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(#7) Alec Baldwin
- 60
The Scene: The owners of a real estate business have sent over a hot downtown salesman to light a fure under the rest of the sales team.
The Role: Whereas most motivational speakers opt for a hopeful, you-can-do-it approach, Blake scares his audience by warning about the stark realities of failure - which include getting fired - in a blistering seven-minute scene.
The Performance: Glengarry Glen Ross is fundamentally about the pressure of working in a cutthroat business, where one's survival is at stake every single day. The intensity with which Baldwin plays Blake sets up the stakes the salesmen are under. Baldwin is in full command throughout the sequence, barking and yelling vintage David Mamet dialogue at the other characters. He makes Blake an alpha male who relishes his power, perfectly setting the tone for the rest of the film, which he's not even in.
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(#11) Alfred Molina
- 65
The Scene: Down-on-their-luck adult film actors Dirk (Mark Wahlberg) and Reed (John C. Reilly) attempt to swindle a local dealer. Their master plan is to pass off baking soda as a half-kilogram of coke.
The Role: Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina) is out of his mind yet still more mentally adept than Dirk and Reed.
The Performance: If you think of Boogie Nights whenever you hear the Night Ranger song "Sister Christian," it's because of the impact Molina makes in the role. He does a brilliant job creating a dangerous, anything-can-happen vibe as Rahad fiddles with a firearm and rocks out to the tune in the middle of a deal. (He especially loves the drum riff.) We know the moment is supposed to be tense for the heroes, but Molina makes the character so vivid that the audience gets agitated, too.
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(#16) Chris Tucker
- 47
The Scene: Dealer and gun-runner Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) fears that one of his couriers, who just got pinched, will turn informant on him. He bails the guy out, convinces him to get in the trunk of a car, and then executes him.
The Role: Beaumont Livingston is a profane, fast-talking goofball who really doesn't want to get into that car trunk and puts up a passionate defense against it.
The Performance: Going toe-to-toe with the estimable Samuel L. Jackson isn't easy, but Tucker does it. That feat is even more remarkable when you consider he only had a few film roles under his belt at that time and hadn't yet achieved his massive Rush Hour success. Tucker makes Beaumont's fear of getting in the trunk funny and tense simultaneously, leading to one of the most electrifying moments in a movie packed with them.
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(#9) Dave Bautista
- 50
The Scene: K (Ryan Gosling) shows up at a protein farm to "retire" an aging Nexus-8 replicant. He is met with resistance, leading to a smashing-through-walls fight.
The Role: Dave Bautista is that replicant, Sapper Morton. He's physically strong yet also cultured, as his large book collection reveals.
The Performance: It isn't surprising to see Bautista putting up a good fight. That's what we're used to. What is surprising is the way he plays Sapper as a polite, cultured yet weary figure. There's a sadness to his performance that suggests the character has seen, and possibly done, a lot of bad things in life. That mournful quality is unexpectedly powerful, especially coming from an actor we don't typically see in that kind of dramatic mode.
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(#4) Bronson Pinchot
- 56
The Scene: Detroit cop Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) arrives in Beverly Hills and stops into an art gallery to see his old friend Jenny (Lisa Eilbacher). Upon entering, he is greeted by her assistant Serge.
The Role: Serge has an accent of indeterminable origin. He is immediately taken with the rough-edged Foley, famously offering him an espresso with "a lemon twist."
The Performance: Coming out on top in a scene with Eddie Murphy isn't easy, yet Pinchot did it. In just a few minutes of screen time, he takes an otherwise irrelevant character and imbues him with purpose and meaning. Serge, who was inspired by Pinchot's makeup lady on a previous film, was such a fan favorite that they brought him back for Beverly Hills Cop III, despite the fact that his boss, Jenny, wasn't part of the film.
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(#22) Martin Scorsese
- 73
The Scene: Mentally unhinged cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) picks up a passenger, whose talk of violence plants a seed in his head.
The Role: Director Martin Scorsese plays "Passenger Watching Silhouette," the angry guy who makes Travis drive him to an apartment building so he can spy on his unfaithful wife. The character goes on a wild racist rant before announcing an intention to take matters violently into his own hands.
The Performance: Scorsese wasn't even supposed to do this scene. Actor George Memmoli was hired, but after sustaining an injury on another film, he was forced to back out. With no one else around to step into his shoes, DeNiro suggested the director simply do it himself. Although not generally an actor in his own right, Scorsese knew what was needed for the sequence and, with his star's assistance, ended up knocking this paranoid moment out of the park with a suitably jittery performance.
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The use of scene language in the film is like a storyteller, taking the responsibility of conveying the content and meaning of the film to the audience. Excellent use of the scenes can make a bland story appear as an amazing experience. Of course, a perfect single scene performance cannot be separated from an excellent actor. It is an important issue to make scenes' movements and use complement each other in a single scene.
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