Word: villainizing
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...Fantastic Island (1935), a book Ian Fleming obviously ransacked when he wrote Dr. No, the villain is a mad Russian pianist who owns an isolated Galapagos island, feeds his guests to a horde of clacking crabs and explains this little character problem in a marvelously sappy 19th century trope. "I am impelled to unspeakable desires," he sighs contentedly, "when my fingers wander over the keys...
...Misfire. The camera cannot confront a grown Caucasian without making him a rapacious stock villain, nor can it present the savage as anything but an improbably heroic amalgam of Friday, Chingachgook and St. Francis. A pity. The cast are an attractive lot and, as some lyrically nude bathing scenes demonstrate, Miss Agutter possesses one of the lithest, blithest young bodies on public view. Were the eye the only judge, Walkabout might be considered a treat. But no, Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing...
...spawned most of the radical movement, and fueled it for six years. Harvard has always been a strong anti-war campus. But the war got lost for a long time this year, and most of us were no longer sure that it could affect us, or that the villain we were fighting was real any longer. While patient bombardiers were dropping tons of napalm, defoliants, white phosphorous and fragmentation bombs on Indochina, Nixon told us that it was almost over, and that he was winding it down. Nobody trusts Richard Nixon-but over the summer, like hypnopaedia, the message began...
...Villain is Richard Burton, playing a closet-queen gang leader named Vic Dakin. Alternately brutal and simpering, Dakin is the sort of chap who, when revealed as a multiple killer, is described by his neighbors as "a quiet, unassuming man" and whose unbelieving mother invariably laments: "But he always kept his room so clean." Vic, in fact, takes good care of his mum, conveying her to the Brighton sun, faithfully carrying in the afternoon tea. Between such assignments, he coshes opponents and irritably castrates a chap or two. In films like this, of course, there is no such thing...
Shot in color that may have been invented by Madame Tussaud and edited with a cleaver, The Villain is acceptable only as a glimpse of procedural tradition, the English bloodhound pursuing his accursed foe. Villain Burton's voice remains one of the most distinctive and controlled in the world. But he is no longer in charge of his face. The little piggy eyes glisten and swivel in a seamed and immobile background. Dissipation, alas, now seems less a simulacrum than a portrait...