The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes Thrilling Conclusion!

Back in the late Cretaceous period, when I started this series of posts on anti-heroes, I had a few simple goals and expectations.

1. To come up with a clear and firm definition of what an anti-hero is.

2. To have no one agree on that definition, no matter how clear and firm I was.

3. To be called a moron (I even posted a picture of Forrest Gump).

4. To write about 10 of these anti-heroes.

5. To regret coming up with the idea after a while.

6. But still enjoy it.

7. Sort of.

But now that I have written nine of these things, it is time for the grand finale. The big tamale. The last hurrah. Time, indeed, for me to unleash my very best rhetorical wordisms in praise of that greatest of movie anti-heroes.

Anti-Hero #1: J.J. Sefton, from Stalag 17

Long time fans of the blog (and it really bears noting how strange that was to type) might remember that the penultimate entry on my "Movies about the Movies" series was also a Billy Wilder production, in that case Sunset Boulevard. Some of you might groan at the idea of my picking another Wilder movie/character as the top entry on a list, but according to a recent study by the New England Journal of Actual Scientific Things, people who dislike Billy Wilder movies are generally also found to rape their pets.

ANTI: It's midnight in a German prisoner of war camp, and two desperate men are about to attempt a blitz out. The other men gather nervously around. The barracks commander gives the two a few last terse instructions, makes them repeat the plan. And when there's nothing left to say they're suddenly gone, out through the floorboards and into an escape tunnel.

The men pace around. It's the longest night of the year, one says. I hope they make it to the Danube before dawn, says another. The murmurs swell. One prisoner, especially young looking, can't contain himself. "I bet they get all the way to Switzerland!" he blurts. The men all smile.

Except one. He frowns.

"And I bet they don't even get out of the forrest," he says.

They all look at him. "Now what kind of crack is that?" one says.

"No crack. Two packs of cigarettes say they never get out of the forest."

The men are appalled. Many call his bet. He'd make book on his mother getting hit by a truck, one of them says.

Outside, the two men reach the end of the tunnel and pop out on the other side of the wire. The coast seems clear and escape looks certain, but it isn't. They've been set up. A German machine gun nest is waiting for them, and as the two men stand to run one and then the other is mercilessly mowed down.

Inside the barracks, the men are horrified. Except one. He sighs and gathers the cigarettes. One moves to stop him.

"Hold it. So we heard some shots. Who says they didn't get away?" he says.

The man looks up. "Anybody here want to double their bet?"

Nobody does.

So begins the greatest prisoner of war movie ever made, Stalag 17 (yes, better than The Great Escape and Bridge on the River Kwai), and brings the calculating, amoral, selfishly opportunistic J.J. Sefton to the screen, in a performance that won William Holden the Academy Award.

Where most of the prisoners in Stalag 17 spend their time trying to escape or otherwise resist the Germans, Sefton doesn't bother. The only thing he cares about is making life easy for himself. He builds a telescope so the men can spy on a women's camp nearby. He builds a distillery. He builds a racetrack for mice and takes bets. For every service he charges cigarettes, which he turns into food, cigars and preferential treatment from the guards.

Not quite this preferential, but you get the idea.

Sefton snipes at everyone. The barracks chief. The two barracks clowns. No one is safe from his cynicism. One day two new men come into the barracks. Sefton recognizes one of them -- a Lieutenant Dunbar -- as being a rich kid from Boston. He and Sefton had gone into officer's training together, but Sefton was washed out, and now he taunts him mercilessly.

SEFTON: Look, Lieutenant. All your money won't help you here. Because here you're on your own. And no mother to throw you a lifeboat. Now let's see how good you can swim.

The lieutenant has managed to blow up a munitions train while being transported across Germany, and it doesn't take long after he tells his fellow prisoners about it that the Germans swoop in and lock him up. Between that, the two slaughtered escapees and a radio the Germans cheerfully confiscate, it seems inescapable -- there's a spy in the barracks.

No prizes for guessing who they accuse, pin to his bunk and then beat mercilessly.

Sadly, no.

HERO: Only Sefton isn't the informer. And lying in his bunk, bruised and bleeding, he resolves to figure out who it is.

Some watch Stalag 17 and see Sefton's pursuit of the real informer, which takes up most of the rest of the movie, as an act of selfish revenge and nothing more. But this interpretation ignores the deeper complexity of a character who's not just an amusingly cynical bastard, but in my view, a wounded idealist whose passion is finally aroused.

First he tries desperately to buy off a guard.

SEFTON: You better talk, Schultz, because I'm going to find out with you or without you. Because I won't let go for a second. Because they'll have to kill me to stop me! So talk!

Holden's performance here is truly inspired. Watch as his battered face burns with an anger it never showed during the first half of the movie.

But buying off the guard doesn't work, so he's forced to watch. To scheme. Finally, in a sequence that for my money ranks among the best ever filmed, Sefton lies in his bunk while the men sing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" on a borrowed phonograph. The spy (I won't say who) watches the men from a distance, then goes over and uncovers a note the guards have hidden in the barracks. He reads the note and hides it before anyone knows, but Sefton sits up in time to catch the signal (a light cord) still swinging. He sits up and turns to look at it, and a flash of recognition goes through him. He's got it.

With that piece of puzzle, he bides his time until the signal is tripped again. This time he hides out in the bunk during a phony air raid and catches the spy in the act, explaining how the lieutenant blew up the train.

But now that he knows who it is, that doesn't mean it's over.

SEFTON: You tip your mitt and the Jerries pull him out of here and plant him someplace else, like Stalag sixteen or fifteen. Or you kill him off and the Krauts turn around and kill of the whole barracks. Every one of us. So what do you do?

Sefton bides his time. When the Gestapo shows up to take Lieutenant Dunbar away, the men stage an impromptu rescue and stash him in the camp. The spy offers to distract the guards, but Sefton smoothly interferes and prevents him from spoiling the plan. Dunbar is safely hidden, but only the barracks chief knows where. The Germans try desperately to find him, but without any inside information they're helpless to find him.

Finally it's time. Dunbar has to be moved. In another midnight meeting, the men draw dog tags to see who'll bust him out. But when the dog tag is drawn, the spy grabs it and makes the case it should be him.

With that, Sefton steps in. In a speech that would have been home in an episode of Columbo, he confronts the spy, shakes him up, reveals how the system works and gets him to crack. When the spy dives for the hole in the floor and cries out in German, the men restrain him.

Sefton's biggest enemy steps up to him. "Brother, were we all wet about you," he says. Sefton looks at him, grabs a cigar and strikes a match on his face.

"Forget it."

Sefton suggests a plan. He'll get Dunbar out of his hiding place, and when they're ready to go the men will throw the spy out of the barracks. The men in the goon towers are trained to shoot anyone out of the barracks after lights out, and the distraction should allow the two of them to escape.

Sefton grabs the clothes and the wire cutters. Every eye in the barracks is on him. When he gets down into the hole, he stops and addresses them.

"Just one more word," he says. "If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let's pretend we never met before."

According to Wilder, Sefton was his favorite of the characters in his movies -- the one he missed having around -- and it's not hard to see why. Sefton is smart, acerbic, funny and totally and unashamedly his own bastard self, just like Wilder. And he also suffers the indignity of being an outcast and the final vindication of proving everyone wrong, which is something we all, if we're lucky, have that fierce joy of feeling now and then.

I suppose it's obvious by now that I love the character of J.J. Sefton, too. He might be my favorite character in all the movies, for in that shock of being an outcast he rises to the challenge of being more than a self-obsessed heel.

He becomes a hero.

Note: The entirety of Stalag 17 can be watched on YouTube. It probably goes without saying that if you haven't seen it, stop what you are doing right this minute, even if what you're doing is pulling a knife out of your chest, and watch the movie.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 5

Whew. I mean, has it been some kind of hard week or what?! I don't like to go much into personal details here on the ol' HH, but here's a rundown.

1. Flew to Jamaica, where I was accosted on the beach by a group of thugs and had to fight them off with coconuts.

2. Went to jury duty, where I was dismissed because it was a drug related case and I showed up in costume as Dr. Gonzo from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3. Was stuck in a waiting room with some guy on the phone having the "yeah, I've got AIDS" conversation... which quickly devolved into a plan to go his ex-boyfriend's house, throw a brick through his front window, and murder him.

4. Wished my life was as interesting as those things, because I made them all up.

Except the AIDS thing. That actually did happen to me once. Just not this week.

But we're not here to discuss whether there's enough Weird in my life, we're here to discuss anti-heroes. Specifically, the 2nd best anti-hero of them all, according to the crack team of scientists, scholars and dope fiends who came up with this list.

Anti-Hero #2: Ethan Edwards, from The Searchers

Most movies that rise to legendary status are like those rare jewels that never come from behind glass. They are pure... nearly divine, flawless in every move, every motive, every line. They seem to have arisen perfectly formed from the consciousness of a genius and then been miracled to the screen without interruption.

John Ford's The Searchers is not like that. It's premise -- a gunfighter and a young half-breed go on a five year search for a young girl kidnapped by Comanches -- is rudely interrupted by a series of pointless diversions dealing with the half-breed's girlfriend, played by Vera Miles, who's pissed he's been away for so long.

Intended as comic relief, these scenes only serve to annoy us, as we wait impatiently for the return of the dark force that sustains the movie and lifts it beyond these missteps, one of the greatest characters ever put on the screen: Ethan Edwards, the gunfighter, played by John Wayne in undoubtedly his greatest performance.

ANTI: Did I say gunfighter? I meant a bitterly racist, extremely violent gunfighter. A Confederate soldier who never gave up his gun or his sword. It's hinted he's spent the three years since the war fighting as a mercenary for the French in Mexico, and as the movie opens he's come across the great Texas wasteland to his brother's home.

A great impromptu welcoming is made for Ethan, but he's uncomfortable with the attention. His greeting to his brother's wife implies a past relationship. Then an old friend up shows up and asks him to join the Texas Rangers, but Ethan says he took an oath to the Confederacy, and a man's only good for one oath at a time. Listening to him, we suspect the truth: Ethan's only true oath is to himself.

Shortly after Ethan's arrival, cattle belonging to his brother's neighbor are stolen, and a posse, including Ethan and his half-breed nephew Martin, is formed to go after who did it. They follow the trail, only to realize the theft of the cattle was a ploy by Comanches to lure them away from their homes. By the time they can rush back to the Edwards homestead, the Comanches have slaughtered everyone except two of Ethan's nieces, who've been abducted.

They quickly pursue the Comanches, catching up with them at a river where a small skirmish ensues. After the Comanches flee, they follow the trail and come upon the grave of a dead Comanche warrior. Ethan pulls out his gun and shoots his eyes, gunfire echoing in the valley.

Reverend Clayton: What good did that do ya?

Ethan: By what you preach, none. But what the Comanche believes, ain't got no eyes, he can't end the spirit land. Has to wander forever between the winds.

The posse pursues the Comanches a while longer, but eventually most of the men either peel off, get killed or return home, and it's down to Ethan and the half-breed Martin. Martin's sister and Ethan's niece Debbie is still with the Comanches, and the rest of the movie takes the form of their five year search for her.

It's hinted that Ethan's mother was also killed by Comanches years before, and with the assault on his brother's house and the capture of his niece Ethan's hatred becomes all consuming. He's cruel to Martin because he's a half breed, treating him like a child, refusing to let him drink, trying to ditch him. When one night Ethan suspects men will come up on their camp and kill them, he uses Martin as bait before shooting one of the men in the back.

Martin takes the abuse and refuses to leave Ethan's side. Not because he has any love for Ethan, but because of a terrible suspicion he keeps in his heart that grows with the years: Ethan no longer plans to rescue Debbie. He plans to kill her. "She's been living with a buck," Ethan says. And that's not being alive.

Link: things that are uncool.

HERO: After five years, and many close calls, Ethan and Martin finally catch up to the Comanches that captured Debbie. The chief has taken her as one of his wives, and when she runs out to tell them to leave, Ethan pulls out his gun.

"Stand aside," he says. Martin shields her with his body and pulls out his gun, but before anything can happen a Comanche comes over the hill and shoots Ethan with an arrow, and the two men escape.

When they return, it's with a Texas Rangers raiding party. The force attacks the Comanches. Martin kills the chief and scalps him. Debbie flees the battle, but before Martin can do anything, Ethan is after her on a horse. She runs down a hill and into a cave with Ethan close behind. She stumbles suddenly, and flops against the wall of the cave. Ethan comes up and dismounts, gun in hand, and approaches her.

She's been living with a buck.

He looks into her wide and terrified eyes. Her terror is almost childlike. This is the face he's been searching across five years for. First to find, if she was still young, and then to kill.

To kill. He's told himself over and over again. She's not Debbie anymore. She's a Comanche.

By this point, we know Ethan. His hatred is terrible. It consumes him, almost against his own will. But faced with this helpless sight of his own niece, something suddenly softens within him, and he scoops her up into his arms.

"Let's go home, Debbie," he says, and with the battle won they ride the long journey back to the Edwards homestead. They approach slowly, with Debbie on Ethan's horse, and then in his arms. Martin's girlfriend comes out to greet him. They'll soon be married. The sun is setting, a meal almost certainly awaits.

Ethan carries her all the way to porch, where she's greeted by relatives she's long forgotten. They lead her inside.

Standing on the porch, Ethan takes one longing step forward, wanting to join the family, but stops himself. He doesn't belong in there, in all that warmth and happiness. A song swoons with lyrics so perfect they almost seem to have inspired the movie, "his peace of mind, he knows he'll find. But where, oh Lord, Lord where? Ride away, ride away..."

Ethan gives one more mournful look, and turns, as he must, toward the wilderness. Even after all he's been through, he' still not a man at peace with the world or himself. But through his heroic act of mercy, he's managed to restore a sense of harmony to his family. And maybe that's enough.

Greatest closing scene in a movie ever? Perhaps.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 4

So if you're anything like me, over the last week and a half you've been on a day trip to Tampa to watch the US defeat El Salvador in a preliminary World Cup match, and then you spent the next four of five days watching coverage of the NFL Scouting Combine, which you of course do every year.

Or perhaps not.

And it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? But now that it's over, it's time to get back to the task at hand, the last double entry of my Profiles in Courage Award winning series on Anti-Heroes.

Anti-Hero #4: Harry Callahan from Dirty Harry

You've got to ask yourself one question: Is this huge, phallic gun covering up for something?

ANTI: My selection of Harry for the list is something of a cheat, since I'm not particularly enamored with the character but his presence allows me to talk about a kind of character that was a one time very popular, and still somewhat is now.

But cheating or not, Harry's not a good dude, nor is he a good cop. Consider this scene, between Harry, Harry's new Mexican partner -- hilariously named Chico Gonzales -- and a fellow cop, De Georgio.

Gonzales: There's one question, Inspector Callahan. Why do they call you "Dirty Harry"?

De Georgio: Ah, that's one thing about our Harry, doesn't play any favorites. Harry hates everybody: Limeys, Micks, Hebes, Fat Dagos, Nigger, Honkies, Chinks, you name it.

Gonzales: How does he feel about Mexicans?

De Georgio: Ask him.

Harry: Especially Spics.

The only person Harry hates more than his superiors, or his new partner, is the Scorpio Killer, a over-the-top lunatic played by Andy Robinson who claims he will shoot people from rooftops until the city pays him $100,000.

Harry and a fellow cop (Gonzales has been wounded in a previous shootout) eventually get a vague tip that Scorpio might live in Kezar Stadium. But instead of waiting for a warrant or even having probable cause, Harry breaks in. Kicking down the door to the greenskeeper's room, he finds the sniper rifle, and then a chase ensues where Harry blasts Scorpio in the shoulder at the 50 yard line and proceeds to beat a confession out of him on where he's keeping a girl he's kidnapped.

Pictured: standard police procedure.

Unfortunately for Harry, who's supposed to be a cop, he apparently hasn't heard of, you know, the law, so when the DA tells him what he did was grossly illegal and Scorpio will have to be released, Harry's reaction, rather than to feel bad for fucking up so enormously, is to say, "the law's crazy!"

Later, Scorpio kidnaps a bus full of children, and demands to be driven to the airport where he wants a plane and $200,000 to be waiting. And if I see any cops, or any funny stuff, he says, I'll start killing children.

In a move that really should go in the "what the fuck were you thinking?" Hall of Fame, Harry's chief asks Harry, who by this point is so angry he's ready to chew asphalt, whether he wants the job of bag man. I mean, why would you do that? Harry doesn't follow orders. Plus, he fucks everything up!

Thankfully, Harry turns him down. Not so thankfully, he chooses to attack the bus alone, waiting on an overpass and then jumping on it's roof as it passes. Nevermind there's a psychopath inside who could murder every child within reach while you're playing Mission: Impossible on the roof, but Harry is so determined to kill Scorpio he doesn't seem to care about anything else, including dead children. Or maybe he's just an idiot.

So the bus crashes, and Scorpio leads Harry on a chase through some kind of factory. They shoot at each other a few times until Scorpio finally makes it to a nearby lake, where he grabs a kid who frankly must be deaf to have not heard either the bus crash or the multiple rounds of gunfire before now.

Scorpio puts a gun to the kid's head and orders Harry to drop his .44 Magnum. At first Harry looks like he'll do it, but then he remembers how little he cares about children so he pulls a Quick Draw McGraw and miraculously shoots Scorpio in the shoulder, allowing the kid to flee. Harry walks up, asks Scorpio if he feels lucky, and proceeds to blow his head "clean off."(Editor's note: "Off" I buy. But I'd wager "clean" is the last word you'd use to describe shooting someone in the face with a .44 Magnum.)

With Scorpio now dead and shredded pieces of police procedure manuals floating around in the breeze (metaphorically speaking), Harry pulls out his badge, looks at it, and throws it into the lake.

Credits roll.

HERO: Born in a time where public concern over violent crime had reached it's peak, Dirty Harry became a symbol of the kind of avenger who could bring justice when the system -- more concerned with the rights of the accused than the rights of victims -- had failed.

Written mostly by military enthusiast and infamously outspoken right winger John Milius, Dirty Harry sought to show a world where you know who the good guys are (you), who the bad guys are (them), and the laws that stand between you bringing the bad guys to justice are not laws that need to be respected. If you need to use excessive force, well, what's excessive? If you need to plant evidence (not that Harry does this), well, you know he did it, that's what's important.

It's particularly interesting watching Dirty Harry after you watch a movie like Sidney Lumet's Q & A, which features a cop played by Nick Nolte who starts the movie by shooting a drug dealer in cold blood and then rigging the scene to make it look like self defense.

But in Lumet's world, the cop who goes outside the law to get the bad guys doesn't stop there. Once you're willing to break the rules, Lumet argues, where do you stop? As an investigation into the shooting progresses, Nolte's cop is revealed to be a part-time mafia hitman perfectly willing to kill the lawyer investigating him.

And that is taking it a step too far, in my view, but I'd have to say my sympathies in this matter lie largely with Lumet. Ours is not a world of good guys and bad guys. The road to tragedy, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Dirty Harry tries to argue that Harry is good. Not because he is necessarily ideal -- though knowing Milius' work, it's not hard to imagine him arguing that -- but because bad guys are bad, we're know they're bad, and anyone who stands in the way needs either to be ignored or punished.

The movie cheats this point of view by never showing anything negative arising directly from Harry's recklessness. In an early scene, he freely fires his .44 Magnum at a group of criminals robbing a bank, despite the fact that civilians are running all over the street in a panic. Real police officers never, ever do not do this. The money isn't worth the potential loss of life. But Harry shoots away, and wouldn't you believe it, no civilians get hurt.

Dirty Harry doesn't concern itself with these kinds of shadings, and I have to say I find it's moral certitude really sort of naive and quaint. I would argue, as many of Lumet's movies (and movies written by legendary screenwriter David Webb Peoples) do, that people simply do not get to declare who they are. You show your worth by your adherence to the rules of morality, and it is that which guides you to who is good and who isn't.

So is Harry good, or does he just think he is?

Frankly, I'm not sure. As you can imagine from the above, I don't particularly think so. But like my entry on Travis Bickle, I think the question is the thing worth asking, though in this case I don't think the question was particularly on the mind of the filmmakers.

Two things, though, that I'm sure of.

1. A guy like Scorpio is better off dead (or at minimum, in prison).

2. Though Harry throwing his badge into the lake was meant to show his frustration with the justice system, I was personally happy to see him do it for a completely different reason. As Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men might say, "he puts people's lives in danger." There's got to be something heroic about giving up something you're terrible at.

Anti-Hero #3: Sanjuro from Sanjuro

Yes, it's a samurai movie.

ANTI: Rude and unkempt, a killer with a saunter does Sanjuro come into the movie. Nine young samurai have gathered in a room. They are in earnest. Corruption has gripped their clan and they meet to decide how to dispose of it. The boldest one, their leader, says they have discovered that two elders are definitely corrupt. He has reported this to an official, Mutsuta, who says he cannot help them. The eight other samurai start muttering. Bastard Mutsuta. But it's okay, the leader says. He's reported this to the leader of the clan, and he's agreed to help. The samurai mutter cheerfully. The leader, what a great guy!

Then, from the next room, they hear laughing. It is Sanjuro. You are fucking idiots, he tells them. The leader of the clan is the true mastermind, and he will send people here to kill you. And you have also put Mutsuta in danger, by telling the leader you told Mutsuta of the corruption.

Oops.

Sanjuro is a killer for hire, we learn later. He seems to live most of his life in the countryside. Where the young samurai are proper and clean, Sanjuro is rough, unshaven and given to violence. There is almost a Bogart quality about Toshiro Mifune's performance, in that we sense a basically honorable man who has now and then lived dishonorably and feels the shame of it. When he decides to help the earnest, young samurai, who would otherwise surely be killed, we get a sense he's trying to make many old wrongs right.

Late in the movie, when forced to kill an evil man he's double crossed, he warns the young samurai, who by this point see him as nearly a God, "he was exactly like me."

HERO: Sanjuro's heroic act is a lot less subjective than Harry's. Seeing the nine young, basically helpless samurai, he decides to help them. To advise them. In a corrupt world, their sense of direction is valueless, and it takes a man with long experience in underhanded business to know what to do. His talent for killing is unmatched, and he sees the moves of the corrupt coming, and though the young samurai at first oppose him, the more he is proven correct the more they begin to follow him.

He volunteers to pose as a double agent, joining the clan against the nine young samurai. He plans and executes a rescue of Mutsuta's wife and daughter. The wife seems cheerfully oblivious of the situation, but she manages to see into Sanjuro's soul.

Mutsuta's wife: You're too sharp. That's your trouble. You're like a drawn sword. Sharp, naked without a sheath. You cut well, but good swords are kept in their sheaths.

Sanjuro marks his attempt to sheath his sword, so to speak. Rather than profit from death, for this one moment he finds the courage to save lives (eve though he ends up killing a lot of people in the process, each one more reluctantly than the last).

At the end, when he's killed the last enemy, the nine young samurai implore him to stay and be their master. But he refuses. He has found it within himself to act honorably, but in the end he does not belong. His destiny, like so many of these characters, is to wander.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 3

Boy, that was some Superbowl, eh? A game so good my brother vomited all day Monday, though it probably had more to do with undercooked buffalo hot dogs than the game.

Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: anti-heroes. Specifically, these two anti-heroes.

I have sort of paused here at my keyboard a minute wondering whether I really have to repeat my definition of what an anti-hero is. As this is my third entry, I've already written it twice. And since I have four more to go, that would probably get even more tiring for me than it would be for you.

So can I trust you to go back and look at what I wrote before/remember it? Good.

I'm glad we're friends.

Anti-Hero #6: Travis Bickle, from Taxi Driver

Yes, I'm talking to you. Now stop looking at me like that.

I hemmed and hawed and thought and wondered more about including Travis Bickle on this list than anyone who made it or didn't. I put him on, I took him off. I stared at the wall. I punched myself in the head. At the end of the day, I decided my indecision reflected a virtue in the movie itself. More on this below.

ANTI: I sort of have to laugh at the start of a paragraph about why Travis Bickle is unlikable, since he is, in my view, one of the least likable characters in the history of cinema.

We get no real sense of Bickle's uprbringing as the movie begins. He tells people he was in Vietnam, but nothing about what happened. Now he's a taxi driver. We don't know for how long (too long, apparently). He is alone. He tells us he's been alone most of his life. What he doesn't tell us -- but we sense anyway -- is that something is very wrong with him.

Has Bickle separated himself from society or it from him? It's almost certainly both. When he's not out patrolling the streets as a taxi driver -- a job completely unsuited for the sociopath he is -- he stays in his room. He exercises. He schemes. Now and then he goes to the movies... always muttering about the scum on the streets.

Bickle: I think someone should just take this city and just... just flush it down the fuckin' toilet.

Bickle has retreated so far into himself he's lost all sense of society and it's rules. At one point Bickle meets a blonde in white (Cybil Shepard) who works for a politician. He comes in and makes bold conversation. When she agrees to a date, he takes her to a theater showing a porno. Why does he do this? Her objections totally confuse him. He tries to call her, but she's through with him. Later, he attempts to kill her boss.

When his mind finally snaps, it retreats into the rules of the movies: bad people deserve to die, and good people are justified in taking the law into their own hands to kill them. Bickle thinks of himself as a good person. An avenger. But is he?

Either way, he's better than these two assholes.

HERO: Now here's where the interesting part begins, and why actually watching the movie is so important, because on paper, Travis Bickle is without a doubt absolutely the hero of the movie.

I mean, he meets a 12-year-old girl who's working as a prostitute (Jodie Foster).

A 12-year-old. As a prostitute.

Even Bickle is appalled. She jumps into his cab for a moment, saying she wants to be taken away. But she just as quickly jumps out, and when he tracks her down she brushes it off as just having been strung out. Bickle wants to take her away, take her back to her parents. No, she says. She's happy with her life, though how could she be? Bickle persists. He goes to meet her pimp, a freak named Sport played by Harvey Keitel.

Bickle asks about Foster's character, who's also Sport's "steady" girl, and Sport replies with, for my money, one of the most shocking speeches in the movies.

Sport: Well, take it or leave it. If you want to save yourself some money, don't fuck her. Cause you'll be back here every night for some more. Man, she's twelve and a half years old. You never had no pussy like that. You can do anything you want with her. You can cum on her, fuck her in the mouth, fuck her in the ass, cum on her face, man. She'll get your cock so hard she'll make it explode. But no rough stuff, all right?

Jesus.

Later, after his mind has broken completely, Bickle buys what seems like 10 guns and storms Sport's place High Noon-style, killing Sport, Foster's client and another man in an attempt to set Foster free. In the process, Bickle is (seemingly) mortally wounded himself, leading to the famous shot of him sticking a bloody finger to his temple and pretending to blow his brains out.

We then cut to the the movie's intriguing last scene, where Bickle has survived his injuries and been declared a hero, receiving the commendation of the city and the return of Foster to her parents.

Is this real, or just a fantasy of Bickle's... his last thoughts before death? I'm inclined to think the latter, even though the movie doesn't say. Presumably it wants us to think about it.

When you get down to it, the question of Taxi Driver is really one of context. In objective terms, is it morally justified to kill three men in order to free a 12-year-old from the bonds of prostitution?

Killing three men for pie is harder to justify, unless, of course, it is really good pie.

In High Noon, to use an example, Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) systematically tracks and kills three men. In the movie named after him, Nevada Smith (Steve McQueen) hunts down the three men who killed his father and raped, skinned and murdered his mother. And war movies... sheesh. Bodies pile up by the thousands. The guy who wipes out an enemy platoon by himself gets a picture with the president.

The trick, of course, is in the above examples we're never unsure who the good and bad guys are. The point is clear and in bold. Will Kane tries to get help from everyone to face down the gang, but he's ignored. Killing those men is an act of sheer courage. Nevada Smith learns to act like a bad guy and even causes the death of a woman, but his need to avenge the death of his parents is as old as literature. And besides, he even spares one of them (to ride off to the swell of heroic music).

The fact that Bickle is a crazy, racist sociopath short circuits our perception of the moral force of his actions. In effect, the movie asks us to consider what's really important -- the deed, or the man? Bickle believes completely that his actions are morally justified. His failure is that he doesn't see himself as we see him. Otherwise, he would doubt as we do.

At the end of the day, I didn't put Bickle on the list because I'm sure he's a hero. I don't really think the question can be answered, or is intended to be (though if you put me on the spot, I'd probably say no). Bickle goes on the list because I respect the ability of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader to ask the question in a way that is endlessly and brilliantly fascinating.

Anti-Hero #5: Sam Spade, from The Maltese Falcon

Adam Savage from Mythbusters loves that falcon prop so much he made his own. Clink that link, by the way. Savage is batshit crazy.

When I first started thinking about the possibilities for this list, one actor jumped immediately into my mind -- Humphrey Bogart. But the longer I thought about Bogart's career, the more I realized he tended to play either certified assholes (The Petrified Forest, The Caine Mutiny, Treasure of the Sierra Madre), or, if not genuinely good guys, then certainly not bad guys (The African Queen, To Have and Have Not).

Only a few movies seemed to break the mold. Casablanca, where his words speak a callousness his actions betray. In a Lonely Place, where his abusive, alcoholic character is proven not to have committed a murder, but he's such a dick that whatever, he might as well have. And then this one -- The Maltese Falcon -- for my money, Bogart's greatest role (with a nod to his turn as Captain Queeg in the aformentioned The Caine Mutiny).

ANTI: In his review of The Maltese Falcon for his "Great Movies" Roger Ebert put the dark character of Spade as well as it can be put:

"Spade is cold and hard, like his name. When he gets the news that his partner has been murdered, he doesn't blink an eye. Didn't like the guy. Kisses his widow the moment they're alone together. Beats up Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), not just because he has to, but because he carries a perfumed handkerchief, and you know what that meant in a 1941 movie. Turns the rough stuff on and off. Loses patience with Greenstreet, throws his cigar into the fire, smashes his glass, barks out a threat, slams the door and then grins to himself in the hallway, amused by his own act."

The movie's plot centers on a long lost falcon (from Malta), covered in jewels, being pursued by a number of lowlifes and criminals. Once Spade is involved, he dives in like Kirstie Alley into a doughnut ocean, playing the angles and dividing the criminals against each other.

Meanwhile, the police are still investigating his partner's murder. They wonder if Spade did it. We don't blame them. When Spade gets control of the falcon, we wonder if he'll decide to keep it and screw over the others.

HERO: But he doesn't. And moreover, he finds out who killed his partner, in a last act that shows Spade's charade for what it is: a means to an end.

The Sam Spade character is perhaps the ultimate example of the film noir anti-hero: cutthroat, intelligent, sometimes cruel, sometimes murderous, but ultimately redeemed in the eyes of the audience by a code of conduct he holds to that the "villains" don't.

In Rififi, Tony le Stephanois was a thief who cruelly beat his ex-girlfriend for taking up with a rival. But he believed in honor among thieves and was willing to both kill and die for that honor.

Sam Spade doesn't have to kill or die for honor. But he believes, as he says to his secretary, that "when a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it." And he does, wading neck deep into a band of criminals willing to do anything to find the invaluable falcon and using their desperation against them, even though this puts him at grave risk.

At the end of the movie, when he finds out the killer is one of the criminals after the falcon -- a woman he's sort of fallen in love with -- he turns her over to the police anyway.

"I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck," he says. "The chances are you'll get off with life. That means if you're a good girl, you'll be out in 20 years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."

Cold, sure. But Spade makes sure his partner gets justice for his murder. He even turns over the money he was paid by the criminals as evidence. He may be untrusting and manipulative, willing to screw another man's wife even after he's been murdered, but he has a code, and that's enough. In the dark world in which he travels, it's even heroic.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 2

So after a week off to discuss the fairly shitting nature of The Book of Eli, it's time to get back to my series of posts on Anti-Heroes, which wasn't really a series since there was just the one post before now, but let's not be dicks about this, shall we?

Anyhow, by way of recap:

1. I dig Anti-Heroes.

2. Therefore, Anti-Heroes are cool.

3. An Anti-Hero is a character that despite being an asshole, douchebag or even evil most of the time, manages by the end of the movie to perform a truly heroic act, either because they've changed their character, or more likely, because a kink in that character followed it's logical way toward an act of heroism.

4. This definition is not like everyone else's, but this is my blog, so they can suck it.

5. Larry Flynt and Barry Lyndon are Anti-Heroes.

6. Larry Flynt likes boobies.

So now that that's out of the way, allow me to present, with no further ado....

Anti-Hero #8: Walt Kowolski from Gran Torino

Get off my plane, err... lawn!

ANTI: Racist, violent and bitter, Korean War veteran Walt Kowalski chugs Pabst Blue Ribbon and stalks his front porch, shotgun never far away, hurling insults at anyone -- priests, family, neighbors -- who comes near.

As the movie starts, Walt's wife has just died. No one in his family respects him, and he hates all of them. His granddaughter waits for his death, hoping to inherit his 1972 Grand Torino and a couch he keeps in the basement. One of his sons and his wife ask him whether he's ready to move, so eager are they to sell his house. In this way the movie invites us to sympathize with Walt. Sure, he's a racist asshole, the movie says, but everyone around him is just as a bad.

And he is bad. Every non-white person he meets is a "gook," "zipperhead," "spook" or the like. Any sign of disrespect he seems to consider an offense worthy of execution. When given the chance to tell a joke, he says:

"A Mexican, a Jew and a colored guy go into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, 'Get the fuck out of here.'"

Later, he tells a gang member, "I'll blow your head off, go inside and sleep like a baby."

Deleted scene.

HERO: But Walt's heart is eventually melted by a family of Hmongs (Asians) who live next door. Well, not really the whole family, just a kid (Thao, who Walt calls "Toad") and his sister, Sue (who Walt calls "Dragon Lady").

Sue he admires for her strength in facing down three black hoods (Walt comes to her rescue in what's probably the best scene in the movie), and she ends up inviting him to a party and introducing him to the family.

His relationship with Thao is more problematic. Young and aimless, Thao's pursued by a local Hmong gang who want to make him a member. His initiation: stealing Walt's Gran Torino. But when Walt catches him in the act, Thao only barely gets away with his life. Later, his mother and Sue come back to Walt with a request: let Thao work off the debt.

Well, those of you who haven't seen the movie can guess where this is going. Walt and Thao become friends (to the point of Walt getting Thao a job), the gang intimidates Thao, Walt fights back, the gang rapes Sue (so maybe you didn't guess that part) and Walt, though haunted by memories of Korea, knows he must respond.

But how? How does one foul-mouthed septugenarian take on a six or seven gang members without ending up like, well....

This.

The answer is (uh, Spoiler Alert): he doesn't. Walt chooses to sacrifice himself by walking onto the gang's front lawn, threatening them and then pretending to pull a gun out of his jacket. When the gang mows him down in the presence of neighborhood full of witnesses, the cops are called, who promptly haul the gang off in chains.

For Walt, who the movie implies is about die from lung cancer anyway, they bring the meat wagon.

Now I personally have some problems with the logic of Walt's plan. If the gang has truly been terrorizing everyone as much as the movie implies, why would shooting someone on their front lawn be the thing that suddenly makes the neighborhood decide to stand up to them? And even if you're Walt and you assume there's a reasonable chance of this (which given that he is still a racist and despises most of the Hmongs shouldn't be something he assumes), it's pretty hard to gamble your life on just a reasonable chance. I'd have to be sure. Especially since if you die and the gang gets away with it, there's nothing to stop them from terrorizing Thao and Sue without end.

But despite those nagging problems, Walt's choice cannot be called anything but heroic. His revenge is total without being bloody. By sacrificing his own life, he gives his Hmong neighbors (by this time, his surrogate family) the freedom to live theirs in peace.

Anti-Hero #7: Tony le Stephanois from Rififi

Portrayed by Jean Servais

I've already written a bit about the great movie Rififi, so hopefully this will be somewhat shorter than the fucking opus the above turned out to be.

ANTI: A career criminal and ice-cold killer, Tony is simply not to be fucked with. Aging, just released from prison after five years for a jewel heist and stricken with tuberculosis, a friend finds him playing poker in a smoke-filled room in the early hours of the morning. This friend is Jo the Swede, genial and loyal protege of Tony's, who has a son Tony dotes on.

Tony asks about his old girlfriend, Mado. Jo tells him she's taken up with a rival -- scumbag nightclub owner Pierre Grutter. Tony goes to the nightclub and finds Mado a kept woman, dressed in expensive clothes and glittering with jewelery. Tony invites her back to his run down apartment, where he forces her to strip and then savagely beats her.

Tony, Jo and two other men plan an elaborate jewel heist, the 30 minute execution of which has become the inspiration for countless other heist sequences, and which originally got the film banned in some countries for being too realistic. Anyhow, the heist goes perfectly, except for one thing -- one of the men, a safecracker named Cesar Macaroni, has fallen in love with a singer involved with Grutter -- and when he gives her a jewel from the heist, Grutter figures out what happened, captures Cesar and learns everything.

Now in pursuit of Grutter and his men, Tony finds the Cesar tied up alone backstage at Grutter's club. Tony walks up, squints and coldly pulls out his gun.

"I liked you, Macaroni," Tony says. "But you know the rules."

Wrong kind of "rules," dickhead.

HERO: Jo the Swede knows where the jewels are, and when Grutter finds out, he conspires to steal them for himself. His plan? Kidnap Jo's son.

This springs Tony, coughing but still deadly, into action, as he begins a desperate search for the boy before Jo inevitably gives in to Grutter's demands. His search leads him first to find Cesar, who he kills in cold blood, and then out to a house on the outskirts of town where Grutter and his men are hiding.

Knowing that Grutter will simply kill Jo and his son once he has the jewels, Tony launches a one man assault on the house, killing each man in turn before (Spoiler Alert) being fatally wounded himself.

But he grabs Jo's son, and instead of rushing to a hospital, he drives at breakneck speed back into town, dying as soon as he's delivered the boy. Like Walt Kowalski, he sacrifices himself for an innocent, and despite being a violent sociopath and hardened criminal, achieves a moment of heroism.

The 10 "Best" Anti-Heroes, part 1

So the last time I did a list-based series of posts, things turned out pretty well. Part of that, I think, was due to the fact that the subject matter -- movies about the movies -- is fairly modest in size and scope. There just aren't that many movies to cover, so the chance of missing something or just generally coming off like a douchebag is not really that much higher than normal (granted, this is not saying much).

This series of posts will be nothing like that. The subject of anti-heroes in the movies is, well, huge. A simple Google search for "movies" and "anti-hero" provides more lists than you can shake a wiener at.

As a result, I'm fairly sure I'm a moron for tackling it, a fact I'm sure at least a few of you fine people will remind me of.

Not an anti-hero.

So it will happen this way. Keeping with the human fascination with lists that are divisible by five (for example: five things), this list will cover 10 of the best anti-hero characters in movie history, with the first four entries covering two characters each, and the last two getting their own entries.

At least, that's the plan. Even with just five entries last time, I still managed to fuck things up.

Now a few words on the term anti-hero. It seems that everyone has their own definition of it, so for reference here's mine -- an anti-hero is a character who, despite being immoral, selfish, a killer or whatever, manages to accomplish the chief heroic act in (this case) the movie.

This definition helps separate out a lot of sundry characters we just end up rooting for because they're clever, or put upon, or think they're doing the right thing -- from characters who are mediocre or even bad human beings but who manage in the world of the story to rise at least for a moment to the level of a hero (for whatever reason).

This distinguishes them from characters like Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange or Blondie from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, who despite the fact that we root for them can not be called anything but, you know, protagonists. Which is of course different from a hero.

So now that's all been covered, let's get into it.

#10 -- Larry Flynt

As seen in: The People vs. Larry Flynt

ANTI: In the movie (as in real life), Larry Flynt is a mostly uneducated, philandering smut peddler. Facing a run of bad luck running a strip club in Cincinnati, he publishes the first Hustler magazine with pictorials of the women who dance in his club.

He becomes involved with Althea Leasure, a runaway turned stripper played by Courtney Love, publishes nude photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, and generally goes out of his way to offend every measure of taste and decorum possible, including, famously, publishing a cartoon that implies conservative icon Jerry Falwell lost his virginity to his own mother in an outhouse.

In court repeatedly on obscenity charges, Flynt is a disaster. He yells repeatedly, fires his own lawyer, wears diapers and at one point throws an orange at a judge.

HERO: But -- beyond the fact that he's portrayed, and by all accounts is in real life, as a completely classless asshole -- Flynt is right. The obscenity laws of the United States are ludicrous. As Flynt at one point says, you can get a Pulitzer for printing a picture of a murder, which is illegal, but go to jail for printing a picture of a sex act, which is legal.

This is madness, and by railing against it, even in his cartoonishly immature circus act fashion, Flynt does a public good.

Though he loses most of his obscenity trials, by the end of the movie Flynt has triumphed in the Supreme Court over the legality of his Falwell ad, solidifying a relaxed standard for satirizing public figures that still influences public satire today, enabling everyone from SNL to stand up comedians to do what they do.

Though he remains someone you'd probably never want to meet, by paying the price both in jail time and lawyers fees, Flynt proves himself a hero. Not just to people who want to look at fake and/or skanky boobs, but to anyone who thinks it's important to make that choice for themselves.

"If they'll protect a scumbag like me," Flynt says. "They'll protect anyone."

#9 -- Barry Lyndon

ANTI: A boobish, naive teenager turned ruthless gambler and profiteer, the story of Barry Lyndon is often described as the odyssey of an opportunist, tracing his humble beginnings in Ireland -- a lost love, a duel, and an escape from the law -- to his eventual profession as a gambler and his cold-hearted seduction of a widow.

As directed by Stanley Kubrick and portrayed by Ryan O'Neal, Barry is anything but sympathetic. Forced to join the Army to survive after being robbed while on his way to Dublin to escape a murder he didn't actually commit (I know, it's complicated), Barry deserts at the first opportunity, stealing the costume and papers of a messenger.

When a Prussian officer discovers Barry's lies, he's forced to join the Prussian army, which is even worse than the British one. Eventually he's brought back to Prussia and told to spy on a chevalier (whatever that is), who the Prussians think is an Irish spy. Instead, he and the chevalier join forces as a gambling team, cheating rich nobles at cards all over Europe (and fighting duels to collect when necessary).

By this point, as the Narrator puts it:

"Five years in the army, and some considerable experience in the world, had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love with which Barry commenced life. And he began to have it in mind, as so many gentlemen had done before him, to marry a woman of fortune and condition."

Stripped of his innocence, Barry seduces the widow Lady Lyndon, who falls hard (and stupidly) for him. Once they're married, and he has charge of their finances, Barry essentially throws her away, engendering the undying hatred of his adopted son, Lord Bullingdon.

After Bullingdon -- now a teenager -- insults Barry one too many times in front of a party of guests, Barry beats him mercilessly, rendering Barry a social outcast among the upper crust he's been trying so hard and so expensively to join.

HERO: The only good thing in Barry's life, other than money, is the son he and Lady Lyndon have, an annoyingly precocious kid named Bryan, who softens Barry's cool facade.

When Bryan dies in an accident, Barry falls into a prolonged drunken stupor, giving Bullingdon an opportunity to challenge Barry to a duel over mastery of the Lyndon estate.

The duel scene -- justifiably famous -- proves to be both Barry's undoing and his greatest triumph as a human.

Despite having both reason and opportunity to kill Bullingdon, and a lifetime of war, gambling and murder to harden him to the idea, he chooses not to. Bullingdon accidentally fires into the ground, so Barry -- weary and aging -- does as well. After trying to buy his way into the title and style of a gentleman and failing horribly, Barry finally finds a measure of grace and nobility in his mercy toward Bullingdon.

Bullingdon, though he has the bloodlines of a Lord, fails the moral test. Though in a twist that's very Kubrick, his very act of failing a moral test leads to the passing of a social one, since Barry's resulting injury allows Bullingdon to take control of the Lyndon estate and banish Barry to Europe.

But even though he loses the duel, Barry rises for that brief moment into heroism, showing mercy on a young kid who is clearly shitting his pants. The cold world of the movie punishes him immediately for this act, but still, after a lifetime of being a heel, Barry finally rises above.