"82"

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

Over the years, the movies have offered up many memorable nerds. Highly intelligent, fascinated by history, science and technology, possessing fearsome powers of concentration, and able to recite astonishing amounts of data (some of it useless), the nerd is really just a hero just waiting for his chance to use his unique skills for maximum good.   Nerds are the inventors, researchers, tinkerers and experimenters. They are — almost by definition — obsessional. And they're often the characters with the best lines. After all, they've got the most developed vocabularies. Sure, they suffer abuse from the cooler types, but when a genuinely inspired idea is required, only a nerd will do.

Who are you calling “Diva?”   In real life, wrangling with a diva is a blood-boiling lesson in the perils of the high-maintenance personality. On film, though, there is an undeniable deliciousness to watching the diva — at a safe distance.   Divas are so cutting, so presumptuous, so brash, brassy, demanding, withering, larger than life, full of themselves, and they chew through scenery with cast iron teeth. And, in what might just be a law of nature, it often takes a diva to play a diva. 

There’s an extra frisson of excitement to be found in what I call “launch pad” movies. This is not necessarily a movie star’s first film, but rather the one that propels him or her to that exalted status. In these special outings, you can feel a certain electricity coming off the screen; it's as if the performer is announcing in a subliminal stage whisper: “I’ve arrived!”  Here are twenty key launch pad vehicles for some of my favorite stars, spanning eighty years of movie history.   

One of my favorite “insider” books about the film business is 1983’s “Adventures In The Screen Trade,”  an often lacerating, highly insightful expose about the inner workings of Hollywood. Its author is veteran screenwriter William Goldman, who scripted numerous high profile movies in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.  

It all started with the hardboiled detective fiction which exploded onto the American popular culture way back in the roaring twenties. This new genre portrayed America’s evolving urban landscape as vividly as the Western genre did the rural frontier.

Film lets us move in with idealized families, the families we would happily join if they were real and would have us. Here, we have gathered our favorites into one warm, harmonious place. We can smell the cookies baking from here…

Submarines perform wonderfully as containers for high-tension drama as the challenges of close quarters, the inability to see what’s going on above, and the vulnerability of sailors working at many fathoms beneath the sea become as compressed as the oxygen they breathe.

Just as the British once showed Americans how to reinvent rock music, so it was with the French and the crime film. Many of the top French directors of the ‘50s and ‘60s turned out memorable, enduring gangster films, and we are all the better for it. Though critics dubbed these young filmmakers as "The French New Wave," they may as well have called them "The French Crime Wave."  A key turning point was when an American director, Jules Dassin, found himself exiled to Europe during the McCarthy era, and directed French actors in the classic "Rififi" (1955). American film noir (ironically, a French term) was on the wane by this point, and France not only picked up the torch, they practically yanked it out of our tired hands. French directors did more than create rehashes of American crime movies. True, they borrowed many techniques and stories that were already familiar from Hollywood films, but they seasoned them with distinctly French flavorings, whether it was Jean Luc Godard's jump-cut editing technique, or the way existentialism seemed to crop up even in plots about car thieves.