WORLD OF HURT, PART 2

The delectable John Hurt

(This is PART 2 of the article I published 2 weeks ago, which previously appeared on Salon.com. However, I have heard your moans and the people have spoken: No more two week gaps between articles. Such is my love for you!)

"I've done some stinkers in the cinema. You can't regret it," Hurt has said -- no actor with so lengthy a résumé hasn't, but some of his films number among the truly regrettable: "Spaceballs" (1987), "History Of The World Part 1" (1981), "King Ralph" (1991), "Even Cowgirls Get The Blues" (1994). Still, none of these can compare to the great stinker of them all, "Heaven's Gate" (1981)

"Heaven's Gate" is not one of those films, like, say, "Apocalypse Now," where years from its ignominious release, the scales will fall from everyone's eyes and they will realize it was an unappreciated work of genius. Twenty years later, it is still mind-blowingly bad; the pacing is interminable, sienna-toned banjo jamborees make it look like a maudlin, three-hour version of "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Never has so much been spent to suck so much air.

Hurt said of the experience, "I found it a difficult film because I can't bear that sort of indulgence and also it was at a time in my life when I couldn't treat it with a sense of humor ... And I was working with a lot of people who'd worked together before and thought that it would be a very powerful film. It was not an easy time for anybody and it brought a studio to its knees."

While it is absurd to think that one can get an idea of what an actor is like off-camera by one of their performances, Hurt's character, giving an abysmally written valedictory speech to the graduating Harvard Class of 1870 at the beginning of the film, is how I suspect he might have been, at various times in his life, as an actual person: giggly, a little drunk, a little manic, crackling with impeccable comic timing, alternately ebullient and heartbroken. But this is no reason to see the film: indeed, if every copy of it were incinerated, the world would be no worse, but perhaps it is good that it is still floating round video stores as a dreadful object lesson to hubristic young directors with pretentious intent.

"The Disappearance" (1981) is an excessively heavy thriller in which Donald Sutherland speaks in a self-consciously Eastwood-esque monotone. This is a part where Hurt, a junior spy of some sort, looks boyish, but I wouldn't say he ever looks actually young; his mouth is too cynical, his eyes are too insomniac; he always looks like the teen who would have been running the choirboy prostitution ring out of his prep school chapel. He gives the impression, in roles like these, that if he were slightly less talented, he might have been a white-collar criminal.

Although I have tremendous respect for the late Pauline Kael's taste, I think Sam Peckinpah was an idiot, and his filmmaking about as sensitive as an Astroturf condom. "The Osterman Weekend" (1983) is Hurt's most -- uh, physical role. In the first five minutes, his character, intelligence agent Lawrence Facet, is being vigorously mounted by a naked Danish blonde to Lalo Shifrin, proto-Cinemax blow-job music. Hurt's bare, meatless ass exits to the lavatory (his body is like one of those statues of adolescent Hermes -- sprightly, milk-white, toneless) and Mrs. Facet, the horny blonde, is killed by hypodermic-wielding assassins while masturbating. Since this is all captured on film, Facet is driven bonkers and must seek revenge on the parties responsible, blah, blah, blah, whilst watching the tape over and over again in a sicko fashion.

The film is ram-packed with topless, babytalk-dribbling skanks fresh from the toilet stalls of Studio 54 ("Wanna schtupp?" says one; "I bet I could get a little something out of Mr. Tanner. I just coke 'em a little and stroke 'em a little," says another) and Peckimpossible, bourbon-powered caveman dung:

"There's a principle I like to live by: The truth is a lie that hasn't been found out. Maybe you ought to bear that in mind. These are strange times, amigo. But I'm gonna survive. Let's you and me survive 'em together. "

The whole film is sleazy, repellant and absurd, but its most interesting failure was in having cast Hurt as a warm, touchy-feely guy: he tousles a kid's hair, vigorously pets the dog -- it looks very unnatural. Even mid-coitus, Hurt is a frozen fish stick, physically speaking -- he just doesn't read as a big hug guy -- even one who devolves into a psychopath by the end.

In "1984" (1984), as the hapless dissident, Hurt is filled with self-recrimination and moral weakness. It is an utterly joyless life; the small glimpses of happiness he finds are brutally awkward. Hurt's jaw usually hangs open on its hinges, but here it is especially slack; his skin has been allowed to retain its natural pearl-gray oyster tint. It's an excruciating role: He is the ultimate victim, the last vestiges of humanity are tortured out of him, and he is left empty.

From the Guardian interview: "A victim is basically the ultimate of most of us ... It's one of the things that I think cinema deals with fantastically well because it deals with privacy and private moments that are material as opposed to literary and I think it's a wonderful medium to be able to understand more clearly the depths and secrecies of people's lives, and can lead to a great deal more understanding."

"The Hit" (1985), though not particularly successful, is a great film: one of Hurt's favorite projects, and one of his most toothsome roles. He plays Mr. Braddock, a hit man who's lost his inhumanity. He is bloodless and insectoid in his white suit and Cuban-heeled shoes. When feisty kidnapped Latina Laura Del Sol bites his hand, there's an eel-knot of conflicting feelings: he wants to kill her, he doesn't want to kill her, he is surprised by how much he is attracted to her fighting spirit. When she stares at him triumphantly in the rearview mirror with her bloody teeth and spits out a wad of his skin, his eyes show the faintest trace of some strange, bleak kind of invertebrate love. At the very end, Braddock is dying of multiple gunshot wounds when he catches a glimpse of Laura Del Sol, and with the last of his strength, gives her a weak, almost imperceptible, wink.

It is one of the great romantic moments in film, but it's easy to miss completely, it's so, so subtle.

One of Hurt's most charming roles is in "Scandal" (1989), where he plays Dr. Steven Ward, sexual Svengali to Christine Keeler (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer), who ends up touching off the Jack Profumo scandal. When he first catches sight of the sumptuous Whalley-Kilmer (whom no American actress since Faye Dunaway has come near, in the last 20 years, in terms of sheer sexual delectability paired with truly impressive craft. Annette Bening wanted to do it, but Beatty kept her on her back instead. Worse fates could befall a woman's career, but I digress), she is in a floor show. He stares at her and puts a cigarette in his mouth ve-e-e-e-ery slowly, first touching his tongue to the tip of the filter, then, with open mouth, rolling the cigarette around on his lower lip before sticking it in. I can't imagine anyone besides John Hurt and Cher pulling this move off with any marketable sincerity, but it is so eloquent: The gesture tells you in the first 40 seconds of the film that this man is a sex fiend, an opportunist, a charmer, a cad.

His perversions are fun; you want him to be filthy and excessive, because watching him enjoy himself is just too addictive. You want to hear that nasty, cackling laugh and watch the smoke pouring through his teeth, eyes like shiny black slits, smile lines like a dozen parentheses up each cheek.

This character's complexity comes from his sympathetic understanding of scurvy behavior: He forgives moral trespasses easily because he commits them easily.

"You don't care," whines Walley-Kilmer, unfaithful girlfriend.

"Oh yes I do," Hurt says gently. "More than I can say."

You believe that: You believe there are a million strange, icy onion-skin layers between him and everyone else because he has tasted most of life's manifold degeneracies; he has done and accepted it all, Dear, all the orgies, bullets and chemicals and more, simply more, in the pursuit of shameless experience, and your little sins are just too adorable to be of any consequence.

"The Field" (1990), is where Hurt and Richard Harris seem to be competing for Who Can Chew the Most Irish Scenery in a Single Film. Hurt is a village idiot with about seven black teeth in his head, who toadies up to Harris, who is an apoplectic Irish patriarch seething with grunting, red-eyed fury, appropriately nicknamed The Bull.

"Yaargh, aaargh," hacks Hurt, waggling his little fists in support when Harris picks a bar fight. "Yar' tha Boool, yar tha Bool, yar tha Bool!"

About the only thing of value in this film is Hurt's naturally croaky, Long John Silver-ish voice, which he told the Guardian "has been blamed on Guinness and on Gauloises ... but I'm here to tell you that it's a family voice entirely."

Hurt very much enjoyed working with Jim Jarmusch on a small role in the gorgeous "Dead Man" (1995), but perhaps no film enjoys more gushing praise from the man himself than "Love and Death on Long Island" (1997), in which Hurt plays Giles D'Ath (De-Ath -- get it?), an aging, Luddite author who has the embarrassing misfortune of falling in love with Jason Priestly, who essentially plays Jason Priestly, and surprisingly well. This film is ostensibly a retelling of "Death in Venice" for the young and hip, but has many quite funny and smart moments.

We get to see John Hurt crucified by an unrequited fan-love usually suffered by 14-year-old girls. He hides from his housekeeper while cutting out pictures of Priestly from TeenBeat. In a particularly affecting bit, Hurt sneaks a peek at a video of one of Priestly's "Porky's"-esque films. Hurt visibly blushes when watching his secret beloved deliver a tacky line: "You're just a skid mark on the underpants of life! Huh huh huh." Hurt cringes, laughing hysterically -- it is the stab of hot feeling everyone has had watching someone they're in love with do something embarrassing ... then the moment expands, and Hurt giggles, because, on the wings of his great love for Priestly, he can't help but guiltily give in to the lowbrow teen fun. It's a gorgeous little private moment of pure nuance, multi-textured and too subtle for the attitude, dictated by American films, that emotions must be big, hammy sandwiches, slathered in obviousness.

"If you're making a film that is lifelike," sayeth Hurt, "the humor very often isn't something that the character considers to be amusing."

Hurt continues to make films of varying quality, but even in the midst of the dullest concepts, he can bring something to the screen that he hasn't brought before. "All the Little Animals" (1998) is an annoying and unsuccessful film, in which Hurt looks tweedily glamorous, like an aging Samuel Beckett, but is supposed to be playing a mildly psychotic, animal-loving wacko, who forms a friendship with a weepy, brain-damaged, "Willard"-like kid (the truly talented Christian Bale). This is a prime example of the fact that an extraordinarily high level of acting can't save a project that the writer and director are determined to plunge into mediocrity, but Hurt's character is vivid and hilarious when he explains why he loves animals but has no affection for people: "The animals need help! ... Other men kill them, I bury them. I bury rabbits, rats, mice and birds, and frogs, hedgehogs ... .even snails ... .!"

You feel that, indeed, Hurt found a truthful corner of himself that preferred any snail to the most notable human being. The tree-hugging, hippie intentions of the film are good, but ultimately, one would have to be a really stoned or shell-shocked person to endure a film of such oppressive peacefulness.

In "Owning Mahowny" (2003) Hurt has, unlike himself in any of his other films, a deep tan. In a remarkable bit of miscasting, he plays an Atlantic City casino manager. Clearly, John Hurt had no business in this film, but the people casting just loved him, and wanted him to work with him so badly, they didn't care. And really, who could blame them?

I wanted to end with this last quote from the Guardian interview (which I have so ruthlessly eviscerated for my own gain):

Guardian: And who do you see when you look in the mirror?

Hurt: I've no idea who I am anymore. But I cease to be confused about it and frankly I'm not too worried. I'm motoring towards the end of it all in the most enjoyable way and does it really matter if I know who I am? I don't think it does, no. I do see a flicker.

(In addition to the Guardian interview, I have also relied on Dominic Wills' excellent article on Hurt on the U.K. Web site Tiscali.)

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Artwork: “Flying Tiger,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2022