The Five Best Films of Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel became truly in demand in cinema only after he was 50. And this played to his advantage - having graduated in his youth from the famous Lee Strasberg acting studio, where almost all the future best actors of Hollywood studied, Keitel played in small theaters for ten years, which made him a professional. It was the theater, where not all roles are leading, that taught him to play in such a way that, even if he appeared in front of the audience for a few minutes, he would be remembered for a long time.

Let's take, for example, his role as a pimp of a 12-year-old prostitute played by Jodie Foster in the famous "Taxi Driver" by Martin Scorsese. There he appears briefly, but long enough for him to be hated not only by the main character (Robert De Niro), who shoots him in the finale, but also by the viewer, who will perceive this finale with a sense of triumph of justice.

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Keitel is often helped by the fact that, as actors well know, it is easier to play negative roles than positive ones. If only because the scriptwriters write them more vividly. And Keitel has played more than enough of such roles, including, for example, Judas Iscariot in Martin Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ."

But Judas is a complex character. And Mr. "cleaner" Wolfe in Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" is simple and clear - he is an expert in destroying evidence in the shortest possible time. He is completely uninterested in everything else. Keitel appears in a two-hour film for only a few minutes - but is remembered as one of the main characters. That's what acting skill means.

In fairness, we should note that Harvey Keitel also succeeds brilliantly in positive roles - and how can one not recall the priest in the film "From Dusk Till Dawn" by Robert Rodriguez, a friend of Tarantino, who also found a role for Quentin, albeit only for the first half of the film. Keitel played there almost from the first to the last minutes a minister of the church, who goes from non-resistance to active struggle against evil.

Keitel played the best role in his acting life even before this - in 1991 in the magnificent, but still underrated film by Abel Ferrara "Bad Lieutenant". It is underrated because it is too complex for Hollywood. However, it is not easy, like other films by Ferrara, even for a serious European or American viewer. Keitel plays a policeman (in Hollywood terminology - "bad cop", hence the name "Bad Lieutenant"), completely mired in vices - drunkenness, drug addiction and sexual addiction.

In addition, he is also a gambling addict who cannot stop, which in the end leads to his death from a bullet from a gangster bookmaker. Moreover, he himself goes to this bullet, since he gives his money to the rapist boys so that they leave New York and start a new life. These boys raped a nun, who, nevertheless, forgave them, which turned the attitude of Keitel's hero to his own life upside down.

Realizing that he will no longer be able to save himself (not because he cannot pay off the bookmaker, but because he can no longer change his essence), he gives this chance to these boys. In the retelling, such a concept looks quite controversial (Abel Ferrara generally understands Christianity in a peculiar way), but this is not the point, but the fact that Harvey Keitel in this role of the "bad lieutenant" played human loneliness and the feeling of defeat in life simply brilliantly.

And finally, we should mention another role of Keitel - and again with Ferrara, a year after "Bad Lieutenant" in the film "Dangerous Game" (second title - "Snake Eyes"). There the actor plays a director who is making a film about how the life of a married couple has gone to hell, in which the main female role is played by Madonna (and, it must be said, she plays well).

Keitel's hero in this film is a truly negative character. However, the entire world of cinema according to Ferrara is a disgusting world of inverted values, where actors drink in the evenings, use drugs and have casual sex, like the same heroine of Madonna, who in the film that is being filmed plays a sincerely religious woman.

And Keitel's hero in this whole world, as befits a director, is a skillful manipulator who plays actors like pawns not only on the set, but also in life, in order to get the emotions he needs from them. And at the same time, by the way, he talks about art intelligently and accurately.

Harvey Keitel looks just "like a native" in this super-negative role. And when he played the aged famous gangster Meyer Lansky in the 2021 gangster drama "Lansky", one of the American film critics wrote about it this way: "Keitel imbues his role with more than enough authority of a lion in winter to dominate every moment when he is on screen, and quite often when he is not."

Photo: Wikipedia