Alan Rickman, who passed away recently (to great disappointment
and surprise), was a terrific movie villain, one of the best to ever stride the
screen. Like all fans of movie bad guys, I was thrilled to my toes by his debut as Hans
Gruber in 1989’s Die Hard, a
scene-stealing turn worthy of Sidney Greenstreet’s in The Maltese Falcon.
In most of his villainous roles, Mr. Rickman played the civilized
and smooth ultra-sophisticate type: courtly, often British, definitely with an
international flair. They speak with mellifluous diction and take their tea
every afternoon at four on the chimes, heartlessly sipping Earl Gray with their
pinkies up, as they watch their minions torture and toy with the hero. If they
tend toward the Germanic—like Herr Gruber--they might listen to Beethoven
Quartets as they beam at der Fuehrer’s
portrait. (You can always tell the Bad
Guy: he’s the one with manners and good taste!)
Rickman was both a great villain and the very best of
actors, as he proved time and again throughout the 1990s and 2000s, in films
such Sense and Sensibility, and the
achingly bittersweet Truly, Madly, Deeply.
As Rasputin
And he could also play characters from society’s lower
depths. If you can find it, watch his Emmy-winning, unforgettable turn as the
title character in HBO’s Rasputin: Dark
Servant of Destiny. Here, Rickman played the flip side of Hans Gruber, as
the rough, pseudo-mystical peasant opportunist who helped bring down the Romanov
Dynasty. Alan Rickman could play lowlife villainy with a panache equal to his upper crust characters.
Rickman demonstrated one of my favorite Hitchockian adages: the
better the villain, the better the movie. He was the only—really the only—good thing about Kevin Costner’s
lumbering Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
as George, Sherriff of Nottingham (putting him in direct line with another
great well-mannered scoundrel, Claude Rains from the still-best Errol Flynn
Robin Hood.) A hammy performance? Sure, just what a movie like that needed.
Another striking Rickman memory comes from the first Harry
Potter film, The Philosopher’s Stone.
Just when that picture was threatening to sink to the bottom of my cold pond of
memory, Alan Rickman as Severus Snape bounded into the classroom and for a
short time, ruthlessly grabbed the movie all to himself like a kitten he’s
eager to drown. The rest of the movie is vague to me, and I never saw any of
the sequels.
And now that he’s gone, I’m considering setting out on the
Harry Potter journey after all, just to watch Alan Rickman (I can doze through
the rest.) I said
it once before here and I’ll say it again: Snape starring Alan Rickman, and then everybody else, preferably cowering
and running in terror. It would have been a great movie.
Like all the greats in his particular class (among them
Basil Rathbone, Conrad Veidt, Vincent Price, and James Mason), Rickman’s
villainy played to a sneaky feeling that civilization is but a disguise for the
brute beneath; their pinpoint style and snobby manners are mere seductive filigree
and Satanic hypocrisy. Their elegant surfaces reflect in an inner vileness; these
surfaces can’t be trusted. They may even be sexually fluid, though you very
seldom see them locked in embrace.
Such men, as they mostly are, float over or glide past like
airships, separate from the physical grime and sleepless nights experienced by
the those with the Spirit of Conscience. Regarding themselves as free from
consequences, they do as they damn please, and make it look very easy.
That’s part of a splendid villain’s appeal, that sense of
wish fulfillment. While Alan Rickman and his ilk allow us to focus and unleash
our hatreds in a relatively harmless direction, they can also live out a secret
dream. Especially for many males who live with fear and boil with resentment
and disgust at our tormentors who may also be simultaneously be our inferiors.
His characters may live in some kind of Movie Hell, but Mr.
Rickman himself surely lives in heaven.
Copyright 2016 by
Thomas Burchfield
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