One could argue that "The Elephant Man" is a shameless tear-jerker, but look closely: Hurt heroically turned himself inside-out; the role is a supernova of compassion, and if he didn't have 10 pounds of rubber on his face, the light of it would melt the screen.

The only role to which Hurt does not seem particularly well-suited is that of a dutiful husband, even when his wife is the incomparable Jane Alexander. The family-man role in Disney's "Night Crossing" (1981) is Hurt's least convincing, but it's not really his fault -- the directing is bad, and he is miscast. While Hurt is peerless at playing a man obsessed, one does not get the impression that he wants to save his children from a dismal life under the commies by flying them over Checkpoint Charlie in a hot-air balloon half so much as he is compelled to endanger them for twisted personal reasons. Were this not an über-formulaic Disney film that insists that you take it all at its dumbest face-value, Hurt might have been playing a father who, loathing the boring demands of his station in life, insists on embarking on a ludicrously dangerous long shot in order to hurl his entire family within shooting range of the Berlin Wall guard towers, in an unconscious effort to get rid of them. Truly, the only scene with any real passion is when Hurt is hollering at Alexander in an effort to convince her to support his plan; he makes her cry by asking (with lots more gusto than is absolutely necessary), "How would you like to see our son's body, riddled with bullets?"

Roll the R, and spit those last three words out with maximum British enunciation, in a vaguely hysterical voice that curls up at the end, like a barrister putting the capper on his final argument: Rrrrriddled with bullets?!" Make sure at least two flecks of saliva are emitted on the last ts, and you may approximate the sadistic oomph with which Hurt rips this one off.

Underneath this ham-fisted, Disney-Dad-Risks-All-to-Save-Family veneer, there is another movie going on in Hurt's eyes -- a movie that asks, What kind of weird, twisted asshole repeatedly risks his family's life and limb in a horribly unsafe contraption, miserable political situation or no?

Jane Alexander regards Hurt, every time the balloon goes down, with a kind of resigned, tightlipped, humiliated fury -- her expression is that of betrayal: Is her husband ballooning toward political freedom, or merely away from the repression of family life? I imagine a private conversation between Hurt and Jane Alexander. You can see the two seasoned actors having a beer together, and Hurt proposing this bit of subtle thespian mischief: doing This but thinking That.

"Bet they don't notice, in the end," you can imagine him saying, of the thick-headed Disney execs.

"I'll bet you're right," she says.

"Oh, let's do," he growls, with that batty twinkle in his eye, unable to resist such high-minded subversion.

"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."

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