Note: This is one of a set of articles that look at movies from a particular point of view. Some previous entries are: Great flicks that bombed, What happened to movies?and Great moments in mediocre movies.
I keep meaning to do one on great lines and great exchanges in movies, but I’m having trouble coming up with a comprehensive list of lines I haven’t covered in the above categories.
What occurred to me the other day was, what about great “looks” in movies?
I was watching Robert DeNiro in a great but underregarded fantasy called “Stardust,” starring Charlie Cox and Claire Danes. (Based on a Neil Gaiman story, which is a good recommendation to begin with.) DeNiro, along with Michelle Pfeiffer, plays a supporting role.
What I saw was DeNiro changing personna from a tough pirate captain to a closeted gay priate captain who secretly longs for culture and civilized company. It’s a hoot! And it’s done largely with a change of expression, rather than outrageously gay camping it up.
DeNiro is good at the look, and that seems to me to be rare these days. There seems to be a manhood deficit among this generation male actors – and if you doubt this, think: Robert Mitchum, Robert Stack, Charles Bronson, Jimmy Stewart, Tyrone Power – and these are names taken at random. And in some way I have trouble defining, it seems related to a lesser ability to… “act with your face.”
DeNiro never did it better than in The Mission (1986.) Soldier and slave-raider turned Jesuit Rodrigo Mendoza, attempting to protect a tribe of Amazon Indians he has come to missionize, leads some on a midnight excursion to a conquistador camp to steal weapons.
While creeping stealthily along the ground by the hammock of a sleeping soldier, the soldier stirs in his sleep. Reflexively, Mendoza’s left hand slides up to cover his mouth while his right slips a dagger into his kidneys just slick as a whistle.
Then That Look comes across his face when he realizes what he’s done. There’s no dialog, and if I remember correctly, no music, just background jungle noise.
And what volumes that look says! Guilt, shame, and the realization that you can reform, you can change, you can turn your life around – but you can’t throw away guilty knowledge. Once you’ve been a killer, you always know how to kill.
Another contemporary actor who can do this well, is Bill Murray. I wrote about an example of this in Great flicks that bombed.
Recently I saw Liam Neeson do this very well in Chloe (2009,) with Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfreid.
Basic plot is a Fatal Attraction riff involving a young professional “escort” who is infatuated with a handsome older married lady doctor. Lady Doc thinks her professor hubby is cheating and hires the escort to seduce him, to see if it can be done. Escort reports it can be done, and she has. Mission accomplished.
Wifey prepares a confrontation between the three of them in a cafe (after sleeping with the escort – not too shabby if you’re into that sort of thing.)
So, hubby (Neeson) is sitting with his back to the door while wife grills him on his allegedly cheating ways. He protests innocense, he flirts with pretty students, he doesn’t sleep with them.
Then escort Chloe walks in, hubby sees his wife look past him in recognition, turns around – and then does a whole page of dialog with just a look.
What you see on his face is: expectation from his wife’s expression that he’ll see someone he recognizes, changing to a “Hey it’s a pretty girl” look, without a trace of recognition, then turning attention back to his wife – who now sees for certain that her husband did not recognize the girl.
Julianne Moore deserves some credit in this scene too, but it was Neeson’s face that really caught my attention. Up till then you wondered if the girl was lying, after that you are sure.
Neeson’s countryman Peter O’Toole is very good at acting with his face, but the scene I always think of in this context is one with a lesser-known supporting actor, Michael Bryant in Goodby Mr. Chips (1969.)
It’s the eve of World War II, and schoolmaster Mr. Chipping is walking across the quad of the English boarding school with his close friend the German master.
The German master tells Chips the Fuhrer has ordered all Germans home. Chips pleads with him, “Don’t go.”
The German master tells him his mother is still alive in Germany.
“My dear fellow,” Chips says, “they wouldn’t.”
The German master gives him That Look, a look that freezes Chips’ tongue, and says, “My dear fellow, they would.”
Then he looks around at the campus he loves with an expression of hopeless sadness, and says, “You English. How much you have, and how little you appreciate it.”
Another example of the ability to do this kind of acting in a relatively obscure supporting actress was in The Iron Mistress (1952) a heavily fictionalized movie about Jim Bowie.
Young Bowie (Alan Ladd) goes on a business trip to New Orleans, where he is befriended by an aristocratic family and introduced to the dueling culture of the city. All of this is leading up to the invention of the Bowie knife of course.
After his new friend is killed in a duel, he duels the killer and kills him in turn. This is by the way, one of the more exciting single-combat scenes in movies. Bowie, who is a fighter but not a fencer, challenges the duelist to fight in a dark room cleared of furniture. He’ll use his knife and the other guy can use his duelling sword. The fight is lit by intermittent lightning flashes through the narrow windows. It’s very well done with the excitement coming more from what is suggested than what is actually shown.
At any rate, Bowie goes home to the backwoods and is sitting down to dinner with his brothers while Ma Bowie serves the meal and asks how his trip to New Orleans went. Ma Bowie was played by Sarah Selby, a gaunt spare woman who looks very much the part of a tough frontierswoman.
Bowies goes on about, “I sold our timber… I met… I saw” etc, then kind of mumbles, “I killed a man.”
Ma freezes stock still, with That Look on her face. The look that says, “Are my sons in a feud now? Is the law coming looking for my son?”
She asks, “Did he have it coming?”
Bowie mumbles, “As much as any man, I guess he did.”
Ma says, “Then we’ll speak no more about it.”
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