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15 Famous Movie Masters

You thought Dolph Lundgren, Meryl Streep, and Darth Sidious couldn’t co-habitate. You were wrong, Padawan.

The Master
Photo: The Weinstein Company

This weekend brings us our first big baity film of awards season, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, a supposed Scientology allegory that truly explores crises erupting from a modern man’s lack of structure and authority. The faithfully well-composed film, which includes big, beefy performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, got us thinking about other masters who’ve passed across our movie screens, be them masters of a trade, a servant, or even a universe. You thought Dolph Lundgren, Meryl Streep, and Darth Sidious couldn’t co-habitate. You were wrong, Padawan.


Masters of the Universe

Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella in Masters of the Universe (1987). Warner Brothers is busy developing a new rendition of Masters of the Universe, one of the few untapped properties of our current superhero surge. But it’s tough to imagine any new blood topping Frank Langella’s booming histrionics as Skeletor, and Dolph Lundgren’s dumb-blonde hunkiness as He-Man, Eternia’s answer to Fabio. Joined by Courteney Cox and a whole host of familiar names from the toy line (hide the kids; it’s…Evil-Lyn), these intergalactic masters spar to see who can rule the galaxy, resulting in what’s kindly been called “the Star Wars of the ’80s.”


Fantasia

Yen Sid in Fantasia (1940). Mickey Mouse is the star of Fantasia’s most famous segment, the Disney rendering of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but his fearsome boss is the sorcerer himself, Yen Sid, whose spells Mickey’s apprentice tries and fails to conjure properly. Conceived to reboot Mickey’s popularity, the Sorcerer segment offered a classic master/servant dichotomy, wherein the faithful right-hand figure crumbles under his ambitions to emulate. Fantasia remains a cornerstone of the Disney animated canon…and we’ll just forget about that Nic Cage flick inspired by this segment.


Black Snake Moan

Samuel L. Jackson in Black Snake Moan (2006). Craig Brewer’s underappreciated follow-up to Hustle & Flow was this gonzo, southern-fried tale of backwoods rehabilitation, wherein Samuel L. Jackson’s farmer-guitarist aims to reform Christina Ricci’s nympho-drifter. How? Oh, you know—by chaining her to a radiator and keeping her hostage until she’s freed of her sinful ways. Steeped in atmosphere and palpable heat, Black Snake Moan flips the script on slave cinema, and in Jackson’s Lazarus, it presents a master whose methods are undercut by his own fear of God.


Drunken Master

Yuen Siu-tien in Drunken Master (1978). Jackie Chan would later revive his Drunken Master brand, returning with such films as 2000’s Legend of Drunken Master, but the eponymous karate-chopper in this first installment is played by Yuen Siu-tien, who embodies the man otherwise known as Beggar So. Hired to train the reluctant and mischievous Freddy Wong (Chan), So eventually gets his would-be pupil to pay attention, and teaches him such time-honored practices as Drunken Boxing. Take that, Mr. Miagi.

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The Lord of the Rings

Elijah Wood in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). “Come master,” Andy Serkis’s Gollum beckons, keeping close his accompanying ringbearer, Elijah Wood’s ever-burdened Frodo Baggins. Though he needs his two-faced sidekick as a guide through the wilds of Middle-earth, Frodo is hardly a master by choice. Ring-drunken Gollum would bow to anyone toting the gleaming, golden “Precious”; Frodo just happens to be its current tortured vessel. But there are benefits to being the master of a slimy, schizophrenic cave-dweller: all the half-chewed fish and rabbits you can eat.


Puppet Master

Jimmie F. Skaggs in Puppet Master (1989). There are screwed up narratives, and then there’s the plot for Puppet Master, a straight-to-video cult sensation that’s spawned a mess of sequels since debuting in 1989. The story concerns a handful of killer animate puppets created by a Geppeto-like toy maker, and a band of psychics who become the playthings’ prey. The chief baddie turns out to be Jimmie F. Skaggs’s Neil Gallagher, another seer who finds a way to cheat death before making enemies of everyone, including those nasty puppets. His master title drops when he perishes in a spray of green blood, but it’s implied that his life-giving powers pass on to someone else.


Spartacus

Peter Ustinov in Spartacus (1960). Before there was Gladiator, and the tough-love slave owner Proximo (Oliver Reed), there was Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Peter Ustinov’s Lentulus Batiatus, a similar character that netted its performer a Supporting Actor Oscar in 1960. Batiatus serves as master of Kirk Douglas’s titular broadsword-wielder, purchasing him to entertain the like of Laurence Olivier’s cruel, tyrannical Crassus. As in Ridley Scott’s newer swords-and-sandals epic, the relationship between boss and servant proves complicated, but amenable to putting on one helluva show.


The Devil Wears Prada

Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). She’s certainly no traditional master, but ask any of Miranda Priestley’s on-screen underlings what they feel like at work, and “slave” is bound to be a popular response. Prone to outlandish demands (“where’s that unpublished Harry Potter manuscript?!”) and cold, knee-weakening speeches (“why’d I hire the smart, fat girl?”), this ultra-steely Devil Wears Prada editrix lets her cutting words crack like whips, and feeds on the fear of the gals who do her bidding. But no worries—it’s all for the assistants’ own good, even if it means, as in the case of stalwart Emily (Emily Blunt), getting hit by a cab with an armful of Hermes scarves.

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin

George Siegmann in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927). There’ve been scads of adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s magnum opus, including a 1987 made-for-TV version with Samuel L. Jackson. In the silent era alone, there are at least nine known film versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, making it the most-adapted story of cinema’s earliest days. In Harry A. Pollard’s 1987 take, George Siegmann took on the role of Simon Legree, the malevolent master who purchases Tom and demoralizes him, along with poor Cassy and Emmeline. Siegmann also starred in Birth of a Nation, and the distinction of his take on Legree is that this film sees the character revisited by Tom’s ghost, who leads the villain to his own demise.


The Master of Ballantrae

Errol Flynn in The Master of Ballantrae (1953). After 20 years and 35 films, Errol Flynn made his last movie with Warner Brothers in The Master of Ballantrae, a Scotland-set adventure based on Robert Louis Stephenson’s novel. Flynn plays Jamie Durie, one of two brothers presented with the threat of battle in 1745. Jamie heads to war while brother Henry stays behind, creating tensions between the siblings regarding who’ll step up as the family’s heir. Jamie heads to sea then returns home a rich man, where the fate of who will become the true master is decided.


Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Russell Crowe in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). In Peter Weir’s sprawling, Oscar-nominated sea epic, which brought you beneath the deck to experience the life of a ship’s crew, Russell Crowe gave viewers one of his finest (and least celebrated) performances, sensitively playing the other Captain Jack, who presides over Britain’s HMS Surprise. Both unhurried and steady, Master and Commander doesn’t skimp on ocean-set drama, but the finest moments are quiet ones shared between Crowe and Paul Bettany, who shines as the ship’s resident doctor. The pair share a believable kinship, not to mention a number of impromptu musical duets.


Les Misérables

Ferdinand Gottschalk in Les Misérables (1935). When Tom Hooper’s take on Les Misérables hits theaters this Christmas, you’ll see Sacha Baron Cohen tackle the role of Thénardier, the scheming head of an inn he runs with his equally shifty wife. But in the film version that was released in 1935, and boasted Fredric March and Charles Laughton in the lead roles, Thénardier was played by Ferdinand Gottschalk, and English theatre vet who had 76 films under his belt by the time he died in 1944. He dug his teeth into a character who’s as comical as he is detestable, making life hell for poor little Cosette (Rochelle Hudson). We’ll tell you where you can raise that glass, Mr. Gottschalk.

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The Apple

Vladek Sheybal in The Apple (1980). If you love Rocky Horror, you’d be cheating yourself to not catch Menahem Golan’s The Apple, a sci-fi, disco-fied musical that riffs on the tale of Adam and Eve. The movie couldn’t grant studio wishes and repeat the success of Saturday Night Fever, but it did a offer a terribly fabulous (or fabulously terrible?) turn from Vladek Sheybal, who, as Mr. Boogalow, leads the cast in a little track called “How to be a Master.” The song refers to Boogalow’s stance as the head of Boogalow International Music, who cheat their way to song-and-dance contest victories. Sinful!


Return of the Jedi

Ian McDiarmid in Return of the Jedi (1983). If it weren’t for all that snazzy headgear, Darth Vader may well have been out-villained by Ian McDiarmid’s hooded Darth Sidious, one ugly mother who makes his Star Wars franchise debut in Return of the Jedi (unless, you know, you’re one of those Force-infused chronology sticklers). The twisted, blackened form of corrupt Senator Palpatine, Sidious is the master of all Sith warriors in George Lucas’s saga, including Vader and the devilish Darth Maul. He may look decrepit, but hey, even Yoda can wield a lightsaber with the zeal of a virile 20-year-old.


Metropolis

Alfred Abel in Metropolis (1927). In Fritz Lang’s enduringly relevant masterpiece Metropolis, which sees an underground society oppressed by the ruling suits above, Alfred Abel plays your archetypal one-percenter, Joh Frederson, who watches over his city from a lofty, priveleged perch. If only Joh knew that his ultimate threat was right in his very household, as his son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), goes on to be the inciter of an inevitable revolution, which, thankfully for viewers, wound up televised.

R. Kurt Osenlund

R. Kurt Osenlund is a creative director and account supervisor at Mark Allen & Co. He is the former editor of Out magazine.

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