Make The Case: 5 Essential Christopher Lee Films

3. The Devil Rides Out (1968)

If you’ve noticed that a lot of these movies are associated with Hammer, you’re not wrong. At the same time, it is fairly difficult to disassociate Lee from the studio that allowed him to secure a legacy, while also keeping him gainfully employed for several decades. Based on a Richard Matheson story, The Devil Rides Out is pretty freaking silly. It also features Lee in a rare heroic role, and he clearly has a blast with the opportunity to showcase his versatility. He is the highlight of a film that is quite frankly a hell of a lot of fun.

 

4. The Wicker Man (1973)

The Nicolas Cage-heavy remake is bad. Really bad. Really, really, really bad. When you’ve seen the original film, which is quite frankly one of the scariest, strangest horror films ever made, the remake is even worse. There is a lot to love about this story of a religious police officer whose investigation of a missing child brings him to a very weird, very tiny island community off the coast of Scotland. The Wicker Man carries a very strange sense of humor throughout, but this is undercut constantly with the feeling that something deeply wrong is occurring with these people. We suspect it’s not going to end well for the police officer, played beautifully by Edward Woodward (Hot Fuzz), but we don’t know for sure. We really can’t begin to figure out the true severity of the whole mystery that permeates the increasingly odd behavior of the townspeople.

Christopher Lee stands at the center of this masterpiece. His performance here is perhaps more terrifying than any monster he ever played. His swift movement from charming, even generous, to the kind of fanaticism that turns people by the thousands on to a very special brand of Kool-Aid is a staggering highlight in his career. Lee was capable of expressing dozens of different ideas and personas within the broader concept of villainy. There is nothing hammy or forced about how incredibly scary his character in The Wicker Man is. It is a truly great performance that is all the greater for standing out in such an amazing-across-the-board film.

 

5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

The fact that we just skipped several decades to go from number four to number five isn’t because Lee didn’t make any good movies between 1973 and 2001. It’s simply that difficult to choose just five roles that defined a career that no actor will ever repeat, or even come close to duplicating. It is simply impossible to not include his riveting performance as Saruman the White. Lee supposedly read the trilogy every year for much of his adult life, and mentioned many times over the years that he was a massive fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. He was also the only actor from both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogies to have actually met the author.

All of that is neat trivia, but never lose sight of the fact that Lee gives an outstanding villain performance, several decades after he had started on that path. At an age when most actors are either dying or retiring, Lee was embarking on an extraordinary resurgence. His association with the likes of Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, and even George Lucas allowed Lee to prove that until the very end of his life, he was still an unbelievably creative credit to his profession. The Fellowship of the Ring is perhaps the best of his roles from this period of his career. There are a great many things in the first of the film trilogy that stand out and captivate in the best way possible. You better believe that Lee stands near the top of that list.