Cast Against Type: Heroes as Villains

Some notes for the series now playing at the Criterion Channel

Rosalind Russell, Robert Montgomery, Matthew Boulton, and a hatbox, all star in a publicity still for Night Must Fall

Nowadays it’s pretty common for a star to demonstrate range by taking on a role as a villain, the more rotten the better. Back in the studio era, though, and even later, it could be a risk for someone to set aside a career full of romantic leads and play a heavy. Some switch-hit between good and bad from the beginning, like Bette Davis, so there was no danger the audience would be outraged. Others, like Humphrey Bogart, started out playing bad guys, and after graduating to leads still enjoyed the ability to go back to the bad old days.

But other actors declined to risk a carefully crafted image, such as George Raft’s celebrated refusal to play Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. “Where’s the lapel bit?” he asked Billy Wilder. “What lapel bit?” asked a baffled Wilder. “You know, when the guy flashes his lapel, you see his badge, you know he’s a detective,” said Raft. Told there was no such lapel bit, Raft lost interest.

I’m always interested in when and how an actor with a flourishing or well-established career might take a flyer on a role that’s out of their presumed wheelhouse, and why the filmmakers might cast them that way. For a group of movies now playing on the Criterion Channel, I put together a look at several decades of “wholesome, likeable, and appealing” actors cast against (their presumed) type. I also thought that I’d come here and offer some notes on the choices, along with some of the historical background.

I should add a couple of things. First, these entries are meant to supplement the descriptions already on the channel, so I didn’t include things like plot descriptions. Second, these aren’t the only examples of casting against type in these decades; they are just ones that I liked and that we wound up with. Many considerations go into selecting movies for a streaming series. So if the movie isn’t included, please don’t assume that’s because I didn’t like it, or worse yet, that I forgot it existed. Trust me, that’s almost certainly not the case.

Roy Ward Baker and Marilyn Monroe on the set of Don’t Bother to Knock

Don't Bother to Knock, 1952, Roy Ward Baker

Don’t Bother to Knock is based on the 1951 novel Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong, a highly respected thriller writer, and it has a down-market realism in keeping with another memorable early outing for Marilyn Monroe, The Asphalt Jungle. At the time, 20th-Century Fox head Darryl Zanuck wasn’t keen on putting the suddenly famous blonde in dramatic roles. But Monroe wanted the part, despite the fact that it was no small thing in 1952 for an actress on the brink of stardom to play a woman crazy enough to abuse and possibly even kill a child. Thus Monroe was told she had to do a screen test, and to prepare, she stayed up for 48 hours straight (shades of Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man) to get just the right air of distracted insanity for Nell Forbes. Don’t Bother to Knock is also one of the few (if any) movies where we see Monroe play consuming, unchecked anger. The character of Nell, marked by untreated mental illness and abuse suffered as a child, perhaps echoed aspects of Monroe’s own life, but she dove into the character’s complexity and brought out the young woman’s pathos too. The reviews were mostly patronizing (good old Bosley Crowther was especially bitchy) but as Marilyn Monroe’s stature as an actress has grown, so has the critical regard for this movie.

The Boston Strangler, 1968, Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis had heard a film about the Boston Strangler—the serial killer who terrorized the city in the 1960s—was in the casting stage, and he badly wanted the role as a way to reboot his lagging career. But he also knew he’d be considered far too pretty to play Albert DeSalvo. So an undeterred Curtis gave himself a putty nose, altered his hair and eyebrows to look like DeSalvo’s, then had two dozen 8x10 photos of himself taken, and gave them to director Richard Fleischer. A duly impressed Fleischer showed the offbeat headshots to the initially reluctant Darryl Zanuck, and Curtis got the part. During filming, wrote Curtis, the makeup team used something similar to his own 8x10 makeup. But it was a set of black contacts, Curtis claimed, that helped him disappear into the character. The film—still a highly unsettling watch—has little dialogue, and Curtis described his performance as “very interior,” adding that “the pantomime scene at the end, where I come in and talk to an invisible woman, that was all improvised.” After the premiere, Fleischer sent Curtis a cable that said only, “I am vindicated.”

A Face in the Crowd, 1957, Elia Kazan

Andy Griffith’s immortal Lonesome Rhodes was partly based (said screenwriter Budd Schulberg) on some radio celebrities — Arthur Godfrey, Tennessee Ernie Ford, even the beloved Will Rogers — said to have mean streaks off-air, as well as a certain contempt for their audience. This was Griffith’s first movie, but still, it wasn’t at all what the public might have expected from his debut. Griffith, then about 30, had been playing the lead in the homespun comedy No Time for Sergeants on Broadway after originating it on television. He’d first become famous via cute comic monologues like “What It Was, Was Football,” a No. 1 single on Columbia Records (and, depending on how well you tolerate folksy, still pretty funny). Elia Kazan’s film is now a widely screened classic, a study of egomaniacal celebrity and uninformed fans that many see as an unheeded warning about where American politics were headed.

Frank (Henry Fonda) got his shirt pressed before the gunfight.

Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968, Sergio Leone

Anyone who has been reading me long enough, or followed me on social media, knows that this movie is no big personal favorite of mine. But programming a streaming series isn’t always about personal taste, and it would have been silly, bordering on indefensible, to leave this movie out. That’s because Once Upon a Time in the West is often cited as the ultimate in casting against type. Henry Fonda, known for playing icons of American virtue like Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the crusading juror in Twelve Angry Men, saddles up as Frank, an outlaw so remorselessly evil he’d have scared the bejesus out of Old Man Clanton. (Fonda can be viewed elsewhere in this series helping to catch The Boston Strangler, from the same year.) Sergio Leone called Fonda his favorite actor, and claimed that he persuaded Fonda to take the role with a detailed description of how he planned to shoot the first scene, where a child is murdered in cold blood. Then, enthused Leone, imagine the shock when the camera reveals Henry Fonda! Leone’s many close-ups of the star challenge us to see him as part of the Western landscape; we’re facing the evils of the west’s settlement through a face we’d always associated with goodness. But Vincent Canby also noted that Fonda “was such a good guy that when he played a bad guy, we tended to side with him,” calling that “one of Leone’s darkest jokes.”

The Killers, 1964, Don Siegel

Don Siegel writes in his memoir that he knew it would be plenty hard to talk Ronald Reagan into playing the icy mob boss Jack Browning for a remake of The Killers. So the director used a time-honored Hollywood tactic: He took Reagan to lunch. Unfortunately, wrote Siegel, they’d barely settled in when the future president announced, “I’ve never played a villain and I probably never will.” Siegel countered that many actors Reagan knew and revered from the studio system had played memorable villains with no adverse effects on their careers. For whatever reason—possibly including the fact that good roles had thinned out for him—Reagan finally accepted. It turned out to be his final film performance, and he’s said to have disliked the results, but many today would call it the best acting Reagan ever did. Star Lee Marvin’s aversion to Reagan went back as far as 1955, when they were both working in television. Marvin continued to think Reagan “couldn’t act worth shit” (that, of course, is a direct quote) because Reagan played his scenes like he had at Warner Bros—the same way, take after take. But the contrast works well for the movie, with Reagan’s capitalist gangster up against Marvin’s furious 60s–style hitman. Reagan’s distaste might or might not have had something to do with realizing that just a slight change in his genial persona could show a very different view of the good ol’ American success story.

Hawks enjoys showing men at different points in their lives: John Wayne just entering a weathered middle age at 41; Montgomery Clift still south of 30.

Red River, 1948, Howard Hawks

John Wayne’s role as Tom Dunson, a rancher willing even to lynch his own men to complete a cattle drive, put Wayne on the map as an actor with range. They disliked each other, but Wayne’s work meshes beautifully with the Method-influenced Montgomery Clift. Though not entirely villainous, Dunson was enough of a heavy for Gary Cooper to turn the movie down, saying the character was too harsh and callous. According to film historian Joseph McBride, when John Ford saw Red River, he said, “I didn’t know the big son-of-a-bitch could act.” This was obviously an exaggeration on Ford’s part. Earlier in 1948, Wayne played the upright cavalry officer Kirby Yorke in Ford’s excellent Fort Apache; for years Wayne was given good work in his mentor’s movies. But after Red River, Ford and many others used John Wayne in increasingly complex ways, creating deeply ambiguous portraits of American manhood. Without Dunson, it’s hard to imagine Wayne as Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.

The Boys From Brazil, 1978, Franklin J. Schaffner

Much of the advance publicity for The Boys From Brazil trumpeted the fact that Gregory Peck, dear to the public’s heart as Atticus Finch, would be playing a villain for the first time since Duel in the Sun all the way back 1946. But Peck was playing far more than a villain. He’d been cast way, way, way against type as one of the most evil men of the 20th century (when the competition of course was fierce): Josef Mengele, believed to still be alive in Paraguay at that time. (Mengele died in Brazil just four months after this movie was released.) Peck saw the film as a way of furthering his shift to character parts, like The Omen two years before. He also gave a lot of interviews pooh-poohing the idea that Mengele would be a stretch; “I don’t make a big deal of it. I’ve played character roles before,” said Gregory Peck. But for audiences, it truly was a big deal to find Gregory Peck ordering a child’s death on screen, just like Henry Fonda (an equal avatar of American goodness) had done ten years earlier as Frank. The action, based on a novel by Ira Levin, revolves around a preposterous plot to clone Hitler, but the star power of Peck, James Mason and Laurence Olivier helped make it a hit. The Boys From Brazil remains a potent mixture of science fiction, horror, and moral fable.

Why are you just sitting there, Robert Mitchum you fool? Run!! But they never do. So let’s just note how cute the handbag is.

Angel Face, 1953, Otto Preminger

Beautiful Jean Simmons had been working at The Rank Organization in the U.K., often cast as genteel young ladies and/or damsels-in-distress. She was excellent at both, and rose to stardom via films such as Great Expectations, Hamlet, So Long at the Fair and Cage of Gold. But, she told an interviewer many years later, “I was sold to Howard Hughes and RKO like a piece of meat.” Angel Face was not a project that Simmons chose, and she had no fond memories of the film, which was a nightmare to make. Fabled tyrant Otto Preminger, encouraged by Hughes, was particularly monstrous on this set; you can look it up, the stories have been told many times. When Hughes made one too many demands about his star’s hairstyle, she cut it all off, and had to wear a wig during filming (which bugs some people, although it’s never bothered me). Despite all the rumpus, Simmons’s performance as Diane Tremayne—the heiress with major daddy issues, a possible hatred for all men and definite hate for her stepmother—is a landmark in film noir. Simmons was fond of co-star Robert Mitchum, and that may have helped, as she puts all her Black Narcissus sexiness into Diane and turns it full force on Mitchum’s chauffeur. Their erotic chemistry is as potent as any in film noir, and deadlier than many.

Night Must Fall, 1937, Richard Thorpe

By the mid–1930s Robert Montgomery had begun complaining that he was typecast as rich playboys in light comedies. ''The directors shoved a cocktail shaker in my hands,” he reflected long after, “and kept me shaking it for years.'' Then, one day Montgomery went to New York and saw Night Must Fall, an early version of a serial-killer yarn. Virtually as soon as the curtain fell, the actor was badgering his studio MGM for the role of the pathological killer (played both in London and on Broadway by its author Emlyn Williams). With the kind of scheming logic it was famous for, MGM decided Montgomery could have his precious role, because MGM thought it would 1. shut him up and 2. flop, thus teaching him a lesson. In fact, Night Must Fall turned a small profit, but the studio was wrong in a more important way than that: The film greatly enhanced Montgomery’s reputation as an actor. He was nominated for an Oscar and thereafter he asked for, and grudgingly got, more variety. Montgomery's stellar work as Danny foreshadows the homicidal maniacs to come: he’s outwardly pleasant and obliging, but secretly a woman-hater, a rapacious con artist, an unhinged sadist. (Rosalind Russell, appearing in series entry The Velvet Touch, plays a nice young lady who’s a little too slow to assess the situation.) SPOILER: Night Must Fall’s business about the hatbox—never opened during the runtime, but strongly implied to contain the head of Danny’s latest victim—anticipates Seven by decades.

In Name Only, 1939, John Cromwell

We tend to think of villains as staples of thrillers, horror, or noir, yet women’s pictures offer a striking array of coldblooded baddies. It’s just that the schemes of these movies’ villains involve social death, not the physical kind—not usually, anyway. Kay Francis had been making movies at Warner Bros for just under a decade when her contract ended in September 1938. Through film after film, Francis had suffered in chic gowns. She was often superb at it, too, though her romantic dramas were frequently, and wrongly, dismissed as “mush” (Kay’s own word). Exhausted by a run of stale scripts and the growing fear that the studios saw her as old-hat, Francis went to RKO for In Name Only at the urging of her good friend Carole Lombard. “My friends told me I was crazy,” said Francis. “I said I had to be seen in some other kind of part.” So now Francis played Cary Grant’s scheming wife, who’s obsessed with her husband’s wealth and status and dead set against the divorce that would free him to marry Lombard. In other words, In Name Only let Francis play a villain straight out of one of her own movies, and she loved it, getting better reviews than she had in years.

Leon Ames not noticing the menacing side-eye of Rosalind Russell...

The Velvet Touch, 1948, Jack Gage

In her delightful Life Is a Banquet, Rosalind Russell brushes off The Velvet Touch with two sentences as “a murder mystery” that “made a bundle” for her production company. But Roz fans know better. Sure, it was a big help for Russell to have a hit after the colossal failure of Mourning Becomes Electra, which lost over $2 million for RKO the year before; but The Velvet Touch was also great entertainment. The movie isn’t true film noir, though it boasts noir legends Claire Trevor and Sydney Greenstreet in the supporting cast. Rather, it’s a psychological mystery, full of atmosphere and backstage sass, in which Russell’s Valerie, a Broadway star, must answer that eternal question of the theater: What do you do about an ex-boyfriend and current producer who is most inconveniently dead? Especially if he got that way while in your company. And even more especially if your dream role, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, hangs in the balance. In fact, in addition to what The Velvet Touch has to say about fear of aging and loneliness, there are some clever plot parallels with Hedda Gabler. Russell looks smashing throughout in costumes by Travis Banton, and for her fans, the devious Valerie often ranks as a favorite role.