SUPPORTING ACTOR
Menace. The most important aspect of life that no one talks about and the ingredient at the core of all electronic entertainment.
Every organism's first job is survival and the first tactic of survival is to attempt dominance. From termite mound to lion pride, from caveman's club to infant's hi-chair tray, the primal instinct of any being is to pound one's Cheerios into submission. In order that we dont just automatically extinct ourselves with our impulses, civilization frustrates dominance until we are each tiny pods of an unspoken rage, more precarious to access with each passing generation. Menace is our surrogate for dominance, something storytellers have known for a long time and media has now monetized. All men are captives of the brand of menace which most impresses them and to which they feel the closest access (women can be impressed by the ability to menace, but have no need for it in their media because they can menace a man any time they feel the need for speed) and the major reason Western Civilization becomes more suckerized each season.
If you want to think about all that before i show how the best supporting actors of cinema are part & parcel of my theory of menace as the center of storytelling & entertainment, g'ahead. i'll wait..........................................................................................................
16. Casey Affleck (1 point) - The younger Affleck gave a wonderful performance in Manchester by the Sea. It made me want to research his supporting roles, but i realized it was easier to say that Casey Affleck is NOT Eli Wallach, EGMarshall, Lee J Cobb, Jason Robards, Rod Steiger, Martin Balsam (or whoever else of the cast of 12 Angry Men i left out), James Earl Jones, George Sanders, John Gielgud, Jeffrey Wright, Sydney Greenstreet, Alec Guiness, Harvey Keitel, Michael Pena or even Wilford frikkin Brimley
15. Claude Rains (2 pts) - Love Claude Rains, but i cant put him over the bar i just set either.
14. Ed Harris (3 pts) - Just an all-round blend-in MVP, as well as a lead performance in
Pollack that was even better than Affleck in
Manchester. Same deal, though.
13. Alan Rickman (4 pts) - ibid
Before we move to the actual contenders for best (and i would not be upset by any of the top dozen being #1, except for my menace angle), my favorite supporting performance of all time (3:30 of
this to 5:00 of
this), by vaudevillian Ed Wynn.
12.
Edward G Robinson (5 pts)- my old business partner grew up next to Eddy G and, from his recollections, i know for a FACT that the great actor, raconteur & collector would abhor being thought of as anything but a star. So i put him at the bottom of the greats as his protest against the classification.
But he is also my way to introduce menace as the abiding quality in movie performance. The ugly little man became a star on menace alone - whether a Caesar, a weasel or haunted citizen, he projected workaday villainy & avarice & relentlessness in a way that activated everyone's sense of the menace in their secret hearts and turned movies into a vicarious chase to the top instead of a reflection of life. But he was a star, so last of these.
11. Tommy Lee Jones (6 pts) - Put Ed Harris in a bowl, add black hair dye, battery acid and menace. Stir.
10.
Walter Brennan (7 pts) - the other side of the coin: the menaced. I don't even remember if Brennan actually had a limp or not. Don't matter. No one reflected a person beaten up by the venalities of existence like Walter. He even won sometimes, on determination alone - a very American thing at one time. But he was Job personified, to those who did & didnt believe in God.
9. Michael Caine (8 pts) - the Cockney Gene Hackman. Believable as anybody - menace, menaced, menacer of menaces and, therefore, a lead or supporting player. Began as a leading menace to respectable mores, Alfie, then played one of the great menacers of all time -
The Man Who Would Be King's Peachy Carnehan, Iago to a man who left civilization to become not only a king but a god, and suffered the ultimate pain & woe to bring proof of their quest home when they were done.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,
Cider House Rules, a seething turn in
The Quiet American and Alfred to boot.
8. Peter Lorre (9 pts) - the Ur creep, but i have personal reasons to make him tops of the classic-era supporting players. me Ma (RIP) was orphaned in her teens and taken in by a Sicilian family. Sundays were gigantic meals, lawn bowling and all the children entertaining the adults. while the older kids had to play clarinet or do recitations, i went vaudeville and learned two imitations (Louis Armstrong and an imitation of an imitation of Peter Lorre, from
this Spike Jones record) and did the same routine every week and the grownups would howl every time and i didnt have to practice anything. thx M.
7. Morgan Freeman (10 pts) - a very powerful force in modern moviemaking because any world becomes palpable when Mr. Freeman addresses it. I'm not sure what to do with that because it's so unprecedented. Can't put him higher because his performances are more useful than great.
6. Joe Pesci (11 pts) - the world caught up to Peter Lorre, making it possible for a creep to be a player and that player is Joe Pesci. I would love to see someone modernize a Shakespeare piece and have Pesci play one of the Bard's enduring creeps. But he's a one-note player so, as ultimately menacing as that one note is and as memorable as some of his roles are, i can place him no higher.
5. John Cazale (12 pts) - the unicorn. Cazale's movies AVERAGED 10 Oscar nominations; he taught Meryl Streep why we act and he did the most courageous thing any actor who made it to Hollywood ever did - played weak. There is a Sal, a Fredo in every man and each of us loathe being reminded of that at every turn. But some stories have no perspective unless someone is willing to play that and John Cazale used star talent in his unfortunately short career to give good pictures greatness by delivering that perspective. It's like going to a museum and finding the same human figure in The Last Supper, The Garden of Earthly Delights, the Night Watch and The Potato Eaters
4. Phillip Seymour Hoffman (13 pts) - I have no problem stipulating that PSH is the best actor of any on this list. But, as i said in my preface to my supporting actress list, the roles are as much a factor as the acting and my favorite of his performances (Capote, Synecdoche) were very much leads. Even though, on the menacing front, he played the best Bond-type villain ever in MI3, the landmark supporting role isnt there to rank him any higher.
3. Gene Hackman (14 pts) - the American man. His temper, temperament, manfulness, menace, confidence & dread are the makings of any guy who tried. Size of the role don't matter for he or Duvall (who would have won this) - if he aint supporting the star, he's supporting the audience in their understanding of the story at hand. I had him down with Caine originally and he kept rising up. By the time he got this high, i had the top two set in my head so this is his ceiling.
2. Christopher Walken (15 pts) - now this is menace. Nothing menaces us more, even women, than our mental health. What flights of fear & fancy make us take personally what we do? How does hating at ourselves til we can love ourselves again work? Why do we continue when we have very little idea what happens next and what we'll do about it? ALL of that bounces across the minds of Christopher Walken's characters and one can see the play of every bit of it. He's locked in & loose as a goose at the same time and, lord help me, i love it so. Right after i came to the menace idea for judging this (i once actually considered rating them on a scale of imitatibility) i watched the cable-ubiquitous
Catch Me If You Can. As Frank Abegnale Sr, Walken used a career of menacing to show a man ultimately menaced and i cried. Add that to Nick in
Deer Hunter (the greatest supporting performance i know of) and i dont know how i didnt make him #1. But i didn't....
1. Samuel L.Jackson (16 pts) - NOW, #####es! Right muddafrikkin' NOW!! Nobody has ever brought some NOW to the screen like SLJ. And, in case you havent noticed, making NOW happen is the most vital part of making movies. In fact, because of that, he may be the most important American black man of the last fifty years, cuz he leapt right past valuable or important and went to absolutely necessary. Sam Jackson pisses on your equality and aint all that impressed with his supremacy. He goin' str8 to the Wrath of God visited upon this this earth. Sure, a black man has been president, but even Obama didn't have the gravitas to righteously announce ""I've had it with these mother####ing snakes on this mother####ing plane!" So he wins
My favorite scene.)
