Watching the antics of Donald Trump during this US presidential season, I can’t help thinking about how vintage Hollywood has dispatched its male villains.
Who can forget Henry Fonda’s baddie, for example, in Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)? I can still hear the collective gasp in the movie house when people realised that the Bad Guy was the man who always played the Good Guy… Fonda.
We all just sat there for a few minutes, dumbfounded. Everybody knew that Fonda was in it; that’s one of the reasons the tickets sold. But he played a murderer, a killer of little kids: a guy just called “Frank”.
His playing that part was shocking and unreal and, to this day, still one of the greatest casting coups in cinema history. “Frank” gets the ending he deserves and, at the end, we come to understand why.
Over three decades earlier there was Little Caesar (1931, Mervyn LeRoy). This film, based on a predecessor of Al Capone, allowed Warner Brothers to provide scintillating violence while simultaneously preaching.
It starred Edward G Robinson as Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello. It ends with Robinson’s Bad Guy uttering the immortal lines as he dies: “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
These words are rated as some of the most quoted of all time and something that Robinson could barely live down for the rest of his career.
But the Bad Guy denouement that made me think of the Republican Party’s candidate for POTUS – not that I wish him to end this way – is James Cagney’s memorable villain Cody Jarrett in the 1949 film White Heat (Raoul Walsh).
Cagney portrays a criminal who could only be called a psycho. In fact, that was the way Cagney described him. It is interesting for two reasons.
One: the film Cagney had made with Raoul Walsh a few years earlier was the exact opposite of their 1949 picture. It is a bagatelle called The Strawberry Blonde (1941), notable mainly because it co-stars a radiant Rita Hayworth as the titular character. Cagney was also a celebrated song and dance man at the time, and he works here.
Two: in White Heat, Cagney’s mother-obsessed gangster destroys all that he encounters. He carries on creating chaos until he is stopped. And this is the way it happens.
In the very last scene, “Jarrett” is dispatched in an explosion – in a blaze of glory. As he is blown to smithereens he utters the immortal line: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” Considered, along with Robinson’s lines at the end of Little Caesar, among the greatest phrases in movie history.
So why do I think of the 45th president of the United States when I think of the last scene in White Heat? Not because I want Trump to end in an explosion.
It’s that no matter when the end of his political career comes, he will not – as a great poet once wrote – “go gently into that good night.”
Last week’s quiz: The answer is A Welcome to Britain (1943). Burgess Meredith co-wrote and co-directed this training film, a guide to how GIs, particularly white GIs in the segregated US military, should conduct themselves in the UK – especially in relation to African American GIs like my late dad who were welcomed here. Meredith’s co-director was Anthony Asquith, who went on to direct The Winslow Boy (1948), one of postwar Britain’s most successful films.
This week’s quiz: I lived on New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1980s. One morning I woke up to klieg lights blazing through my window. I looked out and saw James Cagney being filmed coming out of the door of the house across the street. What movie was he making?
