10 Henchman Movie Roles Made Epic By Casting
1. The Entire Crew(s) That Took Pelham 123
Telling a young person today that Walter Mathauu was once a credible action star is a fairly daunting task. The actor, best known for his grandfatherly parts or as Jack Lemmon's schlub foil, had a solid run in the seventies as a more hard-boiled figure, appearing in The Laughing Policeman, Charley Varrick and most notably The Taking of Pelham 123.
From Morton Freedgood's novel, Joseph Sargeant (of Jaws: The Revenge) directed a fairly legendary crew of terrorists who hijack a New York subway car for a ransom of one million dollars. The hijackers call signs - Mr. Green, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown - would show up in Reservoir Dogs years later.
Mathauu was the wisecracking NYC transit cop tasked with negotiating the ransom.
No great band of criminals would be complete without a great ringleader, and Sargeant had one in Robert Shaw, who played the role with an icy coolness that nicely worked against Mathauu's schlubby cop.
But the crew is rounded out by a gang of mostly name actors - Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo and Earl Hindman. Balsam is the real standout here, with an eccentricity that winds up being his downfall, but each member brings their own unique brand of menace or incompetence to their role.
The film would see two severely inferior remakes, a TV film in 1998 and Tony Scott's brutally loud 2009 film. But even those manage to round out their cast with character actors - first with Vincent D'Onofrio and Richard Schiff, and then later with Luis Guzman and John Turturro.
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