OR IS BRAVEHEART’S LONGSHANKS THE BEST VILLAIN EVER?
According to 1995’s Braveheart, King Edward I – aka Longshanks – was “the most ruthless king ever to sit on the throne of England.” Patrick McGoohan’s performance more than lives up to the billing: a masterclass by a multi-talented actor in his last major film role. And yet, just as McGoohan was snubbed by awards bodies at the time, so Longshanks has been long overlooked by those compiling ‘Best Villain’ lists. Let’s redress the balance.
Longshanks pursues his goals power for power’s sake; crushing all who oppose him – with a rapacity that puts the likes of Thanos to shame. It took the Mad Titan three whole Phases of the MCU to achieve his aim of retiring to a cottage. Yet in a mere 20-ish minutes, McGoohan demonstrates unfathomable cunning, cruelty and cold brutality, all while schooling his inept son-successor. He’s capable of being a tactical mastermind, heartless bastard and tight git all at once. After hiring Irish mercenaries to fight, he’s asked by an underling if the archers should be deployed. Longshanks’ reply? “Arrows cost money. Use up the Irish, the dead cost nothing.” As The Joker would say, “Even to a guy like me, that’s cold.”
Longshanks is a leader who extends the olive branch to his enemies, then hangs them from the rafters. He’s an expert manipulator, sending Princess Isabelle (Sophie Marceau) to negotiate peace when he’s already dispatched troops to outflank the enemy. He bribes with titles and land those he can’t defeat by force. And he does it all without giving a toss what anyone else thinks. Even Die Hard’s Hans Gruber listened to his team. When the Prince’s ‘secret’ boyfriend offers his two pennyworth, ’shanks asks the room: “Who is this person who speaks to me as though I needed his advice?” And then he chucks the guy out a window to his death.
He’s a snake, plotting, scheming and spurning every offer of redemption. Even Darth Vader repented at the last minute. But on his own deathbed, Longshanks is “incapable of mercy”, preferring to leave a legacy of fear. The movie’s hero, William Wallace, may defiantly bellow “freedom”, but it’s while he’s having his giblets cut out. Clearly, the victor in the battle is Longshanks… or is it just me?
Share your reaction at www.gamesradar. com/totalfilm or on Facebook and Twitter.
Stanley Kubrick’s last film (he died six days after showing stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman a final cut) struggled to get an R-rating thanks to the nudity and implied carnality of this showstopper of a scene; the crux of Cruise’s hurt husband’s nocturnal search for vice. But watched anew it’s difficult to find explicit sex acts – and that’s exactly how the exacting Kubrick designed it.
Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novel Traumnovelle (‘Dream Story’), which Kubrick read after finishing 2001: A Space
Odyssey, Eyes Wide Shut was long gestated as the director considered both Woody Allen and Steve Martin as lead during its decadeslong development. But he offered the roles of married NY couple Bill and Alice Harford, whose frank discussion of infidelity is the nucleus for Bill’s dreamlike wander through Manhattan via jazz bars, prostitutes and ultimately this secret-society party of permissiveness, to Cruise and Kidman.
Inspired by tales of secret sexual societies in Vienna, 19th Century Black Mass rituals and the art of Félicien Rops, Kubrick envisaged Bill’s experience of the party as a
dance and had his assistant, Leon Vitali, comb model and dance agencies to find beautiful bodies without cosmetic enhancement. Choreographer Yolande Snaith was brought on to create the tableaux and swirling moves of the society members to a score by Jocelyn Pook, spending months in rehearsal in the building that would later become the St. Pancras Hotel (yep, the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ location). Despite such a long rehearsal period (allowed by a recordbreaking 400-day shoot), filming the sequence at Eleveden Hall in Suffolk in 1998 was not straightforward.
Kubrick’s legendary multiple-take ethic took its toll on the kneeling nudes (who needed bags of frozen peas for sore knees) and revealed that Brit Abigail Good, playing the woman who saves Harford from harm and sacrifices herself for him during the key ceremony, could not speak in an American accent. Though filmed entirely in England, the NY setting demanded American voices, so Kubrick brought in Cate Blanchett to dub Good. That sense of disconnection perhaps only adds to the dreamlike quality of the scene – alongside Pook’s hypnotic score, Snaith’s wraithlike dancers, film stock deliberately pushed to grainy and Kubrick’s trademark use of swooping steadicam. Despite its elegance, eroticism and suggestion of sex rather than presentation of it, the Kubrick estate were forced to add digital cloaked figures to the sequence after the auteur’s death to cover up the modesty of some of the performers in order to get that coveted R-rating. A move perfectionist Kubrick may have abhorred, but he’d have probably enjoyed the fact that according to supervising digital compositor Paddy Eason, viewers rarely pick out the correct figures as digi imposters. A riddle to the end… JC