10 Smartest Psychos in Movie History

OK, most of us like lists. They’re easy to compile, easy to read, not particularly challenging to the imagination and fun to debate.

Last week I was talked into thinking about movie psychopaths when my friend Dan Fratini brought up a couple of movie psychos, namely Michael Madsen’s Mr. Blonde in “Reservoir Dogs” and Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men.”

I gave the subject some thought and rejected both as a little too obvious and mindless. I prefer some thoughtfulness to my psychos, which is how I came up with the following list of The 10 Smartest Psychopaths in Movie History.

10. Raymond Lemorne (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu): “Spoorloos” (1988), dir. by George Sluizer. When a guy loses his lover at a European rest area, he spends three years searching for her. Then he begins to receive letters from a creepy, if amiably so, guy who promises to reveal the missing woman’s fate. That creep, well played by the French actor Donnadieu, follows through on his promise – the result being an ending that is nothing less than shattering. And at least in this original version, he’s still out there.

9. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins): “Psycho” (1960), dir. by Alfred Hitchcock. By now we all know Norman, the mama’s boy who just can’t help himself when mom demands that he act – even if by act she means cut people up with a butcher knife. Norman is no dummy, though. He’ll show them who has the power by … just … shutting … down.

8. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale): “American Psycho” (2000), dir. by Mary Harron. Don’t ever compete with Patrick, especially when it comes to designing business cards. You just might end up kissing the wrong end of a chainsaw. If such a thing as gleeful bloodletting exists, then this is it.

7. John Doe (Kevin Spacey): “Se7en” (1995), dir. by David Fincher. No criminal is more of a puppetmaster than John Doe, the biblically driven murderer of Fincher’s movie. Even the two otherwise bright detectives (played by Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt) find themselves outsmarted by this creep – to the point of ultimate ruin. Heads up, Gwyneth.

6. Max Cady (Robert Mitchum): “Cape Fear” (1962), dir. by J. Lee Thompson. In some similar lists, you’ll find Robert De Niro in this spot, courtesy of Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake of Thompson’s film (both are based on John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel). But I think De Niro grandstands, making his portrayal of backwoods-smart Cady into an acting exercise, while Mitchum uses his own simmering sense of masculine rage to give his portrayal a more penetrating, and therefore scary, authenticity.

5. Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker): “Strangers on a Train” (1951), dir. by Alfred Hitchcock. Dreamed up by Patricia Highsmith, Bruno becomes a more complicated creature by virtue of Hitchcock’s brilliant casting of Walker. Known mostly as a light leading man, whose bland good looks usually underscore his light comic touch, Walker gives Bruno a particularly chilling feel. He proves almost too clever for the tennis-playing patsy played by Farley Granger.

4. Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum): “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), dir. by Charles Laughton. This was Mitchum’s turn to act, giving the character of the would-be preacher Harry a stirring sense of evangelical psychopathy. But he pulls it off, from his wide-eyed pursuit of the two children to his tattooed knuckles (love/hate).

3. Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell): “A Clockwork Orange” (1971), dir. by Stanley Kubrick. Head Droog Alex, narrator of British novelist Anthony Burgess’ masterful 1962 book, tells us all about his degeneracy, his fall, his punishment and erstwhile “redemption” and, finally, his return to his natural state, with a sense of joy that feels purely American. The irony is that, in the original novel, at least, Alex finally does … well, change. Not in Kubrick’s version, though. Kubrick’s Alex is still singing show tunes while enjoying a bit of the old ultraviolence.

2. The Joker (Heath Ledger): “The Dark Knight” (2008), dir. by Christopher Nolan. Debate all you want the virtues of Ledger’s acting abilities, his reinvention of The Joker gives Nolan’s Batman an able and willing foe. Ledger’s Joker is interested far less in reaping the financial rewards of crime as he is in exploring the very anarchic joy that his crime sprees arouse. And as he says, Batman … completes him. This is a portrayal for the ages, one that all other psychopathic portrayals will be compared.

1. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins): “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), dir. by Jonathan Demme. But when it comes to the king of psychos, only one reigns. And that character, created by novelist Thomas Harris, has been portrayed on screen no less than three times by the great Hopkins. Though Brian Cox predated him as Lecter (in 1986’s “Manhunter”), it was Hopkins who will be remembered as the thinking-man’s murderer, one who can listen to Bach while wielding a cudgel or eating a census taker’s liver with fava beans and a nice chi-an-ti.

Below : Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Hannibal Lecter.