By Martin Keady · October 16, 2023
If the idea of the Good Guy Turned Bad is arguably the most important theme in all storytelling (especially all Western storytelling), the reverse – the Bad Guy Turned Good – is also enormously important. It shows that even the most apparently irredeemable characters can redeem themselves.
It is a theme that exists throughout all of cinema and indeed all screen storytelling, from the original Golden Age of Cinema to the current Golden Age of Television. The six scripts in this collection all demonstrate that one of the most satisfying cinematic/screen-storytelling journeys of them all is the transformation from the negative to the positive and from a state of terrible self-absorption to a state of divine acceptance, in which it is possible to embrace virtually everyone and everything.
Casablanca is an eternal fixture in any list of the best films ever made, especially any list of the best Hollywood films ever made, and keeps being included in Script Collections because it is a truly timeless classic. Among its many timeless themes is that of the Bad Guy Turned Good, or, more precisely, the transformation of an individual who has been made indifferent to the suffering of others because of his own suffering into one who puts the happiness of others – and by extension the possible salvation of the whole world – before his own happiness.
When Casablanca begins, Rick Blaine is a nightclub owner who is effectively a one-man embodiment of American reluctance to enter WW2. When Ugarte, the criminal who comes into possession of the letters of transit that act as the film’s McGuffin, appeals to Rick for help to save him from the police, Rick refuses. This confirms the truth of his earlier exchange with Renault, the corrupt police chief: “I stick my neck out for nobody,” he says, to which Renault pointedly replies, “A wise foreign policy.”
Casablanca (1942)
The rest of the film is a near-miraculous revelation of what had made Rick so seemingly callous (what he regards as the utter brutality of his rejection by Ilsa in Paris) and his subsequent transformation, or rather return to his better self, when he learns the truth about his supposed “rejection” (Ilsa had only left him when she learned that her husband, war hero Victor Laszlo, is still alive). And of course, the film culminates not in Rick’s reunion with Ilsa, because he realizes that she is even more important to Laszlo and his fight than she is to him, but in both the previously cynical Rick and Renault joining forces, first to slay the Nazi (Major Strasser) trying to stop them and then to continue their fight after the credits roll. Truly, this is “the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” not just between Rick and Renault but, by implication, between America and its Western allies.
Read More: Five Plot Point Breakdown: Casablanca
Jack Nicholson excels at playing bad guys turned good, and arguably the greatest of all his flawed heroes is Randle P. McMurphy.
In One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the long-gestating screen adaptation of Ken Kesey’s seminal 1962 novel of the same name, McMurphy initially thinks that he has achieved a master-stroke when he secures a transfer to a psychiatric hospital, on the grounds that he is insane. However, once he is inside the mental hospital, having pretended to be mentally ill, McMurphy finds it impossible to prove that he actually is sane after all.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is emblematic of the great 1970s Hollywood movies that didn’t glorify but instead forensically examined antiheroes such as McMurphy. For all his lying, cheating and sexual predation, he is nothing if not tremendously, almost obscenely alive, and that inevitably puts him at odds with Nurse Ratched, the onomatopoeically named healthcare professional in charge of his ward, who would rather her charges were doped up to the eyeballs than betray any semblance of independent thought. In one of the greatest endings of any film, Ratched ultimately wins, but McMurphy’s inspiration is such that even if he himself cannot escape mental imprisonment, someone else will.
Robert De Niro’s character in Midnight Run, Jack Walsh, is an archetypal bad guy turned good.
Like Rick in Casablanca, it would be more accurate to describe bounty hunter Walsh as a good guy turned bad who subsequently rediscovers his true and good self. In the course of the film, during which he has to escort Charles Grodin’s accountant who has robbed the Mafia from New York to L.A. within a matter of days in order to redeem a bail bond paid for him, we learn that Walsh had originally been an honest cop who had been driven out of his job because he refused to take bribes.
Midnight Run (1988)
This information virtually has to be prized from Walsh by the accountant (Jonathan “The Duke” Mardukas) while they cross America, after “The Duke” feigns fear of flying to escape being taken to L.A. by plane. It is a classic case of the characters in a film making both external and internal journeys simultaneously. However, if that sounds too dry or academic, then consider this instead: in the great decade of buddy movies (the 1980s), Midnight Run is the greatest buddy movie of them all, combining action, comedy and genuinely heart-rending drama, even pathos. That is despite the fact that the two characters are hardly “buddies” at all. In the end, however, just like Rick and Renault at the end of Casablanca, they have begun “a beautiful friendship,” even if it is incredibly unlikely that they will ever see each other again.
Oskar Schindler is the baddest guy on this list because he was a real German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who procured the Polish uniforms that German soldiers wore in order to claim that Poland had actually attacked Germany and not the other way around. However, Schindler is also the greatest bad guy turned good on this list, because he atoned for his earlier sins by saving over a thousand Polish Jews from extermination in Nazi concentration camps by employing them in his factories and then helping them to escape.
Indeed, Oskar Schindler is the embodiment of what might be called The Schindler Principle, namely that sometimes it takes a bad guy to do a good deed. It is precisely because Schindler was so deeply embedded within the Nazi hierarchy that he was able to effect his good deeds; it needed Schindler, a terribly flawed human being, rather than a Saint to save those people.
Read More: The 15 Most Important War Movies
In the world of animation, the baddest guy turned good is Gru, the criminal mastermind who is the villain and hero of Despicable Me.
The tagline for Despicable Me really does say it all: “Superbad. Superdad.” It is Gru’s journey between those two states of super-dom that provides the storyline, as he initially enlists a trio of cookie-selling orphans to aid him in his latest and most diabolical plan (to steal the moon, in an attempt to achieve one-upmanship on the newest bad guy on the block, Vector, who has merely stolen a pyramid), before gradually and reluctantly succumbing to the irresistible gravitational pull of the children’s innocence.
Fleabag proves that bad gals, just like bad guys, can turn out good. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s already legendary television series exemplifies how the increasing access for female writers and filmmakers to tell their stories provides the ability to look unflinchingly at themselves and their characters’ failings.
Self-absorption proves to be the least of Fleabag’s failings because over the course of the first season, we learn that her low self-esteem, which is largely disguised by self-mockery, is rooted in her terrible betrayal of a friend. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that she should literally seek some form of redemption by pursuing “The Hot Priest” of season two. And once again, the first episode of season two sets out Fleabag’s stall perfectly. Indeed, alongside the jaunt to India in Seinfeld, it is one of the greatest examples of comic storytelling in reverse, where the bloody aftermath is shown first and then eventually, hilariously explained.
Superficially, there may appear little to link Casablanca with Fleabag, but both these classic examples of screen storytelling show how the bad guy (in the now-common gender-neutral sense of the word) becoming good is one of the most satisfying, indeed profound, of all story arcs. In effect, it is as if Eve somehow puts the bite back in the apple and paradise is regained.
Read More: 30 Fleabag Quotes That Prove Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the GOAT
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