Tweet We pay actors to show us pain

I heard this comment from a film scholar last week...he was talking about why we like to watch movies and a big reason is that we enjoy watching actors who can really sell us that they are in pain. I guess the point is that they can be in pain and it this is sort of a cathartic experience for us.

This is a special gift that not all actors have, that is, not all actors can do this. I don't mean grimacing or going through the motions like they are pain, I'm talking about a performance where you feel they are really hurting big time. You have to really let go and not be afraid of looking bad. Some very good actors never really could do this. Don't remember Spencer Tracy could do this. He could do angry, but I can't remembering him doing pain. Cary Grant could show hurt, but never really pain.

This came up for me when I watched Virginia McKenna in her performances in A Town Called Alice, and also Carve Her Name in Stone. Those performances sell it completely for me. Other actresses very good this were Ida Lupino and Dorothy McGuire. A more recent actor very good at this is Bruce Willis, although he was so good the writers wrote so many of these scenes that his 'pain look' almost became parody.

Any actors/actresses or performances that anyone want to bring up that are your favorite 'pained' performances?

None better than Maria AKA Renée Falconetti in Dreyer's PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. An unbelievable performance.

Close runner-up: Lillian Gish (in oodles of films, notably THE SCARLET LETTER, BROKEN BLOSSOMS, WAY DOWN EAST, THE WIND, THE WHITE SISTER, LA BOHEME).

None better than Maria AKA Renée Falconetti in Dreyer's PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC. An unbelievable performance.

Close runner-up: Lillian Gish (in oodles of films, notably THE SCARLET LETTER, BROKEN BLOSSOMS, WAY DOWN EAST, THE WIND, THE WHITE SISTER, LA BOHEME).

Yeah, Falconetti's role is one big 'pain-fest.' Maybe so many people have trouble with that movie because it's so much a one-note performance on her part (not her fault I would add).

Also agree with Lillian Gish, although her frequent 'essays in pain' bring up the question of range. Maybe it's not fair to throw performances like One Romantic Night at her, but I'm not sure how convincing she would be playing the femme fatal.

[Mike Gebert]

Brando pretty much had a line in having the crap kicked out of him at some point in every movie. He was never so much a star as in utter agony (STELLLLLLLLAAAA!!!!)

Lon Chaney. John Barrymore. Richard Barthelmess. I don't know why actors are coming to mind for me instead of actresses. Pauline Frederick can do pain. Norma Talmadge i think is more hurt.

Jonathan Harris aka Dr. Smith from
Lost in Space. "Oh the pain. The pain
of it all."

But seriously..........

Montgomery Clift
John Cassavetes
Kirk Douglas (Spartacus)
Charles Laughton (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
Denzel Washington (the whipping
scene in Glory)

He was never so much a star as in utter agony (STELLLLLLLLAAAA!!!!)

I felt his pain in that one, all right...to the degree that, much as I love Leigh's wonderful performance, I've got to leave the room, or hit FF, every time he enters a scene.

Agree with all of the above, in particular, Laughton's 'pained performance' to me is the most 'authentic' in Hunchback. Of course those italics are huge, but as I flash those films by in my mind, it's Laughton that completely convinces me...in other words, I feel his pain more than even Chaney, who was terrific, but perhaps there was always the sniff of the stage performance in his roles. Maybe what I'm saying is that he plays a little over the top with these roles? I know that's a strange thing to say as these roles are often designed to be over the top.

Trying to be sort of serious, I have a prejudice toward British actors in this category, which is funny because you'd think at least by the time we get to Method, that would be closer to what the pain roles are asking them to do. But once again, the Method at least by my eyes, looks too stagy, too forced. So maybe the Classical British training is better for this, although my reasoning about this is confused...perhaps their training is better to know where to go with what is called for. After all, few of us have been tortured, few of us have had to ring massive bells, so they have more training on how to get to this artificial place than the Method actors, who tend to try too hard and overshoot their pain marks.

Two bravura depictions of agony:
Conrad Veidt in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS - showing pain with an almost immobilized face. Peter Lorre in the trial scene from M - "Will nicht...muss! Will nicht...MUSS!"

And then there was Emil Jannings who for a while had cornered the market in middle-aged male suffering: DER LETZTE MANN, THE LAST COMMAND, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH etc.

Jeon Do-yeon in "Secret Sunshine." The film's about how the lead character deals with unbearable emotional pain.

Hope this isn't too obscure, but Tony Leung Chiu-wai has made a career out of emotionally conflicted characters, like his cop in John Woo's Hard-Boiled and his undercover role in the Infernal Affairs trilogy. He and the late Leslie Cheung go through a lot of pain as lovers in Buenos Aires in Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together.

And for real pain, watch Jackie Chan's outtakes from his 1980s films, in particular Police Story 2 in which both he and Maggie Cheung suffer bloody head wounds. Or Armour of God, in which he fractures his skull.

In fact actors suffering through pain forms a pretty large subset of Asian movies, Japanese and Indian as well as Chinese.

If we're talking emotional pain I've got a list of actors who have made me feel their pain.

Without renaming any of the fine actors already mentioned, they are:

Janet Gaynor (Sunrise, 7th Heaven)
Charles Farrell (Lucky Star)
Norma Shearer (Lady of the Night)
Miriam Hopkins (Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Story of Temple Drake)
Camilla Horn (Faust)
Sylvia Sidney (Fury, Dead End, You Only Live Once, Sabotage, Street Scene)
Boris Karloff (The Bride of Frankenstein)
Van Heflin (Act of Violence, Johnny Eager)
Claire Trevor (Key Largo, Stagecoach)
Uno Henning (A Cottage on Dartmoor)
Brock Peters (To Kill a Mockingbird)
Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker)
Deborah Kerr (The Innocents)
Ethel Waters (The Member of the Wedding)

Two bravura depictions of agony:
Conrad Veidt in THE MAN WHO LAUGHS - showing pain with an almost immobilized face. Peter Lorre in the trial scene from M - "Will nicht...muss! Will nicht...MUSS!"

And then there was Emil Jannings who for a while had cornered the market in middle-aged male suffering: DER LETZTE MANN, THE LAST COMMAND, THE WAY OF ALL FLESH etc.

You're right. Jannings did corner the market. And you didn't even need to bring up The Blue Angel. Watching that film, especially the scene of his 'eggs on the head' humiliation was one of the films that got me interested in this era when I watched it in college.

You're right. Jannings did corner the market. And you didn't even need to bring up The Blue Angel. Watching that film, especially the scene of his 'eggs on the head' humiliation was one of the films that got me interested in this era when I watched it in college.

Chishu Ryu. Tatsuya Nakadai. Takashi Shimura in Ikiru. Or anything. Even Godzilla.

Actually, this whole thread is starting to give me a pain------in the neck and temporal area.

Frankly, I think it’s baloney that we mostly pay actors to show us pain, and when they do, it’s usually a major Oscar-begging wallow in self-absorption and “art” ala Emil Jannings. Showing pain in acting is usually overrated, want to see an actor in pain------stomp on his foot!

I think most of us pay actors to show us joy, action, bravery, laughter, and I know we pay a lot of actresses to show us major unclothed sections of their well-siliconed forms. Frequently, the pain-performances are actually the ones that leave the Box-Office wanting. These days, I’d pay actors and actresses just to blink a bit more, and show some intelligence (or get some to show), and a casual interest in what’s going on around them apart from the planets they think revolve around their own personas.

But if you need real examples of actors who portray pain and make us feel it, I much prefer Michael Gambon in a performance that shows how one can rise above pain, as he does in THE SINGING DETECTIVE, and one of the greatest comic actors of all time who always shared his pain with us and made us feel it----Oliver Hardy.

Of course, the finest performance of pain I have seen of recent can be seen below. It’s in French, with subtitles, which is somehow fitting, the French are usually a pain:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7ibPk3 ... ata_player


and the sequel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q34z5dCm ... ata_player


Oh, the Humanity!


RICHARD M ROBERTS

I somewhat agree with Richard that "showing pain" as a form of acting is overpraised and often is overdone. That doesn't mean I don't think Jannings is very good at it, quite the contrary. I like seeing other emotions onscreen as well, and value them equally. I saw an actress in a film have a laughing fit a while back, and it was so perfect a piece of acting (I know, I've had a couple of laughing fits in my life), I admired that bit of acting more than anything else in the film.

I somewhat agree with Richard that "showing pain" as a form of acting is overpraised and often is overdone. That doesn't mean I don't think Jannings is very good at it, quite the contrary. I like seeing other emotions onscreen as well, and value them equally. I saw an actress in a film have a laughing fit a while back, and it was so perfect a piece of acting (I know, I've had a couple of laughing fits in my life), I admired that bit of acting more than anything else in the film.

As I've mentioned already, too much of anything can be a problem, and maybe that's one issue with Passion of Joan of Arc. Ford gave the famous advice to John Wayne about only 'going for it' a couple times in a film, and that's good advice. Wayne was too smart to overdo his pain scenes, The Searchers is about as close as he gets. If you spend the whole film in pain, them somebody should pull your tooth or bop you over the head and knock you out. This post started for me when I saw Virginia McKenna's impeccable performance in A Town Like Alice, but she only has two or three of these 'tortured' scenes, which is plenty. The rest of the film she gets to do the other things actors like to do: fall in love, get mad, cry, and fidget with her cigarette or lipstick.

One of the points of this thread, and Richard you can stop reading this if it pains you, is that actors get typecast in all kinds of ways, and one of them is this 'showing pain' role. Emil Jannings seemed to make a living at this. Either this is the limited imagination of the casting director, or the actor himself/herself just is better at this than other parts. As Emil Jannings might say: 'I'm a sufferer, not a lover,'

[Christopher Jacobs]

I think we as viewers like to see this to a certain extent, and are certainly impressed by it, but again as Richard noted, it doesn't really pay off at the boxoffice all that much. I just caught up a few hours ago with two recent critically acclaimed and intensely powerful films, one of which was nominated for Best Picture, yet neither played in local theatres. Even my basement screening audience was only three people for one film and two for the other (which is actually about what I'd expect to see if it had played theatrically). WINTER'S BONE (2010) and the American remake of BROTHERS (2009) both have incredibly talented casts across the board from stars to extras, but neither can remotely be called a "feel-good" movie nor particularly uplifting. On the other hand, last night I finally watched THE WAY (2010) directed by Emilio Estevez and starring his father Martin Sheen, which is heavily laden with effective multiple character pain, yet spiced throughout with comic moments and ending with a sense of relief, release, and fulfillment (i.e., the catharsis so prized by certain critical analysts) that would not have been possible without all the pain along the way. Nevertheless, it, too, (not surprisingly) never played much of anywhere theatrically, and there were just two of us watching it down in my basement. If people happen to see this sort of film, they very often like them, but they don't necessarily go out of their way to find them (at least in today's market, but probably in the past as well).

And yet Richard Pryor was very successful.

[Christopher Jacobs]

One more thing about WINTER'S BONE and BROTHERS: both Blu-rays were on the $5 bargain shelf at Walmart or Target, and these were critically-acclaimed award-winners from just 2009 and 2010. Obviously there's at least an executive perception that such heavy drama that might make viewers feel some of the pain of the characters is not worth much on the open market these days.

But then there are exceptions. I've not seen it yet but I understand that there's some pain involved in the mega-hit THE HUNGER GAMES (same star as WINTER'S BONE, coincidentally, and her performance in that film almost makes me want to submit myself to see THE HUNGER GAMES). And films like DELIVERANCE a generation ago may have been disturbing with plenty of pain, both physical and emotional, yet appealed to both critics and audiences. Actors like Lon Chaney, Emil Jannings, Paul Muni, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and others have built their careers around dramatic suffering on screen. There are occasional modern films depicting extreme hardships and tragedies, but who today is there that specializes in such roles?

Christopher, I think what you are referring to is the increasing separation of films into two categories: art house films and 'movies' which can be teased out into: action flicks, chick flicks, teenage comedy movies, and such. Of course there is still a lot of cross-over and one could argue this distinction has been around for a long time, but I would argue that this difference is in marketing. Winter's Bone is a good film (I would have liked the lead actress to have had just a little less than perfect teeth, but I'm harping) but in no way can you market that film as any kind of 'blockbuster' movie. So it gets pushed to the side, in a way that the markets might not have done twenty years ago.

A film that really gets caught in the middle is a film like the Johnny Cash biopic. I thought it was a terrific film, but it wasn't a 'movie' in that it wasn't an action film, didn't have toilet humor, etc. So even though it got good reviews, it sort of got buried in the market place and venue showing, in a way that Coal Miner's Daughter did NOT get buried a generation before.

If anything, this is only getting worse with the multiplexes showing multiple showings of one film rather than using the opportunity to show art house films.

The kind of film most of the people who read this list like are going to be progressively relegated to the one art house theater in town, if they are lucky enough to have that.

Leni Riefenstahl, Luis Trenker and Gustav Diessl suffer quite a lot in closeup due to the bad weather in Dr. Fanck's mountains...

A film that really gets caught in the middle is a film like the Johnny Cash biopic. I thought it was a terrific film, but it wasn't a 'movie' in that it wasn't an action film, didn't have toilet humor, etc. So even though it got good reviews, it sort of got buried in the market place and venue showing, in a way that Coal Miner's Daughter did NOT get buried a generation before.

Hard to say it was buried when Reese Witherspoon won the Best Actress Oscar, due in part to an extraordinary push from Fox. I mean they even let me interview her.

I think sadly it was not a film that appealed to a wide audience. Coal Miner's Daughter wasn't either, no matter how well made it was.

That said, Walk the Line was solidly profitable.

I've been following this thread with a growing sense of dissatisfaction. I pay actors to act. Sometimes I pay 'em to show me pain and sometimes I pay 'em to take a fall and not show me pain. Mostly I pay the actors to perform the script in an entertaining fashion. The title of this thread is the typical BS of people who like to think that tragedy is more artistic than comedy.

Bob

I've been following this thread with a growing sense of dissatisfaction. I pay actors to act. Sometimes I pay 'em to show me pain and sometimes I pay 'em to take a fall and not show me pain. Mostly I pay the actors to perform the script in an entertaining fashion. The title of this thread is the typical BS of people who like to think that tragedy is more artistic than comedy.

Bob, when I started this thread. I was first quoting someone who mentioned it and it became of discussion of why people go to see anyone perform, and the performance of 'pain' as opposed to other kind of emotions. Here's a simple question: How many times do we go to a movie of any kind just to see people laugh? We see people laugh at other people's pain, we see people laugh for a moment at themselves at the end of a story, in comedy we see people who are in pain and are trying not to show it. But I can't think of a single film where we see people laugh and have a good time for the most of the story. So I think that's what the film guy was talking about, and even though you've tried, if anything you've convinced me he's right. And if that idea dissatisfies you, why don't you stop reading this thread and find some other discussion that makes you happier?

The title of this thread is the typical BS of people who like to think that tragedy is more artistic than comedy.

Bob

I would like to point out that comedy and tragedy require not altogether different talents. Most of the comedies I love require empathy from the audience because of the pain experienced by the main character. Chaplin in City Lights, The Gold Rush, The Kid, Modern Times, The Great Dictator. Even stone-faced Buster Keaton admitted his character evoked sympathy. "You had to get sympathy for a story to hold up but I made sure I didn't ask for it. If the audience wanted to feel sorry for me that was up to them but I never asked for it in action." I see this in Sherlock, Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr., The General, and the Cameraman. Comedy that doesn't include characters in some kind of pain I don't think works very well, and that's the problem with most contemporary comedy, which seems to feature amoral, coarse, and unsympathetic characters. My favorite comedy of the last thirty years - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles - works because of the pain, emotional and otherwise, of Steve Martin's and John Candy's characters.

Comedy that doesn't include characters in some kind of pain I don't think works very well, and that's the problem with most contemporary comedy, which seems to feature amoral, coarse, and unsympathetic characters. My favorite comedy of the last thirty years - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles - works because of the pain, emotional and otherwise, of Steve Martin's and John Candy's characters.

I totally agree. Just watch DUE DATE as an illustration. A contemporary take on PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES that does not work because the characters are "amoral, coarse and unsympathetic". Actually, don't watch DUE DATE.

[Christopher Jacobs]

And as I sort of noted above, tragedy becomes far more effective if it's punctuated by lighter, even comedic moments. A movie that's all doom and gloom or all sweetness and joy may have its own fans, but it's extremely rare for it to become widely popular. The most successful films work out some sort of balance, perhaps leaning more towards darkness or more towards light but having a certain amount of both (even silliness like Mel Brooks' SILENT MOVIE).

And as I sort of noted above, tragedy becomes far more effective if it's punctuated by lighter, even comedic moments. A movie that's all doom and gloom or all sweetness and joy may have its own fans, but it's extremely rare for it to become widely popular. The most successful films work out some sort of balance, perhaps leaning more towards darkness or more towards light but having a certain amount of both (even silliness like Mel Brooks' SILENT MOVIE).

It's because all good movies hold a mirror up to life, which is both comical and tragic. Good art is never the result of a formula.

I think we as viewers like to see this to a certain extent, and are certainly impressed by it, but again as Richard noted, it doesn't really pay off at the boxoffice all that much.

Also noted by Wm. D. Howells, who remarked to Edith Wharton (she mentions in the autobio. I'm now reading) as they left the failed premier of the dramatization of House of Mirth , "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."