Al Weisel
The 100 Greatest Movie Characters: One Scene Wonders
By Al Weisel
Premiere,
April 2004, p. 57
"There's no such thing as a small part," starving
actors are told. But few really believed it until Beatrice Straight won an
Oscar for one five-minute scene in Network. Although Straight
appears briefly in two other scenes, it's this moment—in which she goes through
every emotion ever experienced by a jilted wife—that won her the award. Dorothy
Malone also became a star after a segment as a bookstore clerk—even sexier
without her glasses—who seduces Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. It
takes a special kind of actor to make such an outsize impression in a single
scene.
In
Malice, Anne Bancroft plays an alcoholic mother who reveals
information about her daughter's duplicity. "It's the moment of discovery, when
Bill Pullman realizes he's been taken," says director Harold Becker. Bancroft
steals the movie as she swears, swills scotch, and does card tricks. "She
really worked on the card handling," Becker says, "as if she'd been dealing
lifetime." Although the scene required only three days of shooting, Bancroft
came in for some early rehearsal as well, Becker says: "I'm a great believer in not just dropping people into the
pool. It's like going from zero to sixty in a few seconds."
But
sometimes bringing in fresh blood can reinvigorate a film set. " Actors who
have been there for weeks and weeks are very welcoming," says Alfred Molina,
who spent about for days playing a coked-up drug dealer for one extended,
nerve-jangling sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights. "A fresh face, a new
energy someone who hasn't heard all the jokes!" The disturbing quality of the
scene—"that feeling that it could all go terribly wrong"—was "in part created
by the actors not knowing exactly how things would turn out," says Molina.
"P.T. asked the kid with the firecrackers to light them whenever he chose,
giving the rhythm of the scene a jagged, fearful edge. No one take was the
same. None of us knew where the hell the next one would land. I suggested that
my character might be so coked up that he can't hear them. I plugged up my ears
and that enabled me to keep going without flinching. The guys on the couch,
however—when they jump or flinched in reaction, that was totally genuine."
Frances McDormand arrived
for one day of shooting on John Sayles's Lone Star excited bythe recent adoption of her son,
Pedro—and sleep-deprived from nursing him through a case of whooping cough.
But her condition made it easy to summon up the manic energy of Bunny, the wife
of Chris Cooper's Sheriff Sam Deeds. "She's like speed, and Chris is
like Quaaludes," says McDormand "That was a great way to succinctly show what
he was escaping." Sayles says there's a special art to writing a scene for a
character that appears only once: "Whoever that character is meant to be, it
has to all be there. You can't fake one way and then another." Although
ostensibly Deeds is just seeing his ex-wife to get some papers that move the
plot along, they manage to pack in the myriad emotions experienced during the
marriage. "It's a very condensed Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," says
Sayles.■
The 100 Greatest Movie
Characters: Marge Gunderson, played by Frances McDormand in Fargo
By
Al Weisel
Premiere,
April 2004, p. 67
A very pregnant small-town police
chief with a thick Minnesota accent, Marge Gunderson could easily have been
played for cheap laughs. Instead, there's something deeply satisfying and
innately humorous about the way she doesn't let the cold climate, the cold
people she encounters, or her 30 extra pounds affect her can-do attitude.
McDormand says she rejected suggestions by her husband, director Joel Coen, "to
do certain pregnancy things, like having trouble getting up out of chairs. I
wanted her to be as physically capable as she could. I like the fact that she's
just working. It's not even a feminist political statement—most people,
pregnant or not, have to work." Surprisingly, she "wasn't pleased" when she
first read the script. "I didn't think it would be that interesting. I found
her sheltered existence kind of scary, a little too reminiscent of my
background coming from the Midwest." But soon she warmed to Marge. "She's
nonjudgmental, and her philosophy of life is pretty simple," says McDormand,
who won an Oscar for the role. "I like that." The character still looms large:
"Little old ladies come up to me and say, 'I just love that movie.' I'm like,
'Do you remember how many people died in the movie?' And they're like, 'Oh,
yeah, but we just love Marge.' "
Defining Moment: Arriving at a murder scene, Marge almost
loses her breakfast—not because of the gore, but because of morning sickness.
"I did suggest the puking being connected to her pregnancy," McDormand says. "I
thought it would be funny."■
The 100 Greatest Movie
Characters: Mrs. Iselin, played by Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian
Candidate
By
Al Weisel
Premiere,
April 2004, p. 55
The manipulative, domineering
Mrs. Iselin—whom Lansbury likens to a "female Lear"—is perhaps the mother of
all bad mothers. The powerful wife of a dim U.S. senator, she's a mass of
contradictions—a red-baiting Communist who helps turn her son (Laurence Harvey)
into a robotic killing machine but who also seems to harbor an incestuous love
for him. "When I see it today I'm sort of astounded, because I think, 'My God,
you had a lot of sass and gall to play it that way,' " says Lansbury. "I
certainly wasn't old enough to have enough life experience." In fact, Lansbury
was only three years older than Harvey ("We had a laugh about that," she says).
She isn't quite sure how she captured the character's supremely selfish
malevolence: "I think it's because I'm so fearful of evil and nastiness. I know
how to play it because I've watched it carefully."
Defining Moment: The pivotal scene that ends with a
more-than-motherly kiss on the lips, "so shocking that John [Frankenheimer]
said, 'Put your hand up' " to partially block the audience's view and get it
past the censors. It'll take more than that to shock viewers of the upcoming
Jonathan Demme-directed remake, set against the Gulf War with Meryl Streep as
Mom.■
Go
here for more of The 100
Greatest Movie Characters
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.
Return to Al Weisel's Homepage