Grand
Moff Tarkin - Peter Cushing
The mastermind of the Death Star project. A brilliant and ruthless tactician,
Grand Moff Tarkin was a loyal adherent to Emperor Palpatine's vision of the
New Order. He saw the Death Star as the ultimate weapon to ensure absolute rule
over the galaxy. The power of the battle station's prime weapon was enough to
deter any rebellion, he reasoned. To demonstrate the Death Star's power, he
destroyed the planet of Alderaan. Tarkin perished aboard his creation. The Rebel
Alliance dared to wage war with the Empire, and targeted a weak spot in the
battle station. A proton torpedo volley fired by young Luke Skywalker sealed
the station's fate. Tarkin was killed in the resulting explosion.
Martin
Scorsese may be the most consistently passionate, committed and inventive director
to have worked regularly in the American cinema over the past three decades.
His work, often rooted in his own experience, explores his Italian-American
Catholic heritage and confronts the themes of sin and redemption in a fiercely
contemporary, yet universally resonant fashion. Scorsese made his name working
largely outside the traditional Hollywood establishment, making films on relatively
small budgets which attracted relatively small, yet dedicated, audiences. Although
he has never enjoyed the box-office success on the level of contemporaries like
Lucas or Spielberg, he has earned an almost uninterrupted run of critical kudos
that has made him the envy of many of his peers. 5In 1969, Scorsese was teaching
film history classes at NYU and helping fellow student Michael Wadleigh edit
the mammoth rock documentary "Woodstock". His career was boosted when
a producer offered to distribute "Who's That Knocking?" (lensed 1967)
if he added a a gratuitous sex scene. Starring Harvey Keitel as an Italian-American
who has been conditioned by his strict Catholic upbringing to see all women
as either "girls" (virgins who make good wives and mothers) or "broads"
(purely sexual creatures about whom he fantasizes), the film was critically
praised for its realism and inspired camerawork. 5Scorsese's next break came
when he was assigned by Roger Corman to direct "Boxcar Bertha" (1972),
a Depression-era allegory which parallels--within the limitations of an exploitation
picture--the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ. Barbara Hershey
(who gave Scorsese a copy of the novel "Last Temptation of Christ"
during filming and would play Mary Magdalene in Scorsese's film of that book)
was cast as Bertha, a good-natured whore, and David Carradine portrayed labor
leader Bill Shelley who, at the film's end, is literally crucified on the side
of a boxcar. The film introduced one of Scorsese's central thematic concerns,
the figure of the "sinner" who has temporarily slipped from grace,
only to enjoy a final, if ambiguous, redemption. 5In 1973 came the film that
assured Scorsese a starring role in contemporary film history: "Mean Streets",
the story of a group of young hoods living and dying on the streets of New York
(shot, surprisingly, almost entirely in Los Angeles). Charlie (Keitel), the
film's central character, juggles his concern for his crazy friend Johnny Boy
(Robert De Niro), a secret romance with Johnny's cousin, and his ambition to
run an uptown restaurant. At his best here, Scorsese combines a cineaste's passion
for film noir with an actor's obsession with rich characters and a loving sense
of time and place. The film was Scorsese's first with De Niro and marked the
beginning of one of the most productive creative pairings in contemporary American
cinema. De Niro would star in many other Scorsese features: "Taxi Driver"
(1976), "New York, New York" (1977), "Raging Bull" (1980),
"King of Comedy" (1983), "GoodFellas" (1990), "Cape
Fear" (1991) and "Casino" (1995). 5"Alice Doesn't Live Here
Anymore" (1974) marked a departure, if not an act of penance, for Scorsese--it
is one of his few films with a woman protagonist and one that isn't suffused
with a particularly masculine point of view. But as if in reaction to the feminism
of "Alice", Scorsese returned with a vengeance to the macho world
with "Taxi Driver", scripted by Paul Schrader. An iconographic street
opera, the film gave De Niro an opportunity for a tour de force performance
as Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet turned psychotic vigilante, and generated considerable
controversy, largely thanks to its bloody denouement--a sustained, hallucinatory,
brilliantly edited piece of carnage centering around a 12-year-old prostitute
(Jodie Foster). 5The pendulum swung the other way with "New York, New York",
an extravagant, uneven and dark take on the 1940s-style Hollywood musical rooted
in Scorsese's childhood memories of the "Make-Believe-Ballroom" era.
"Raging Bull", meanwhile, remains an acknowledged Scorsese masterpiece.
Based on the autobiography of boxer Jake La Motta, the film afforded De Niro
the greatest performance of his career in this story of the rise and fall of
a middleweight boxing champion for which the actor gained over 50 pounds to
play La Motta later in life. Shot in black-and-white save for some poignant
"home movie" sequences, "Raging Bull" won Academy Awards
for De Niro and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. "King of Comedy" (1983)
features De Niro as Rupert Pupkin, an obsessed fan/would-be comic with Sandra
Bernhardt as his wacko accomplice and Jerry Lewis as a Johnny Carson-type figure
in Scorsese's most underrated film, a dark and pointed social comedy. 5Scorsese
temporarily turned away from high-rolling, big-budget filmmaking to make "After
Hours" (1985), a nightmarish black comedy set entirely on the streets of
New York during one night. In 1986, he abandoned New York for the streets of
Chicago to direct "The Color of Money", a career turning point that
was a relatively bloodless but beautifully stylish sequel to Robert Rossen's
1961 classic, "The Hustler". 5Finally realizing a long-held ambition,
he helmed "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988) which offered Scorsese
the chance to dramatize the historical figure whose struggle between the spiritual
and the secular is the most celebrated of all. Scorsese's Christ begins as a
social outcast who wavers between good and evil and the spirit and the flesh,
before eventually choosing the path to redemption. In this sense, Christ has
an affinity with numerous other of the director's protagonists like J.R., Travis
Bickle, Rupert Pupkin and Bill Shelley. The film, though, somehow lacked the
emotional power and cohesion of Scorsese's earlier, smaller-scale productions
but nevertheless generated controversy, with religious forces accusing the film
of blasphemy and issuing threats of boycotts. 5Adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's
book "Wiseguys", about small-time gangster-turned-Federal witness
Henry Hill, "GoodFellas" (1990) marked a return to classic Scorsese
form and content. Capturing both the undeniable excitement as well as the tawdry,
daily details of life on the fringes of "the mob", it pushed audience
manipulation to the extreme by juxtaposing moments of graphic violence with
scenes of high humor. While some rank "GoodFellas" as one of the director's
masterpieces, "Cape Fear" (1991) was another matter entirely; a slick
pretentious and excessive remake of the compact and powerful 1962 original.
As to be expected, the performances in Scorsese's version are generally strong
(Nick Nolte and Juliette Lewis are particularly good) and the camerawork and
editing are impressive in their virtuosity. However De Niro's showy central
performance, while presumably in accordance with Scorsese's half-baked quasi-religious
take on the material, is profoundly problematic. The social reality of Robert
Mitchum's original rendition of a monster from the working class is discarded
to create an improbable contemporary villain. Moreover, the extended "Halloween"-styled
climax should have been an embarassment for an artist of Scorsese's stature.
Still, this was the biggest hit of his career to date. 5"The Age of Innocence"
(1993) seemed an unlikely choice for Scorsese's next project as it is a subtle
drama of manners set in New York's 19th century high society but he pulled it
off adroitly with a careening camera, sumptuous color and decor conveying the
characters' repressed emotions while "Casino" was another study of
gangland activity, this time set in 60s Las Vegas which critics read as a flawed
allegory of America's loss of innocence, a theme most felt had been dealt with
to better effect in the director's earlier work. "Kundun" (1997) seem
ed another odd choice; the biopic of the Dalai Lama, the most pacifistic individual
filter h the consciousness of the director of numerous violent epics. Still,
Scorsese rose to the challenge and crafted a beautifully realized portrait of
this holy man.
