10 most memorable acts of cowardice in movies

[Diary of a Country Musician]

K-19, when a Soviet submarine guy refuses to work on the problem.

[art...@yahoo.com]

On Sep 18, 12:59 pm, Diary of a Country Musician

<bosleycrowt...@live.com> wrote:
> K-19, when a Soviet submarine guy refuses to work on the problem.

Brave Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

[SSS DDD]

Robert Vaughn In Mag 7

[Jim G.]

art...@yahoo.com sent the following on 9/18/2011 5:46 PM:

His minstrel was awesome.

--
Jim G.
Waukesha, WI

[john smith]

Saving Private Ryan where "typewriter boy" watches his fellow American
soldier get knifed in chest by German, He just cowers in hallway.....

I seem to remember Eddie Albert do something cowardly in war movie
Attack, can somebody help me out?

[Car...@aol.com]

Eddie Albert in "Attack."

John L

[Richard Brooks]

john smith said the following on 19/09/2011 03:35:

Lots of it! Pacing up and down and giving out tactical justifications
to the lower ranks which are really reasons for him not be be out
there in harm's way and losing the plot in the process.

Then there was brave young Richard Attenborough who had at least two
cowardly roles thrust on him. I'm sure back then people were as now
in that some could not separate the actor from the acting.

1. In Which We Serve (1942). The powder handler who can't take it and
leaves his post. He's actually uncredited in the film, I've just
found out.

2. Dunkirk (1958). The spiv who would rather get on with business at
home.

Stewart Granger in Waterloo Road (1945) as another spiv in WWII who
had a 'doctored' doctor's note as to why he couldn't fight where he
could drink and creep around the women at home while the men were out
fighting.

[tomcervo]

On Sep 18, 10:38 pm, Car...@aol.com wrote:
> Eddie Albert in "Attack."
>
> John L

Ironic in that as a boat officer, Albert rescued Marines under heavy
fire at Tarawa, and book-ended by Wayne Morris as the craven Lt. in
"Paths of Glory"; Morris earned the Navy Cross as a fighter pilot.
They played the worst kind of coward--the officer who gets his men
killed to save his own skin, as opposed to a private who fails under
fire--and both in real life were emphatically not.

An acute character was played by Van Johnson in "Battleground". He
gets up and runs away during an ambush and stops when he sees the new
kid has followed him, sure that the old hand is planning a
counterattack. He wasn't, but does anyway, and when the kid
complements him, replies with a "yeah" that lets us know what was
going on. i also enjoyed that the real hero of the ambush, who starts
an effective counterfire, and is acknowledged by the guys in the
squad, was played by the unheroic-looking Herbert Anderson.

[Halmyre]

On Sep 19, 12:45 pm, Richard Brooks <richardbro...@bettina-howard.com>
wrote:

> john smith said the following on 19/09/2011 03:35:
>
> > Saving Private Ryan where "typewriter boy" watches his fellow American
> > soldier get knifed in chest by German, He just cowers in hallway.....
>
> > I seem to remember Eddie Albert do something cowardly in war movie
> > Attack, can somebody help me out?
>
> Lots of it!  Pacing up and down and giving out tactical justifications
> to the lower ranks which are really reasons for him not be be out
> there in harm's way and losing the plot in the process.
>
> Then there was brave young Richard Attenborough who had at least two
> cowardly roles thrust on him.  I'm sure back then people were as now
> in that some could not separate the actor from the acting.
>
> 1. In Which We Serve (1942). The powder handler who can't take it and
> leaves his post.  He's actually uncredited in the film, I've just
> found out.
>

ISTR Stanley Baker's character in The Cruel Sea was a bit of a coward.
Or was he just a bully?

--
Halmyre

[art...@yahoo.com]

On Sep 18, 12:59 pm, Diary of a Country Musician
<bosleycrowt...@live.com> wrote:

> K-19, when a Soviet submarine guy refuses to work on the problem.

Guy Pearce giving in to the system at the end of LA Confidential

[Stone me]

"The Caine Mutiny":
I never understood the technical details, but Captain Queeg seems
to have been regarded in such terms.
Something to do with the scene where he sailed over his own towline,
was it?

In the film "Cross of Iron", Captain Stransky seems to be a candidate.


Decorated war hero Audie Murphy plays The Youth in "Red Badge of Courage"
who runs away after his first experiences in battle.

In "The Fighting 69th" Jimmy Cagney plays one of his best roles, beginning
with
the steetwise braggart, and morphing into something of the above
description.

Stone me.

[Halmyre]

Not sure about that one.

--
Halmyre

[Car...@aol.com]

On Monday, September 19, 2011 8:48:55 AM UTC-5, Stone me wrote:
> "The Caine Mutiny":
> I never understood the technical details, but Captain Queeg seems
> to have been regarded in such terms.
> Something to do with the scene where he sailed over his own towline,
> was it?

That action is perhaps not so much cowardice as it is representative of his neglet of duty while indulging his paranoid obsessions with discipline. He was so concerned with berating a sailor with his shirttail untucked, he didn't notice the ship was traveling in a circle and over its own towline. His attempts to cover up the action from the top brass could be seen as cowardice, however.

His revealed himself a coward when ship and crew were endangered during a raging storm. He became a deer frozen in the headlights, unable to make a decision, so his first officer (Van Johnson) takes command in a spur-of-the-moment mutiny in order to save the day.

> In the film "Cross of Iron", Captain Stransky seems to be a candidate.
>
>
> Decorated war hero Audie Murphy plays The Youth in "Red Badge of Courage"
> who runs away after his first experiences in battle.

A shell-shocked kid in his first taste of battle. When he returns to his company (and gets away with an "I got lost" excuse), he tries to compensate for his own shame by carrying the flag and being the first to charge into any battle. Whether his actions are courageous or foolhardy is a matter of debate.


John L

[Michael OConnor]

> > Guy Pearce giving in to the system at the end of LA Confidential
>
> Not sure about that one.
>

I think he cut a deal that helped his career and would help the
department in the long run. At the end of the LA Confidential you
knew in 15 years he would be the Police Commissioner of the city of LA
(and he knew it too; it was clear he was being groomed to eventually
take over the department) and the higher he got in the system the
easier it would be for him to weed out all the bad apples in the
department. And I think he realized during the course of the movie
that he also needed some goon type cops (like the Russell Crowe
character) in the department provided he could keep a short leash on
them.

[Rich]

Diary of a Country Musician <bosleyc...@live.com> wrote in
news:9ead55d4-5f6b-47b6...@z41g2000yqb.googlegroups.com:

> K-19, when a Soviet submarine guy refuses to work on the problem.

Kirk Douglas in "The Final Countdown" when he doesn't attack the Japs.

[tomcervo]

On Sep 22, 9:33 pm, Rich <n...@nowhere.com> wrote:

> Diary of a Country Musician <bosleycrowt...@live.com> wrote innews:9ead55d4-5f6b-47b6...@z41g2000yqb.googlegroups.com:
>
> > K-19, when a Soviet submarine guy refuses to work on the problem.
>
> Kirk Douglas in "The Final Countdown" when he doesn't attack the Japs.

Not really. This was covered in the "City at the Edge of Forever" ep
of "Star Trek"

[Mack A. Damia]

"Titanic" (1997)

Joseph Bruce Ismay, chairman of the Titanic's shipping company. On
that terrifying night in 1912, he got into a lifeboat with the women
and children ... and survived.

Some reports say he helped the women and children into the lifeboats
and climbed in after them because there was nobody else around.

[tomcervo]

Or his board's decision to throw him to the wolves to hide their own
culpability in the disaster. They were the ones who allowed a ship to
sail without enough lifeboats--who'd cut the number of boats carried
to make first class more roomy and luxurious.
The chain of decisions involved in the sinking is so egregiously
incompetent that at least one author tried to prove that the sinking
was a vast insurance scheme that went wrong. Part of the brief was a
plotting of the iceberg warnings received by Titanic all that day--
it's like she steamed into a pocket of bergs.

[Stone me]

"tomcervo" <paradi...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:7f2c10d8-ce24-418a...@p4g2000vbp.googlegroups.com...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I did hear that explained as the desire of the owners to set fast speeds
perhaps even record speeds.
There was, I understand, fierce competition for passengers.
The shortest distance being the unsafe route.

Stone me.

[Mack A. Damia]

On Fri, 23 Sep 2011 16:29:26 +0100, "Stone me" <sun...@boulevard.cpm>
wrote:

One of those tragedies where there were a lot of factors. Full speed
ahead through an ice field was probably not the best idea, but the
captain wanted to set a record on the maiden voyage.

It's often said that if the ship had been alkowed to hit the iceberg
head-on instead of veering, the damage and loss of life would not have
been as great.

One of those assanine things: the Californian that warned The Titanic
of ice fields by Morse but later ignored the initial SOS mesage sent
by the Titanic. This is from memory. At least one major liner that
was close enough to save most if not all of the passengers, but the
distress signals were ignored as "fireworks".

Not enough lifeboats. Smart move.

[tomcervo]

On Sep 23, 5:52 pm, Mack A. Damia <mybaconbu...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> One of those assanine things:  the Californian that warned The Titanic
> of ice fields by Morse but later ignored the initial SOS mesage sent
> by the Titanic.  This is from memory.   At least one major liner that
> was close enough to save most if not all of the passengers, but the
> distress signals were ignored as "fireworks".

They were thought to be company signals, from one ship to another.
Rockets then were not exclusively distress signals.

That business about the icefield was Peter Padfield's book in 1960 or
so. He also corrected plotted the actual site of the Titantic's wreck,
based on where the Carpathian found them and the drift of the current
from the sinking. The Californian in relation to the Titanic was not
where the inquiry said it was--Titanic's radioed position was off.
(Californian's radio was off as well, thanks to the same Board of
Trade that allowed too few lifeboats--radio in 1912 was a convenience
for passengers and not an essential for safety.) So if Californian had
set off at once through the icefield at a safe speed to the radioed
location, they'd have arrived at the wrong spot, hours late.

[Mack A. Damia]

Memory is hazy, and I'm too tired to do a Google, but wasn't the
Titanic visible to at least one other liner as it was sinking?

[tomcervo]

You can see a long way on a calm sea at night, and the officers on the
Californian could see the rockets of the Titanic. Far more intriguing
is the story of the ship seen by the Titanic as passing on a course
that could not have been the Californian's. The most likely story is
that it was an illegal seal poacher that took off as soon as it was
sighted and kept silent afterwards.

[Halmyre]

On Sep 19, 3:35 am, eddyg...@msn.com (john smith) wrote:
> Saving Private Ryan where "typewriter boy" watches his fellow American
> soldier get knifed in chest by German, He just cowers in hallway.....
>

That was one of the stupidest aspects of Ryan - taking a non-
combatant into the field for his language skills (does he ever
actually use them in a way that justifies this?) just to heap
humiliation on him, and then putting him up against the comic-opera
Nazi.

--
Halmyre