I should wait here for a bit. I rather like this place

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Richard Morant has died. I saw him in none of the roles mentioned in this obituary; I knew him as Bunter to Edward Petherbridge's Wimsey. He was younger than I'd thought from the books, but the rapport was there. I never had any difficulty picturing him as a photography geek. He was a year older than my mother and I object to this.

One of the bloggers over at TCM's Movie Morlocks has just thrown her hat into the ring for favorite mad scientist: Robert Cornthwaite's Dr. Arthur Carrington from The Thing from Another World (1951). It's weirdly heartening to see that I'm not the only person who enthuses (I wrote "blithers," but that's unfair to the blogger) about random character actors and their memorable roles, but now I have to wonder who I'd choose. After hours of dealing with fudge, fruitcakes, a plum pudding which has just finished boiling, and the molten orange apricot-glazed sponge cake I turned last night's failed batch of fudge into filling for, I think I am tending toward boring on account of brain-dead—I thought instantly of Ernest Thesiger, Dr. Septimus Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein (1935). This is probably like being asked for a favorite dessert and saying chocolate. (Which isn't my favorite dessert, actually.) The obvious challenger is C.A. Rotwang, but apparently tonight I feel like waspish corpse-stitching over tragic proto-robotics. The Man in the White Suit (1951) is one of the best pieces of science fiction onscreen in its decade, but I'm not exclusively enamored of Sidney Stratton, I just love watching the chaos he innocently creates. Fujimoto from Ponyo (2008) is more of a magician, magnificent sea-worshipping bundle of nerves though he is. Hans Conried's Dr. Terwilliker is a mad music teacher. Bishop—Lance Henriksen, Aliens (1986)—isn't actually mad.

Und so weiter. I could go on like this for some time. (Craziest mad scientist I've seen onscreen: Dr. Emilio Lizardo, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). The man is introduced clipping electrodes to his tongue. He normalizes slightly once he starts with his plans for interdimensional invasion. Ladies and gentlemen, John Lithgow.) But at least until I wake up tomorrow and remember which standout of cinematic strangeness I've left off the shortlist, I'm sticking with one of the classics. Who's yours?

Comments

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Herbert West, Re-Animator, as played by Jeffrey Combs in the film of the same name (and Bride of Re-Animator, though mainly because we get insane stuff like Herb doodling with body-parts while his housemate/partner Dr Dan Cain has sex with a woman upstairs--it's like he can't quite figure out why he's so upset, but it keeps on resulting in spiders made out of fingers and eyeballs that scurry around the place until stepped on). Herb remains top of my list of formative Bossy Little Nutters with glasses, the kind of guy you can't leave with a dead body for more than two minutes without him pulling out the reagent and seeing just how good that residual brainstem activity is. (Never quite good enough, but he sure does keep on trying.)

Runner(s)-up: Sexy and unreliable sociopath with a scalpel Herr Baron-Doktor Victor Frankenstein, as played by Peter Cushing in the Hammer movies, and sexy and unreliable swashbuckling virologist Dr David Sandstrom, as played by Peter Outerbridge in the Canadian TV series ReGenesis.

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Herb remains top of my list of formative Bossy Little Nutters with glasses, the kind of guy you can't leave with a dead body for more than two minutes without him pulling out the reagent and seeing just how good that residual brainstem activity is. (Never quite good enough, but he sure does keep on trying.)

I need to see this already. I'm really fond of Jeffrey Combs.

and sexy and unreliable swashbuckling virologist Dr David Sandstrom, as played by Peter Outerbridge in the Canadian TV series ReGenesis.

I don't think I know anything about him or the show, actually. Tell?

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

ReGenesis was produced in Toronto, and follows the adventures of an international virology lab that operates as a tiny stealth CDC whose core membership is split between Canadians, Americans and Mexicans, with a side-order of at least one Iranian (I think) and a scientist of Vietnamese descent. One character (not Sandstrom) has high-functioning ASD. Their cases start out sort of real-world but then become science fiction really quickly. One of the first continuing plot threads, for example, tracks a an airborne prion plague unwittingly spread by a woman whose newborn was genetically engineered to be a living disease vector, a sort of Typhoid Harry who would probably have to be kept in a bubble for the rest of his life; Sandstrom's daughter, played by a very young Ellen Page, falls for a boy who turns out to have been cloned to contribute material to a cancer-stricken sibling (who died), and is reaching the end of his "natural" life-cycle at maybe 15. Sandstrom also at one point digs up a 1918 influenza victim and cultures pandemic-level flu, ostensibly for a good cause--he's drunk and sleeping with his team-members a lot of the time, a walking embodiment of Ian Malcolm-type chaos theory, definitely the kind of guy who never thinks about if he should do "it", just if he can do it. And then does it.

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the adventures of an international virology lab that operates as a tiny stealth CDC whose core membership is split between Canadians, Americans and Mexicans, with a side-order of at least one Iranian (I think) and a scientist of Vietnamese descent.

That's awesome. I didn't think epidemiologists got to be heroic.

Sandstrom also at one point digs up a 1918 influenza victim and cultures pandemic-level flu, ostensibly for a good cause--

Given a broad-spectrum definition of heroic . . .

(Out of curiosity, does it work?)

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Oh, just about everything Sandstrom does works, though it probably shouldn't. I think there's some fallout, though (just not "new pandemic"-type fallout).