Today: David Warner
Heads, brains and faces, skewed or distorted, are the prominent concerns with today’s Take Three supporting actor David Warner: the lopping off, the removal of, and the obsessively creepy staring, respectively, are what it's all about. In The Omen, From Beyond the Grave and The Man with Two Brains Warner thrilled us in a delightful and devious manner. He's an ideal actor for Halloween season.
Take One: I'm starting with the Man in the MirrorDouble-dealing, in particular, was the name of the game in ‘The Gate Crasher’, the first segment of Kevin Connor’s 1973 Amicus portmanteau film From Beyond the Grave. Warner was Edward Charlton, who surely lived to regret the snagging of an ancient, dubiously prescient mirror from shopkeeper Peter Cushing at a cut-price cost. Warner plays Charlton as cocky and belligerent one minute, and fearfully seized up the next. He germanely conveys the icky terror of Charlton’s unique-antique situation. His slight and consistent facial twitches betraying his discomfort. You can practically feel the (assumed) beads of sweat snaking down his back whenever the séance-induced, Ripper-like spirit appears on "the other side". He’s the best filmic embodiment of why séances can be bad luck for all concerned.
Warner ensures that Charlton’s inherent nature is suspect; he takes duplicity and makes it his bitch. But really he was ultimately an unlucky chancer who simply picked the wrong shopkeep to fleece. All that’s left dangling at the end – the question suspiciously hanging over the film’s cycle of reflection-based entrapment – is: who did Charlton con next? Reproductions, replacements...ah, they can cost dearly.
The moral of the story: don’t be a selfish git. Or, to put it another way: never, ever mess with a Yorkshire-accented Peter Cushing.
Take Two: Dial 666 for Warner
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