James Cagney once said: “Once a song and dance man, always a song and dance man. Those few words tell as much about me professionally as there is to tell.” Perhaps Cagney, who won his only Oscar for a musical, Yankee Doodle Dandy, resented being best known for his hard man roles, in such films as The Public Enemy and Angels With Dirty Faces. But what did he mean, exactly?
Christopher Walken, another screen tough with a hoofer’s background, thinks he knows. “One’s relationship with the audience is much more direct when you’re in musicals. There is no pretence. Never,” he says, with that famous, staccato delivery of his. “You treat the audience like another character. And you take that with you into films, when you’re looking into the camera.”
It’s not rocket science, perhaps, but it might explain the magnetism of these two, physically very different actors. But what’s the connection between being a hoofer, and being a villain? Why is it that actors with light feet and a song in their hearts, can really turn on the chills?
“Well it may have to do with one’s attitude to the characters one plays,” suggests Walken. “It’s easier to play a villain with one’s tongue in one’s cheek. There’s an acknowledgement of the artifice. And that comes from musicals too.”
He smiles. “You know I’m not a villain. Cagney knew that everyone knew he wasn’t a villain.” That may be so, but it certainly doesn’t stop one being seriously unnerved, with both.
Pennies from Heaven
Cagney and Walken may be the best, but there are other great screen hard men with dancing feet. Years after Saturday Night Fever and Grease, John Travolta plays villains more often than not (with a similar wink as Walken). And Robert Duvall, a man who has a tango floor in his home, can still turn on the menace as he approaches 80. Clearly comfort in their own bodies, along with an ability to choreograph menace into their movement, contributes to their success.
When you meet Walken in person, you’re instantly confronted with the physical aspect of his bad-guy persona: dressed head-to-toe in black, the famous, freestanding hair graying now, but adding a leonine touch to the feline movement. One moment the effect can be seductive, the next positively threatening.
I met him during the Marrakech Film Festival, where he was the subject of a career tribute – the highlight of which was the sight of the Hollywood legend humbly saluting a massive crowd of Moroccan film buffs in the city’s talismanic market square, Jemaa el Fna, before an open-air screening of Catch Me If You Can.
For the great and the good inside the festival theatre, there was a montage of his movies: Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, The Dead Zone, True Romance, Pulp Fiction.
The clips remind us that, like Cagney, Walken has had his chance to show his steps on screen: notably in the musicals Pennies from Heaven and Hairspray. But the boy from Queens is also famous for sneaking in the odd dance move, even when the film doesn’t call for it.
His cheekiest moment, he recalls, was in the 1986 drama At Close Range, in which he played one of his scariest sociopaths. “I was this terrible man. A killer. But there was a scene where Sean Penn and I were walking through the warehouse full of stuff that I’d stolen. And I suddenly take a couple of steps – and jump – and spin in the air.” He laughs. “For no reason.”
Another notable example is what he calls “a little flip” in King of New York. But he says he’s put an end to such spontaneous dance moves, “because I thought it started to be ostentatious.” What he’d like, he adds, “is to do another musical,. But they will have to ask me quickly, while I can still move.” It’s hard to believe, but he’s 66.
Weapon of Choice
So while his fabulous turn in Fat Boy Slim’s Weapon of Choice video – from 2001, but still a YouTube favourite – keeps his dance fame alive, on screen the bad guys and nut jobs keep coming: next up being a gang boss in The Irishman, opposite a certain Vinnie Jones.
“I think I’ve made movies that have had too much violence,” he sighs. “Sometimes there’s too much bad stuff.” Of course, as soon as he spits out “bad stuff”, in that inimitable way of his, you can see exactly why people want him to do it.
