As soon as I learned that Scott "Mr. Unwatchables" Von Doviak had gone out of his way to avoid seeing the writer-director Jody Hill's new comedy Observe and Report, I knew that I would move hell and high water of necessary to get an early gawk at it. I can't chalk this up entirely to morbid curiosity. I enjoyed Hill's first film, The Foot Fist Way, a raggedly low-budget indie comedy starring Danny McBride as a malfunctioning martial arts instructor, and I loved Eastbound & Down, a six-episode HBO series that Hill co-created with Ben Best and McBride, who played a broken-down wreck of a burnt out professional baseball player. Observe and Report stars Seth Rogen as Ronnie Barnhardt, a shopping mall rent-a-cop who could be Paul Blart's evil twin. An overgrown pudgy ball of unfocused adolescent rage, Ronnie sees his chance for redemption in the quest to apprehend a flasher who's been bothering people in the parking lot; the movie, which tends to wear its conceptual ideas on its sleeve, makes it clear that the flasher is Ronnie's doppelganger, but instead of harassing people with his unclothed swinging dick, Ronnie has mace and a baton and is trying to find a way against the mall's prohibition against loaded firearms. This is Hill's entry into big-budget, major studio feature filmmaking, and he's clearly set on maintaining his signature edge: a satirical approach towards blustery, lower-class macho bullies and the corrupted cultural images of masculine heroism from which they take their cues, that flirts dangerously with condescension. Bringing that sort of thing off in the context of a big commercial comedy that has to make it past the preview audience test groups would be some trick, especially since Hill's direction tends to be pretty rudimentary beyond his way with actors and his ability to set up a joke. Observe and Report also suggests that it might be some trick pulling it off without Danny McBride in the lead.

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We love the short subjects here at the Screengrab, especially once we've hit the wall about four or five days into SXSW. While it may take four hours or more to get through a double feature at the Paramount, we can burn through a couple of shorts in less than half an hour, which really frees up the drinking time. And we're especially grateful if they're conceived and executed as well as Thompson and A. Effect.

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Imagine all the worst case scenarios you might associate with the term "indie film," and you'll find most of them on display in David Lee Miller's intolerable feature My Suicide. Overbearing, in-your-face mixed media visuals? Check. Facile approach to "edgy" subject matter? Check. Record label-approved hipster band soundtrack slathered over every scene? Check. Photogenic young cast sure to meet the approval of The Hills demographic? Check. Any sort of heart or insight or recognizable human behavior? Nowhere to be found.

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Today is Twelfth Day, the traditional end to the Christmas season for those of us who need a few days for the hangover to die down before we can start thinking about taking down the lights and chucking the tree out the window. So it's not too late to start thinking about taping some New Year's resolutions to the door of the fridge. Not everyone agrees about how much point there is to making New Year's resolutions; the idea behind them is to make some changes that will make your life better, and the world does not lack for evidence that people don't change. But here at the Screengrab, we think about these thing the same way we think about everything else: as filtered through movies, which is why we don't work for a golfing blog. And in the movies, there is no shortage of evidence that people can change resolve to change their lives. For the better? Eh, sometimes it depends on whether you're living the life or just sitting in the dark, watching it.



THE MOVIE: Taxi Driver (1976)

THE RESOLVER: Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro)

THE RESOLUTION: In his own words: "I gotta get in shape. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on there will be fifty push-ups each morning, fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight." He also decides to try a new hairstyle.

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The Belgian artist Guy Peellaert, who died last week at 74, was a painter, comic strip artist, theatrical decorator, and photographer whose best-known work mixed a lurid Pop Art style with a mordant wit and the eye of a critical-minded pop culture addict. The 1972 book Rock Dreams, Peelaert's 1974 collaboration with the British critic and journalist Nik Cohn, cemented his legend in pop music circles for his ceramic-looking images: Phil Spector, fitted with headphones and sprawled on his bed as if cut off from the world in an isolation tank; Johnny Cash parting the prison-farm barbed wire with his fingers to stare out mulishly at the society that thought it had cast him aside forever; Ray Charles, supremely cool behind the wheel of a convertible with one arm around a smiling redhead; Mama Cass and Michelle Phillips, nude, sitting cross-legged in what seemed like a post-apocalyptic landscape, though it was probably just the Mohave. Peellaert also designed album covers, the most famous of which is probably his painting of David Bowie as a half-canine sideshow exhibit for Diamond Dogs. Peellaert guaranteed that the first pressings of the album would become instant collectors' items by originally making the critter's genitals plainly visible; in later editions, the Bowie-dog would be gelded by airbrush.

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“Saying he feels the U.S. film market has become ‘barren,’ the writer of classics Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is packing his bags for Mumbai to write and direct the Bollywood action movie Extreme City,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Paul Schrader is working on the script for this “cross-cultural tale that will center on an American man who travels to India to help resolve a kidnapping case for his father-in-law, only to get caught up in a gangster plot. There likely will be some musical numbers, and dialogue will be spoken in English and Hindi.” Call me crazy, but I’m intrigued.

Graphic novelist Joann Sfar will direct Serge Gainsbourg (vie heroique) for Universal – the first French-language picture in the studio’s history.

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Recently, when we were preparing our list of the greatest leading men of all time, we had occasion to consider the latter days of Robert DeNiro.  The closer you get to the present day, the uglier his career gets, and the more it appears he's just in it these days for the paychecks that will get him into the better restaurants.   When I sat down for a viewing of his latest, What Just Happened, I wasn't expecting much, especially since his comic track record hasn't been stellar since Midnight Run.  The fact that the film's author, Art Linson, is a friend of DeNiro's was also unpromising, since such nepotistic endeavors flatter the friendship over the art, and what's more, it's an inside-Hollywood movie, which has produced its share of great films, but more than its share of stinkers.

I won't say that it's a triumph for DeNiro, or even a return to form, but most of the movie's failings -- of which there aren't enough for me to call it bad -- are those of Barry Levinson's uninspired direction and a somewhat aimless and formless script.  DeNiro doesn't turn in the kind of legendary performance he was once known for, but that's only because the script doesn't let him.  In fact, his role as frazzled middle-aged movie producer Ben -- a stand-in for Linson -- is one of his finest in years:  he never explodes only because he's too ineffectual and harried to aspire to an explosion.  It's a tight, focused, and highly competent performance as a man nearing the end of his rope and no idea of what to do when he gets there, but because he's in such an absurd profession, and surrounded by such grandly dysfunctional people, that circumstance is understood -- by him and by us -- to be comic instead of tragic.  It's a performance that won't remind anyone of Travis Bickle or Rupert Pupkin, but it should definitely remind them that DeNiro still has a few surprises left in him. 

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Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time.  One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered.  He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last).  But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho.  The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels:  with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s.  Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so.  Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily.  He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way.  Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score:  the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

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Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month.

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If we all hit puberty overnight on our 21st birthdays, American life would be a helluva lot less complicated. But, as the recent Miley Cyrus “back-gate” scandal revealed, teenage sexuality is a topic that America doesn’t want to think about, even as it just can't seem to stop thinking about it.

On the one hand, most of us had (or at least thought about) sex in high school...on the other hand, once we’re adults, we’re all supposed to conveniently forget our memories and fantasies of adolescent lust.  On the one hand, sex education is viewed as promoting underage promiscuity...but on the other hand, abstinence-only education tends to lead to a lot of unwanted pregnancy, since teenagers somehow figure out how to have sex even without classroom lectures about condoms. On the one hand, innocent teachers, day care workers, 19-year-olds with 17-year-old girlfriends and that 6-year-old boy who smacked a female classmate on the butt have all been branded for life as sexual offenders based on false or flimsy charges in hysterical witch hunts to “protect the children” at all costs...on the other hand, research indicates 20-25% of girls and 5-15% of boys in the U.S. experience some form of abuse as children, the Catholic Church ignored its institutional abuse scandals and the international sex trade in young flesh is thriving.

Clearly, we’re a little conflicted about the whole sex thing. Sure, we’re all shocked and disgusted by those creeps on To Catch A Predator...but somebody out there is watching Gossip Girl, sneaking peeks at Barely Legal magazine, lusting after Zac Efron and buying sexy cheerleader outfits from the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue...and it’s not all just teens and predators.  In fact, if we here at the Screengrab didn’t know better, we’d almost think Americans fetishize taboos instead of just being honest about them, leading to some pretty screwy behavior...AND the following list of films that reside in that dangerous grey area between sexual initiation and exploitation.

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Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has long been seen as a controversial masterpiece, a searing time capsule of New York City scraping bottom, and a high point in the fashion history of Mohawk haircuts. Now it turns out that on top of all those things, it's also a stealth fighter in the battle to unleash the forces of free market capitalism. This comes from Columbia University economist and Nobel laureate Robert Mundell, who has revealed to the world a theory that might be called wildly speculative and more than a little tasteless--in a word, Screengrabian. It has to do with the infamous effects of the film on John Hinckley, who developed an obsession with Jodie Foster based on her performance in the movie and watched it over and over, immersing himself in the sight of Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle preparing to assassinate a presidential candidate before switching gears and turning his guns on the Foster character's exploiters. Eventually, in the spring of 1981, Hinckley himself shot Ronald Reagan, then less than two months into his presidency.

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We’ve all had a good time picking on Al Pacino for his shameless stroll through the critically reviled 88 Minutes, but the L.A. Times isn’t going to let his partner-in-crime Robert De Niro off the hook. Both Godfathers stand accused of making mockeries of their careers in pursuit of fat paychecks. (Disclaimer: I’m prepared to do the same. Somebody make me an offer.)

“The two icons of '70s New Hollywood, heroes to a generation of young actors and filmmakers, have become parodies of themselves,” writes Patrick Goldstein, “making payday movies and turning in performances that are hollow echoes of the electrically charged work they did in such films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.” As Goldstein notes, this isn’t exactly news to capo di tutti capi Francis Ford Coppola, who blew the whistle on his former golden boys in a GQ interview last year.

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Normally I wouldn’t consider this the most newsworthy item in the world, but for some reason I just couldn’t resist that headline. Anyway, according to the Hollywood Reporter, “Producers Steven Siebert and Christian Taylor have optioned the best-selling novel Hick by first-time author Andrea Portes.” It’s a coming-of-age story that “was recently named among the best adult books for high school students by the School Library Journal.” The most curious part of this story is the note that the producers “hope to mold the project with a lead character in the vein of Addie Loggins of Paper Moon and Iris Steensma in Taxi Driver. " Whoa, whoa, time out here. That’s a mold? Addie Loggins, as we recall, was a scrappy little Depression-era con gal. Iris Steensma was a Times Square hooker who blew Harvey Keitel. Might want to narrow down that casting call, folks.

While we’re here, let’s take a look at some other recent script sales of note:

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To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, New York magazine has set its writers to assemble a "canon" of cultural works (books, music, TV, movies) from the last forty years that "capture something emblematic about New York." This, as David Edelstein's list of movies makes clear, isn't necessarily about selecting the best, nor is it limited to movies made by New Yorkers in New York: El Topo is here, for its role in creating that urban institution, the midnight movie. (By a felicitous quirk of timing, the first title on the list is Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston, for its indelible closing image of the Statue of the Liberty after a wild weekend.) Also cited: Mean Streets, The Godfather, Part II, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Death Wish, The French Connection, Shaft, Deep Throat, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Tootsie, Wild Style, My Dinner with Andre, Stranger Than Paradise, and Wall Street.

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In all of our occasional looks back at great character actors of the past, we've never written about anyone as universally beloved as Peter Boyle.  The husky Irish-American with the wry smile worked, during his forty-year career, in everything from quiet, thoughtful little independent films to blockbuster sitcoms, but despite a number of controversial positions in his private life and the friendship of some of the entertainment industry's most despised liberals (he was a close friend to both John Lennon and Jane Fonda), the American public always took him to heart, and it's impossible to find anyone he worked with that doesn't remember him fondly after his death in 2006.  

Originally intending to enter the priesthood, Boyle was bitten by the acting bug early on (his father hosted a children's show in his native Pennsylvania) and after a few minor roles on film and television, hit it big with his lead performance in 1970's Joe.  Although he did a tremendous job as a racist factory worker and the breakthrough role opened doors for him, Boyle was deeply shaken by the role:  attending his first screening of the film, he was disturbed to hear people cheering the character's reactionary lines, and was extremely selective about choosing his parts from then on.  In fact, it's ironic that some of Boyle's most memorable roles have been those of violent, brutal men; the actor himself was, by all accounts, an extremely gentle man, a liberal, and a lifelong pacifist who opposed the war in Vietnam, championed civil rights, and worried constantly about the impact of his performances as brutes, thugs and killers.  But his career was also peppered with some extremely adept comic performances, and his greatest success came as a cast member of the highly successful situation comedy Everybody Loves Raymond.  He also did some top-flight work in other television dramas, including a swell turn as Fatso Judson in the TV movie adaptation of From Here to Eternity and a lead role in the short-lived but extremely well-made cop show Joe Bash.  But it was on the big screen that he had the greatest impact; his odd features and quirky approach ensured that he'd never be a leading man, but he absolutely barnstormed every character role he was given.  Although we'll list our favorites below, everyone remembers Boyle fondly from a different performance, and he's sure to go down in history as not just one of the best, but one of the best-loved, character actors in Hollywood.

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Of all the great films I’ve written Movie Moment pieces about thusfar, Taxi Driver is almost certainly the most celebrated. In fact, it’s been a canonical classic for so long that it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to see it fresh, to say nothing of trying to describe what exactly makes it great to those who haven’t seen it. As with all the great masterpieces of cinema, there’s a temptation to shrug and say that it exists on its own terms, but that would be selling the film, and director Martin Scorsese, short. Taxi Driver is made from many of the same components as a number of films from the period, but what distinguishes it from more routine violent dramas of its time is that it’s primarily a character study. Paul Schrader's screenplay and Scorsese’s direction follows Travis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) almost every step of the way so that we feel like we’ve walked in his shoes.

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<Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare.  And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch?  Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases.  The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes.  Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually completed before that fatal day in Dallas; but its release was unluckily ill-timed to just after November 22nd, 1963.  It was almost immediately pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era.  It was a generous decision:   the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate.  The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

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Back in 1970, Pauline Kael, reviewing Robert Altman's M*A*S*H, praised it for its "blessed profanity" and wrote, "I salute M*A*S*H for its contribution to the art of talking dirty." (Altman's father reportedly put it another way, warning members of the family to stay away from the theaters because "Bob made a dirty movie!") There's been a lot of cusswords under the bridge since then, so much that when a playwright-turned-moviemaker such as Martin McDonagh gives his actors some floridly profane lines to speak, it isn't even worth a concerned piece in the Arts & Lesiure section from the kind of writer who'd pitch a fit if language half as dirty turned up on one of his kid's rap CDs. So when somebody has managed to distinguish himself by cussing in a movie in a way that stays with you, a salute is in order. Andrew Dice Clay, watch and learn.

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)


It may not seem like such a big deal now, but seen in context, at the end of a big old-style Hollywood movie, spoken by Clark Gable in response to a tearful lover's plea, it's easy to imagine what a shocker it must have been at the time. God knows that, sixty years later, my own grandmother was just starting to recover from the shock. You can just see the fabric of civilization starting to come apart.

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We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata.  Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling.  So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs.  Why taxicabs?  Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?.  His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi.  Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash.  Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you?  There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured.  From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies.  For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy:  A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.  

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When we think of New Year's Eve, we think of short-lived resolutions, ill-advised groping and hangovers that would cripple King Kong. But we also think of the lighted, bejeweled ball dropping in Times Square as an increasingly withered Dick Clark counts down the seconds until the new year's arrival. So on this final day of 2007, we can think of no better way to kick off a new recurring feature dedicated to notable locations and their portrayal on film than with Times Square. Here are a few of our favorite movie moments set - though not necessarily shot - in that ever-evolving hub of humanity.

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The Amateurs opens in limited release this Friday. We have absolutely no intention whatsoever of seeing it, because there is the possibility, however remote, that it will contain a nude scene featuring Joe Pantoliano. But it does give us a chance to talk about pornography. Not actual pornography, mind you — as open-minded as this site is, we're pretty sure the bosses aren't going to let us post stills of our favorite scenes from the oeuvre of the Dark Brothers. No, what we're talking about here is movies about pornography. There's been smut on film since there was film, but while Hollywood has always been officially disdainful of its little brother in the Valley, it's also been a bit fascinated as well. Recently, European filmmakers have actually included real sex in their movies and made it work as part of a respectable narrative, but in the U.S., the NC-17 rating is still the kiss of death and violence will likely always be more palatable to the censors than sex. But even in those arty Euro-flicks, the sex is in service of the story and not the other way around; will a genuine porn movie ever be made with a great script, top-notch direction and production, and big Hollywood stars? Probably not. But there will still be movies about pornography; here are five of the best.

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Friday's AP report that Arthur H. Bremer, George Wallace's would-be assassin, was being released after serving 35 years out of his 53-year sentence for good behavior brings out the best in Glenn Kenny, who responds with a curious point you could probably make in the blogosphere without getting angry, ill-informed letters: Bremer's the biggest pop culture influence you never thought about. "Paul Schrader's revelations about the creation of the screenplay of Taxi Driver show us that the screenplay and, by extension, the film, would never have existed had not Schrader melded his own personal torment with the diaries of Bremer," Kenny notes, going on to draw out how that, in turn, might have inspired John Hinckley's far more warped, Jodie Foster-worshipping attempt on Reagan — and how Bremer is probably unaware of how his attempt (generally remembered after successful assassinations on more beloved types like Robert Kennedy and MLK) has warped the culture. I'd go Kenny one better — without Bremer and Hinckley, we lose the assassin-as-scorned-fan template. If you haven't seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford yet, now might be a good time. — Vadim Rizov

There was a bit of brouhaha recently over Ryan Gosling's getting fired from Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones for having packed on too much weight. The story has since been denied, so we don't know whom to believe in that dispute. It may have been apocryphal, but the incident did get us thinking about some of the more notable bodily transformations we've seen on film. And we're talking real transformations here. (Sorry, Nicole Kidman's fake nose in The Hours and John Hurt's fake face in Elephant Man and Eddie Murphy's whole body in like every other movie.) We're talking De Niro eating his way through Italy to plump up for Raging Bull. We're talking Christian Bale starving himself silly for The Machinist. We're talking about actors so devoted to their craft (and, in at least one case, so utterly stupid) as to commit their bodies to real, physical changes for a part. Here are the Top 12 Real Bodily Transformations on Film.



ROBERT DENIRO in RAGING BULL (1980)

When Robert DeNiro won an Academy Award for Best Actor in his role as tortured prizefighter Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's brilliant Raging Bull, he found that after the ceremony, nobody wanted to talk about it. Everybody was far more interested in discussing his role as would-be political assassin Travis Bickle in 1976's Taxi Driver – a role which allegedly inspired the actual assassination attempt of then-President Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley only days before. Now that things have lightened up a bit, and DeNiro isn't distracting everybody by making good movies anymore, his role as LaMotta has become the textbook case for total character immersion. To play the young, lean LaMotta, DeNiro worked his then-slender physique into even better condition, going through the actual workout regimen of a prizefighter (he even entered, and won, a handful of amateur bouts) and honing his body into a whipcord-thin, muscle-rippled wonder. Then, to play the older, decaying LaMotta, he put back all the weight and more, gaining a stunning sixty pounds and utterly transforming himself into a doughy blob of a man whose muscle had all collapsed into fat. There were many more sacrifices, mental and physical, made for Raging Bull: DeNiro really did bash his head into that concrete wall, and Joe Pesci broke a rib during an unsupervised fistfight. But it's the lightning-fast loss and gain of weight that's still remembered today, and which rang out like a challenge to other actors – one that would soon be answered.

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It’s easy to pick legendary character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age to profile in this feature; much harder is selecting actors who died too young and who, by all rights, should still be with us, making movies. Joe Spinell is one of those. Born Joseph Spagnuolo in 1936, the burly Manhattanite changed his name to make things easy on the casting directors who called him all too infrequently, making him reliant on low-paying night jobs like driving a taxi or working the counter at a seedy liquor store. There was nothing calculated or contrived about his Spinell’s frequent portrayals of tough-guy New Yorkers; he grew up hard and worked for a decade with the Theater of the Forgotten, a troupe that performed exclusively for prison inmates. Spinell’s first big break came in 1972, when he was cast (based almost exclusively on his thuggish looks and his inimitable accent) in a very minor role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Coppola liked him so much that he specifically expanded the role of Willie Cicci to give Spinell more screen time in the sequel.

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