TCM’s Man Stuff Roundtable: What’s the Manliest Movie Ever?

What you’re looking at is a weekly series where TCM asks its writers to chime in on a given question of manliness.  This week: what’s the manliest movie?

JasonB: I love movies.  I watch a ton of them.  And I’ve narrowed it down to two, but I can’t decide, so you’re getting both.

The manliest film ever is 1988’s Die Hard.  NYPD officer John McClane, as played by Bruce Willis, is the prototypical everyman turned superhero.  He finds himself in an impossible situation – saving a group of hostages, including his wonderfully big-haired 80’s wife, from a group of international thieves posing as terrorists – and he kicks everyone’s ass.  This movie has everything you need from a great action movie – huge explosions, bad guys returning from the “dead,” and (warning: spoiler!) one evil genius Alan Rickman getting his just desserts at the hands of our hero.  John McClane is the man we all aspire to be.  He is competent, calm, and when acting to protect his family capable of extraordinary acts of violence.  McClane doesn’t relish in the destruction he has wrought (well, maybe just a little); he walks through the broken glass and flying bullets with the sigh and grimace of a man about to do a hard day’s work, just because he knows it’s what he has to do. Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker.

One cannot question the manliness of 1997’s Starship Troopers.  Heinlein fans, sit the fuck back down, and put away that baseball bat.  As a fan of many things science fiction and an avid reader, I am well aware that Paul Verhoeven’s summer fling has almost zero resemblance to the Hugo Award-winning and much-dissected 1960 novel of the same name.  I know and love the book AND the movie, but it’s because they stimulate entirely different areas of my brain.  For the novel, it’s socio-politics.  For the movie?  It’s tits.  Well, tits and guns.  I guess tits and guns and gigantic CGI bugs dissecting humans and shooting spaceships with butt-goo.  See, Starship Troopers is a perfect movie because it doesn’t take itself seriously.  Yes, it mocks the militarism and deadpan tone of Heinlein’s novel, but it does so with hilarious, over the top propaganda films and matching laser-etched “DEATH FROM ABOVE” tattoos.  Don’t tune in this one for a treatise of facism, do it for the tits.  Would you like to know more?

It's amazing how very, very wrong you all are here.

Wes Crout: Falling Down

David is manlier than Goliath, right?  We cheer for the underdog often enough to consider it a rule, and find ourselves thrilled watching unlikely men become heroes.  Think Rudy, the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Think Forrest Gump and Daniel Larruso.  Think Hillary Clinton.

This prescription causes me to tap the early-90’s on-screen uncorking of white anger Falling Down as the manliest movie of all time.

William “D-FENS” Foster does what most of us want to do every single day.  He wigs the fuck out.  And, really, at nothing more than just a piling on of normal, daily bullshit kinda stress.  But that’s the beauty of it.  Enough is enough.

He’s unabashedly against $.85 cans of soda, aesthetically displeasing fast food, and construction traffic on roads that were fine two days ago.  His path of rampage covers a wide enough swath of Los Angeles to include South Central gang-bangers, a Korean convenience store owner, and fat, rich white guys just trying to enjoy some golf where Mr. Foster would prefer there be a petting zoo.

The poor guy really just wants to get to his daughter’s birthday, for chrissakes.  Everything, it seems, is standing in his way this fateful day, including his estranged wife, Beth.

“Did you know, Beth, that in some South American countries it’s still legal to kill your wife if she insults you?”

If you’re willing to cut your hair into a flat-top and say that shit, you deserve our respecting your manliness.

David Ben:

“Have a brew – don’t cost nothin.”

Animal House is definitely the manliest film ever produced. There’s copious beer consumption. A man chugs a whole bottle of Jack Daniels. One of the guys sleeps with the Dean’s daughter and hits on his wife. They fight ‘the man’ by coordinating an attack on a parade, causing mayhem the town hasn’t seen in decades.

But what makes Animal House manly is the combination of mantastic apathy and ruthless (albeit hilariously discombobulated) determination present throughout. Their actions seem to connote that if the dean cuts their frat’s charter, they just don’t give a damn. They kill a horse in the dean’s office and leave it there for him to deal with.

But at the same time, when the charter does finally get pulled, do they just roll over an accept it? Nope. Belushi rallies the troops by reminding them that when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor, it wasn’t over. So they jack up some lame ass parade using explosives, cunning leadership, some marbles, and a sick-ass modified car.

Re-up your man points. Go rent Animal House tonight.

Megan Ayers: I JUST watched Die Hard the other day, and besides its obvious manliness factor (let’s refer to that from now on as MF), let’s not forget that the movies teaches us that brains and not brawn gets dudes outta tough situations.

Yeah, Ole Johnny Boy is one tough mutha, but he uses his intellect to beat the bad guys at their own game. Yes, he’s tough as shit, yes, he’s got pinache (sp?) to beat the band, and yes, that’s one hell of a a hair piece, but let me argue for two even more manly films: Cobra Verde . and believe it or not, Knocked Up.

1. Cobra Verde is a Werner Herzog / Klaus Kinsky collaboration where we see Kinsky being his usual untamed, ultra-manly self: shooting shit, having mad sex with Amazonian princesses in fields, taming the, ahem, natives, and generally fucking shit up. He’s tough, he’s crazy, people think he’s a terror, but really, he’s just doing his thing. And let’s face it: white men are ALL about doing their thing.
2. Knocked Up is a quintessential movie about what it means to be a man: to be a loser, to be surprised by the love of your woman, to make mistakes over and over again, and ultimately, to bear witness to the life you’ve created, and see that things aren’t so bad after all, because at the end of the day, even more the most manly of men, it’s about love, right? I think Pineapple Express takes those themes even further (especially all of the man-love that’s going on in that movie–huge, HUGE fan of man-love btw) but does so with explosions and pot and eating Nerds out of stripper’s asses. Who can complain about that?

That’s my three cents.

Hitechhifi (or, Mike):

Yes yes, while all these are good (and I didn’t read them to prove to you how good they are), I see no martial arts movies at all in this list.  Why, I ask you WHY have none of you thought of the most manly endeavor to ever have graced celluloid: beating the living breath out of another man with your bare fucking hands?

Fighter in the Wind recants the story of a young Choi Baedal (Mas Oyama), a Korean refugee in Japan, who wishes to fly in the Japanese Air Force.  Held captive by the Japanese military, he is forced to fight an officer (Mayasa Kato) who turns out to be a 4th dan Karate master.  As it happens, the officer’s kitana wants to lick his back in a very non-sexy way.  Being only a practitioner of Korean boxing, Baedal loses, and has to lick the sole of Kato’s boot.

Baedal starts training under the tutelage of a Karate master with a hook for a hand.  This in and of itself should show you how badass this movie is.  Do you know karate?  Do you have a hook for a hand???  Then you should shut the fuck up and watch.

Long story short, he gets hit by a car, pissed on, stabbed, shot at, and sees a mentor killed before taking the works of Miyamoto Musashi out into the foothills of Fuji-san (Mount Fuji for you fer-en-ers.)  There he eats nothing but forest crap that he doesn’t know how to cook, chops rocks in half with his bare hands, climbs an ice fall with nothing but gardening tools, pounds his chest with tree trunks, and kicks everything in sight in a time before Chuck Norris knew that kicking shit was cool.

I won’t give away the ending, but this guy (in real life and in the movie) beats the ever living fuck out of almost everyone in the movie.  He only fights for challenges, to better himself, and to defend others, and to top it all off – he still finds the time to have a cheeky romance with a hot Japanese chick.

So don’t give me the “Oh but Ong Bak / Kickboxer / The One / Kung Fu Hustle are so much” whatthefuck more that you want to insert at the end of that sentence.  I don’t want to hear it.  I’ve seen them.  The only drawback is that FitW is subtitled – and honestly if you’re not man enough to be able to read and fight, I don’t think we should be having this conversation.  Case in point: Fighter in the Wind is way cooler than your dad’s Die Hard, your sister’s Knocked Up, or the guy across the street with the lazy eye’s Falling Down.  As a side note: Starshoop whoopers???(sic) really JasonB?  I would have had more respect for you If you’d said Dune.

The Ed:

It’s amazing how very, very wrong you all are here.  Seriously, the mind reels.  The manliest film ever, hands down, no arguments, is Cool Hand Luke.  This is fucking science, people.  It’s observable fact.

That said, I didn’t arrive at this without thinking about other movies that you all missed, like EVERY JOHN WAYNE MOVIE, or EVERY CLINT EASTWOOD WESTERN.  True, these are all from what could (and probably should) be considered the “Golden Age of Manliness.” but the gold standard upon which all manly movies are judged, and rightly so, is Cool Hand Luke.  Let’s take a look, shall we?

First of all, I’m assuming you’ve seen this movie, because if you haven’t, you’ve lost your first four Black Sabbath albums and can turn in your nuts (where applicable) to Janet at the front desk.

Luke gets arrested for cracking open parking meters.  Why is he doing this?  Because he fucking feels like it.  Dragline whips his ass and he won’t stay down.  Why?  Because touch a dick, that’s why.  He keeps escaping from prison.  Why?  Because fuck you.  Luke is, essentially, every manly thing you’ve ever wanted to be and never could.  He’s punk rock before punk rock.  He’s the bad guy AND the God-damned hero.  Which isn’t to say he’s a role model, per se, but who really wants to be Charles Barkley?  Maybe that’s a bad example.  Point is, Luke does what he wants, even in the face of all law and, hell, rationality.  It’s a standard we should live up to but not necessarily repeat in the same way.  And that’s the beauty of the whole thing.

Sure, throwing your life away over stealing change is incredibly stupid, but ho-lee shit is it manly.

All this said, Cool Hand Luke has managed to make its way in to just about every piece of entertainment you love in the way of referential material.  It’s woven into the thread of our general consciousness now–this means that it’s not only the manliest movie ever, but that it’s flat out one of the greatest movies ever.

Wow.  Now that I’ve written that, I’m thinking of yelling at myself for not choosing Raging Bull.

All this, of course, begs the question: what movies did we miss and why are they manlier than what we’ve got here?

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