Take Three: Rosanna Arquette

Craig here with Take Three. Today three New York stories starring Rosanna Arquette

Takes One & Two: Desperately Seeking Susan and After Hours (both 1985)
Rosanna Arquette was very much at home in Eighties New York. As "Roberta Glass" in Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan and "Marcy Franklin" in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, she had some strange and bewildering night-time adventures. Her well-to-do New Jersey housewife in the former sought and stalked an elusive Madonna; in the latter she was a curious, oddball girl courted by a desperate Griffin Dunne. These two films were early high points in Arquette’s career and established her as one of the ‘80s most likeable character actresses.

Susan was all about chasing the idea of Madonna, but it was Arquette who led us through Seidelman’s madcap Manhattan to do so. You couldn’t blame Roberta for wanting to add mystery to her life, dull as it was as a bored, mousy housewife. The plot hijinx involved a jacket that “used to belong to Jimi Hendrix”, mistaken identity at Battery Park, stolen Nefertiti earrings that got her into trouble with a creepy Will Patton and a bonus romance with a sensitive projectionist (Aiden Quinn) was just a bonus.

More dark and comic nights for Rosanna's soul after the jump...

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Take Three: Tommy Lee Jones

Craig here with Take Three. Today: Tommy Lee Jones who is currently working it out with Streep onscreen in Hope Springs.

Take One: No Country for Old Men (2007)
In the Joel & Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, the ostensible main character is weary Texas lawman Sheriff Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones, though his co-star Josh Brolin is the film's nominal hero. Jones, though, an ‘old man’ on the verge of retirement and tired of the country he’s patrolled for so long, brings a melancholic meaning to the film’s title. Sheriff Bell had more of a life/backstory in McCarthy’s novel (much of which the Coens left out) wherein he discusses his experiences in WWII, which hint at a desire to shy away from violent combat/confrontation, and his life is generally laid out in more detail. What we do learn of Bell in the film is from the slivers of significant information Jones imparts in his refined characterisation.

The actor is typically, movingly good in the key scene where Bell visits his uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin). We see their playfully wry relationship in an exchange of sarcastic pleasantries over Ellis's ‘outlaws cats’ -- a perfectly daft moment that features one of Jones' very best comically weary glances – but the visit is also rife with understated detail that speaks volumes about Bell as a man. Shot in profile staring out a window at the desolate and godless expanse of the Texan desert, and discreetly withholding his true inner thoughts, Bell enigmatically responds to Ellis about why he’s quitting the law.

I always figured when I got older God would sorta come into my life somehow... and he didn't."

Two more takes after the jump

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Take Three: Barbara Steele

Craig here with this week's Take Three: Barbara Steele

Barbara Steele in Federico Fellini's immortal 8 ½

Take One: Black Sunday (1960)
In Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (also known as  La maschera del demonio or The Mask of Satan) Steele plays Princess Asa Vajda, a woman put to death by her brother in Moldavia, 1630 only to be resurrected 200 years later as a vampire-witch. Steele also has a second, key role, as local woman Katia Vajda. Princess Asa’s eager to wreak the long-promised revenge upon her descendants – thus proving Sunday is far from a day of rest for the undead. Black Sunday, highly influential and memorable to future horror like Bloody Pit of Horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sleepy Hollow, features some of Steele’s best work.

That's particularly true in the film's gory opening prologue where she meets her first death. Many horror fans recall with wicked grins this moment that most likely lead to Steele favouring the horror genre throughout much of the ‘60s. (See also 1965’s Nightmare Castle where she also played dual roles and 1966’s The She Beast, where she’s memorably possessed by the titular lady-ogre.) She conveys an immense sense of terror with impeccable assurance. More crucially, she does so with formidable levels of hysteria apt for a future grande dame of horror cinema. Her cries resound in the prologue like guttural shrieks from beyond the grave, but she manages to rattle off a thrilling, yet oddly wordy, pre-death warning to her condemners

My revenge will strike down you and your accursed house!”

[Two more takes, one of them Cronenbergian, after the jump...]

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Take Three: Danny DeVito

Craig (from Dark Eye Socket) here with Take Three. This week: Danny DeVito

Take One: Ruthless People (1987)
DeVito wants Bette Midler dead and gone in Ruthless People. The sooner the better preferably, with a minimum of fuss and personal expense. Sam "spandex mini-skirt king" Stone's wife Barbara (Midler) is kidnapped by the nicest people to ever venture to the criminal side, Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater. When, over the phone, Reinhold relays his strict rules regarding heiress Barbara ransom, DeVito’s face brightens by the minute at the idea that she will be killed if he disobeys their orders or any police intervention is suspected. Cue a fleet of cop cars and every news channel in LA reporting on the story. Cut to: Sam popping a champagne cork with filthy glee.

Ruthless People is a daft rejig of crime film plot staples, a film noir hijacked by a clown. DeVito gives it just the right amount of mugging and brimful-to-overflowing silliness it requires. He revels in the heightened ridiculousness of the plot in his typically impish fashion. There’s something consistently written across his face that suggests he’s so in on the joke and wants us to be just as tied up in the murderous slapstick as he and the rest of the cast are. DeVito mined this goofy performance style to perfection during the 1980s in films like Twins, Throw Momma from the Train and Wise Guys, but its best expressed right here. DeVito is ever the generously complicit comedian in Ruthless People and deserved that Golden Globe nomination for his comic efforts. (Inexplicably, Paul ‘Crocodile Dundee’ Hogan won that year) 

Take Two: The War of the Roses (1989)
When the DeVito-directed The War of the Roses was first announced there was talk, rumors really, that it would be the next installment of the Romancing the Stone series. It wasn’t, but it featured the same core trio: Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner romantically entwined and Danny DeVito on the sidelines. MORE...

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Take Three: Eva Mendes

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: Eva Mendes

Take One: Live! (2007)
Building on her dramatic work in We Own the Night the same year, Mendes took on another (semi) serious role, one deviously tinged with delicious black comedy, as TV executive Katy in Bill Guttentag’s Reality TV mock-doc Live! Perfectly styled in sharp attire and a coffee ‘to-go’ in hand, Mendes' Katy is ambitious, ruthless and most likely hollow on the inside. She has grand ideas. One of them kick-starts Live!’s plot: six members of the public will play Russian roulette live on air; the sole survivor is the winner. Her flippant excuse, while delicately biting into a strawberry:

Hey, I didn’t invent the game, I’m just making it hip again.”

Katy’s the kind of person who thinks that if all of life – including death – isn’t caught on camera it’s not worth living. And she doesn’t want ratings lower than her morals - to her it’s not lives at stakes but viewing figures. She’s the kind of corporate cannibal who caresses a hefty golf club whilst listening to her staff’s TV pitches. But also, quite ironically, has a poster for La Dolce Vita behind her office desk. She’s a vile creature of business, hungry enough to have Sigourney Weaver’s Working Girl Katherine Parker in Working Girl for breakfast and Faye Dunaway’s Diana Christensen in Network for lunch. (Apparently Network is personal favourite film of Mendes’, one which served as her inspiration for this part.) Mendes’ Katy is essentially the dark centre of this goading morality exercise. It’s a performance so exactingly played, so attuned to the film’s intentions and compulsively watchable, that Mendes’ dramatic capability can’t be called into doubt. Does Katy get her way? Or does she get her comeuppance? Tune in to find out...

Two more takes after the jump...

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