Bette Davis, Jezebel (1938)

Davis’s Julie has a spat with her betrothed, banker Henry Fonda, who is graced with impossibly poofy hair. So her vengeance is showing up at a New Orleans ball, where young women traditonally wear white, in a red dress. She is disgraced. Fonda is humiliated by her upstagery, so heads north on Banking Business. When word comes that he is coming back to New Orleans, Julie, in a fever primp, is ecstatic over his return. He returns with a wife. Damn damn damn. Fortunately for both, yellow fever strike New Orleans, Fonda comes down with it, and the rest has Julie channeling Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Davis is deceitful, scheming, amoral, enormously flirty and quite mad. She is delightful.

Burt Lancaster, Seven Days in May (1964)

Lancaster is a four-star Air Force General, Chief of the Joint Chiefs, Medal of Honor awardee with enough “scrambled eggs” (braid) on the vistor of his dress cap for two Denver Omelets. And, by comparison, he makes Julie’s madness seem tame. He is paranoid and a megalomaniac who is planning a coup against the President so he can become America’s dictator. Darn, those old movie themes never quite go away, do they? Lancaster’s intense, coil-springed and impulsive villain is balanced by his aide, Kirk Douglas, a Marine colonel, who is still Kirk Douglasy intense but is also intuitive, thoughful and honorable. Gradually, Douglas unravels the plot and the rest of the cast attempts to stop the coup. Lancaster’s character reminds me also of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, immortalized by Sterling Hayden in a contemporary film, Dr. Strangelove. The film is also notable for old cars, most notably Douglas’s 1963 Thunderbird.

Bruce the Shark, Jaws (1975)

Unlike Lancaster, who chews up the scenery and several hundred yards of film in Seven Days in May, Bruce might be his scariest when he’s unseen, which prepares you for the Boogah Boogah! moments when he appears. And, granted they are both boogah and boogah. Part of that might be because the mechanized shark was so difficult to work with and broke down so often, but I re-watched the last 40 minutes a few nights ago—I stopped before Quint becomes the main course for Bruce—and the final chase sequence, when all you see of the shark are the racing yellow barrels, is brilliant. Spielberg scores it with what might be called happy pirate music, and the film’s mood, after Quint describing the Indianapolis horror, is actually exuberant. Even if you’d read the book, the chase sequence is such a skillful bit of misdirection that it makes the grisly scenes hit that much harder. I still remember, when I first saw Jaws, that the crowd groaned in unison and then grew very quiet. When Roy Scheider blows Bruce the Shark up, there were cheers. It was a grand communal moment.