071200 San

July 12, 2000
San Francisco Chronicle
"Evil has an Accent - British Villains Stalk American Action Films"
by Mick LaSalle

The English villain is back.

Perhaps it was inevitable. With the end of the Cold War nine years ago, Hollywood had to give up its Russian villains. The early '90s saw a brief flirtation with Arab villains, followed by an even briefer flirtation with Russian mafia villains. But how could Hollywood make villains out of foreign mobsters after making heroes of America's own?

Hollywood had no choice but to return to the tried and true. So this summer we get the English bad guy: Jason Isaacs in ``The Patriot,'' Christopher Eccleston in ``Gone in 60 Seconds'' and Dougray Scott in ``M:I-2.''

We all know the type. The English villain is impeccably dressed and unfailingly polite. He never gets his hands dirty. He is usually surrounded by thugs. Yet with a flick of his eye, he will tell the thugs to get lost, so he can have a pleasant chat with the hero, who fascinates him. These conversations usually take place by the piranha tank. Or to the sound of German shepherds baying in the distance. Every so often the villain will be petting a cat. Or a miniature poodle.

``If you're not an American,'' says Isaacs, who commits unspeakable war crimes as an evil redcoat in ``The Patriot,'' ``then the best parts in an American film are the bad guy.''

In ``Gone in 60 Seconds,'' Eccleston certainly had fun as an evil fence of stolen cars. Don't ask how a young Englishman could become the head of a huge gang in America. Could be he started off American and became English only when he turned bad.

The summer kicked off with Dougray Scott as Tom Cruise's nemesis in ``M:I-2,'' and later this week we'll get Ian McKellen as the villain in ``X-Men.'' Actually, McKellen plays a German, but that's also typical. Evil Germans are played by Englishmen: McKellen did it earlier in ``Apt Pupil.'' Ralph Fiennes did it in ``Schindler's List.'' Alan Rickman and Jeremy Irons did it in ``Die Hard'' 1 and 3, respectively.

The English are also tapped to play evil Americans. Apparently no American was quite psycho enough to star in ``American Psycho,'' so Christian Bale was recruited. He also played the most repellent character in ``Shaft.'' Earlier this year, there was ``Up in the Villa,'' with Kristin Scott Thomas surrounded by a lot of stuffed shirts -- and Sean Penn, as the American good guy. And don't forget ``The Beach'': Leonardo DiCaprio was a nice American with a nice French girlfriend (Virginie Ledoyen), and Tilda Swinton played the power-mad village chief.

Very rarely does it go the other way. ``The Avengers'' was the rare case of an action movie with an English hero (Fiennes) and a Scottish villain (Sean Connery), and it died the death.

The English villain is hardly a new trend. In 1997, Patrick Stewart played an English kidnapper named Ralph (pronounced ``Rafe'') in ``Masterminds.'' At the time he said it was his idea to play the villain as an Englishman because he couldmake him exactly the kind of Brit that Americans hate. One might also note that in 1998, the good guys in the British historical film ``Elizabeth'' were played by Australians: Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush. English actors played the villains.

English villains go all the way back to the early talkies. In ``The Sign of the Cross'' (1932), British actor Charles Laughton played Nero. His wife, a sympathetic character, was played by Claudette Colbert, and the hero was played by an American, Fredric March.

This has remained the case with biblical epics ever since. Take ``King of Kings'' (1961), Nicholas Ray's epic about the life of Jesus. Pontius Pilate (Hurd Hatfield) and Herod (Frank Thring) had English accents. The Virgin Mary (Siobhan McKenna) was Irish, while all-American good guys, Jesus and John the Baptist, were played by Jeffrey Hunter and he-man Robert Ryan, respectively.

Clearly, something in the American character dislikes intelligent, elegant people who have mastered rhetorical structure. Americans also don't like people who sound as if they come from money and privilege. It doesn't matter whether they have money -- they're just not al lowed to sound like it.

English villains are never cockneys. Likewise they're almost never Irish or Scottish. There's a knee-jerk class hostility at work here and also an antagonism toward intellectuals. The villains talk in a way that suggests people who have spent a lot of time alone, reading dangerous books.

In a way, movies with English villains can be seen as cautionary tales for America's children. They show what can happen when people spend too much time reading and not enough time playing football.