The American Film Institute is doing yet another movie poll, this time of the hundred greatest heroes and villains in movie history. Results will be announced in June, but you can find a list of all the nominated characters at the link above. I actually find the idea behind this list less annoying than some of AFI's past efforts, if only because a great hero doesn't necessarily need to occupy a great movie, so there's no danger of mistaking this list for some kind of authoritative aesthetic ranking. It's a joy to browse the list, actually; almost every name brings back some startling images and emotions that run as deep as my earliest memories of the movies. Some strange omissions (where's Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest?), and I guess it was too late to include Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York, but based upon the list that AFI provides, my own rankings would look something like this:

Heroes:

1. T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia
2. Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. Rick Blaine in Casablanca
4. James Bond in Dr. No
5. Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs

Villains:

1. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs
2. HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. Frank Booth in Blue Velvet
4. Jack Torrance in The Shining
5. Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

It's also interesting to note how many great villains Kubrick provides; in addition to HAL and Jack Torrance, there's Dr. Strangelove, General Ripper, and Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange, each of whom ended up on my short list at one point or another. I guess the nice thing about Kubrick is that he combines a deep pessimism about human nature with an arch, icy obsessiveness that makes everything seem larger than life, which is the perfect combination for a memorable villain, who needn't be recognizably human. This also explains why Kubrick wasn't too good with heroes.