Thursday, November 19, 2020

Thursday Movie Picks #332: Villains

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week's theme is villians, which in some ways is an easy one since so many movies have bad guys. But I figured that this topic should really be about movies where the villain is the main character, which narrows things down quite a bit:

Villain (1971). A fairly obvious first choice, this one has Richard Burton as a British gangster who gets involved with a payroll heist gone wrong, and tries to blackmail an elected member of the House of Commons to provide him with an ironclad alibi, what with MPs in those days being considered more above reproach. Burton does well, and it's nice to see Britain as it was in the early 1970s.

White Heat (1949). James Cagney plays Cody Jarrett, the gangster who's excessively dedicated to his mother (Margaret Wycherly), and is so nasty that he has no qualms about giving somebody stuffed in the trunk of a car air, by shooting holes into the trunk and killing the guy! Jarrett also leads a payroll heist that goes wrong, but at least Cody makes it to the top of the world.

Purple Noon (1960). Alain Delon plays Tom Ripley, an American who is sent to Italy to find Philip Greenleaf (Maurice Ronnet) by Greenleaf's father. Ripley, who is of a much lower social class, winds up killing Greenleaf and trying to steal Greenleaf's identity in order to get at his money. Based on a Patricia Highsmith story, the movie would be remade in the late 1990s as The Talented Mr. Ripley with Matt Damon as Ripley.

2 comments:

Birgit said...

I have not seen the first or last film but I love White Heat. I already chose that film, more than once, so I couldn't use it again. Cagney should have won an Oscar for that role which he played so memorably. I love the scene when he loses it after hearing his mommy died.

Sonia Cerca said...

I've only seen Purple Noon and I loved it. I suggest checking out The Talented Mr. Ripley as well because it's a different and yet interesting adaption.