10 Henchman Movie Roles Made Epic By Casting

It's still surprising that Mel Brooks' send-up of Hitchcock films, High Anxiety, isn't as well-received as the rest of his seventies output. The Master of Suspense himself reportedly loved it, but critics considered it uneven at best.

Perhaps the disconnect is not any fault of Brooks' film, which is genuinely funny, but that Hitchcock's work required no parody. He had, perhaps even intentionally given his reputation, sent up himself when he made North by Northwest with screenwriter Ernest Lehman whose goal was to write "the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures."

Every trope is there, from his favourite Wrong Man set-up, to perfectly staged moments of suspense that work despite their ludicrous set pieces and a healthy strain of morbid humour. And, in perhaps one of Hitchcock's most common subversive turns, the film's heavy (James Mason) has a henchman with a clear infatuation with his employer.

It's unclear how noticeable it was to audiences in 1950 that Martin Laundau's Leonard was homosexual, but it's obvious now. And he had all the stereotypically over-the-top signifigiers fifties audiences deemed as gay: he was keenly interested in fashion and soft-spoken.

You can't help but feel a little sorry for Leonard when he realizes the love of his life was abandoning him for an undercover spy - and a woman, no less. Landau plays it all-out heartbroken, and his devotion is sympathetic up until the point when our heroes' lives are at his whim.