Credit: Far Out / Alamy
There are pros and cons to having so many different streaming sites all vying for our hard-earned pocket money at one time; yes, we get plenty of variety and some fantastic TV and movies. But some great works also get missed, like Tenzing starring Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe.
Now, it hasn’t been missed entirely, of course, plenty of folk have Apple TV and will have seen the gripping real-life tale of the first mountaineer to reach the summit of Everest, and no doubt a good deal more will too. But due to the sheer weight of content available on Netflix, Apple, Paramount, Mubi, etc, etc, it’s impossible to see everything that’s great, and some fantastic movies will slip by the wayside.
Dafoe, for one, has been in several examples of these, by simple virtue of the fact he is incredibly prolific (he has appeared in ten films in just the last 18 months) and also generally only makes excellent, highly interesting movies as a rule of thumb. Aside from Tenzing, Dafoe was in all kinds of curiosities like The Legend of Ochi, The Souffleur, and Late Fame within that time period, none of which anyone saw but all of which were far more interesting than most actors manage in three times that long.
His partnerships with directors have also turned out to be immensely fruitful; aside from two films with Yorgos Lanthimos, Dafoe has probably done his best recent work alongside Robert Eggers, including the brilliant tête-à-tête The Lighthouse with Robert Pattinson, the little-seen but fantastic horror Nosferatu and the 10th Century Viking epic The Northman starring Alexander Skarsgård. The two of them aren’t done either, because on New Year’s Day 2027 we get another one with Werwulf, which looks absolutely terrifying to be honest.
Dafoe has been responsible for so much excellent experimental cinema over a more than 40-year period now that perhaps it’s something of an eyebrow raiser to know that when it comes to his own favourite film of all time, the 71-year-old plays it very safe by selecting a genuinely timeless classic: a historical epic which has gone down as a landmark in cinema.
He told Deseret News: “One of my favorites, you’ll probably be surprised, is Gone With the Wind. It works on an old, creaky Hollywood level, and it works on something beyond that level. It’s flat-out melodrama, but I think it’s a weirdly robust and complex drama.”
Starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, the film was an adaptation of an earlier novel set in the American Civil War, as slavery comes to an end and Gable’s charismatic scoundrel Rhett Butler sweeps the Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara off her feet in a tale of warring families, class systems and the pain of losing soldiers and children.
Directed by Victor Fleming, it was an enormous undertaking, running to almost four hours long, costing an absolute fortune, and it paid off immediately. It became the highest-grossing movie of all time, and still is, when adjusted for inflation, and was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, winning ten, becoming less of a motion picture and more of a cultural touchstone.
Meanwhile, Dafoe will continue his run of appearing in countless films into the new year; aside from Werewulf with Aaron Taylor-Johnson he has four more on the go and counting, including Oliver Stone’s latest White Lies alongside Michael Douglas and an Adam Sandler thriller called Time Out.
