned gentlemanly in Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt, for instance: a character who was both a loving uncle and a remorseless killer, a guy who could both charm you with his personal warmth and chill you to the bone with his disregard for human life, and Cotten shifted from one to another with ease, often within the same sentence. Was he better than Rickman was? That’s not the argument. Would acknowledgment that great performances existed before 1990 be inappropriate in article that presumed to make declarative statements about bests? Absolutely.
More:
“Hans Gruber is permanently perched atop every list of the Greatest Action-Movie Villains — all of which, frankly, should simply read: (1) Hans Gruber and (2) All the Other Ones — for a one very good reason: No actor before him was ever expected to be that good, and no actor after him has ever managed it. ”
I will tolerate the part before the colon, but not the part after the colon. You can say that a performer exists in rarefied air without declaring him a totally unprecedented prodigy.
“Rickman, among his many other career accomplishments, single-handedly lifted the American action genre to the outskirts of art.”
Fuck you, Howard Hawks. Fuck you, John Ford. Fuck you, Anthony Mann. Fuck you, Sam Peckinpah. Hell, fuck you, Harold Lloyd. Fuck you, Buster Keaton. You all existed before Die Hard, so you are disposable.
The point here is again not that some movie writer wrote something stupid; it is that the particular form of stupid echoes a flaw that has become the expected: the knowledge that goes back only so far, and no farther. The willing blindness. The amnesia.
It does none of us any good.