the column / countdown

The Big Screen Countdown

This is the instalment that started the column, ended several friendships at the store, and produced the correspondence Pat kept taped inside his locker for the rest of his tenure. It is reproduced here in the order it ran.

A note before we begin. Pat declined, throughout, to name any of his selections. He maintained that naming them was “the critic's crutch” and that a character properly described requires no title. Readers found this maddening. He found their finding it maddening to be evidence that he was correct.

Friday

Number one. There was never any doubt.

The man with the boat.

Not the captain. The captain is a different picture and a lesser one. I mean the man who owns the boat, who is not qualified to own it, who bought it in the first act for reasons the film never fully explains and who spends the remaining ninety minutes discovering that the boat was the least of his problems. He is on screen for perhaps eleven minutes total. He has four lines. One of them is “that's not how it works.”

I have watched that scene, on my own, more times than I have watched anything else in my life. The way he says it. He is not angry. He is not even disappointed. He is simply informing a room full of people who will not listen that this is not how any of it works, and then he goes back out to the boat.

Number one. Not open for discussion.

Sincerely,
Pat Freestone

Thursday

Number two. The second brother.

Every picture with three brothers in it has a second brother, and the second brother is always the best-written character in the film and always the least discussed. He is the one who knows. He knows in the first scene, he keeps knowing all the way through, and at no point is he permitted to say so, because the story requires that nobody know until the end.

Watch him in the background of the dinner. He is doing more acting with a bread roll than the lead is doing with a monologue.

I have made this argument to my colleague at the store on four separate occasions and she has begun leaving the room.

Regards,
Pat Freestone

Wednesday

Number three. The one in the coat.

You know the one. Every genre has one. He arrives at the twenty-minute mark, he is wearing a coat that is wrong for the weather, and he explains the plot to the protagonist in a single scene at a counter. Then he leaves and is never referred to again.

The entire film depends on him. Without him nobody knows anything and the picture is forty minutes long. And yet: no name in the credits worth the ink, no interviews, no retrospectives. He walks in, does the load-bearing work of the entire production, and walks out into weather he is not dressed for.

If that is not a great character then I do not know what one is, and I am prepared to say so in print, which I am doing.

Intrigued by my own point,
Pat Freestone

Tuesday

Number four. The woman who runs the desk.

Not the receptionist as a gag. I mean the one who actually runs the building, who has run it for thirty years, who is introduced as an obstacle and then quietly becomes the only competent person on screen. She has a system. Nobody asks about the system. The system is why anything in that building has ever worked.

I feel I understand this character better than most, for reasons I will not be going into here.

Fondly,
Pat Freestone

Monday

Welcome to the premiere of Big Screen's Top Five All-Time Greatest Characters in Motion Picture History.

Number five. The friend who is only in the first half.

He is funny, he is loyal, he gets the good line about the car, and then somewhere around the midpoint the story remembers it is about somebody else and he is simply not in it any more. No exit. No farewell scene. The picture continues without him and does not notice, and if you were not paying attention you would not notice either.

I notice. I always notice. I have made a small mark in my notebook every time it has happened, and the notebook is now, frankly, alarming.

Check in tomorrow for number four.

Yours in cinema,
Pat Freestone

The following Monday

On behalf of everyone here I hope you have enjoyed this special internet companion to Big Screen's Top Five All-Time Greatest Characters in Motion Picture History.

As curator I have spent an agonising week defending choices that required no defence, and I am pleased to report that the response has been overwhelming. Letters have arrived. Several of them are quite long. One correspondent describes the list as “self-indulgent, grossly inappropriate” and states that it “flew in the face of all established film criticism,” which I take as confirmation that the established criticism had it coming and that somebody has finally said so.

Next week: something everyone can relate to.

Vindicated,
Pat Freestone

Editors' note