The Hans Gruber villain that came before ‘Die Hard’
Everyone loves a villain. While most audience members with half a conscience naturally morally root for the hero of an action or thriller movie, it’s fair to say that without a quality antagonist, a deranged mastermind hellbent on world domination, then such films would be starkly lacking one of its main appeal points. Take Die Hard, for instance.
Could the classic action flick even be conceivable without the brilliance of Alan Rickman and his sophisticated yet ruthless villain, Han Gruber? Almost certainly not, for it’s Gruber that provides much of the tension of the film and gives Bruce Willis’ John McClane a point of adversity on which to take out his frustrations and answer back with his iconic cheek one-liners.
With an ice-cold attitude, high intelligence and suave demeanour, Gruber is no slouch in the villain department, and his takeover and heist of the Nakatomi Plaza on Christmas Eve proves that he possesses the calculated precision of an evil genius, capable of manipulating those around him, to achieve his heinous ambitions.
Rickman has given several legendary performances throughout his career, but perhaps Gruber is one of his best, and the actor has undoubtedly made the character one of the most memorable antagonists in the history of cinema. But it appears that Rickman was not the first actor to play a villain named Hans Gruber…
The truth is that there had already been a Hans Gruber baddie some 22 years before Die Hard was released in the 1966 spy comedy movie Our Man Flint. A parody of the James Bond film series, directed by Daniel Mann, Our Man Flint sees James Coburn play spy Derek Flint as he saves the world from a trio of mad scientists who threaten the world with their weather-control machine.
Doctors Krupov, Wu and Schneider are the heads of the malicious Galaxy organisation and the film’s main villains, but there’s also a minor villain called Hans Gruber. This Gruber is an agent of Galaxy and a former Hitler Youth Movement escapee who is sent to take care of Flint in Marseille.
Sadly, at least for Gruber, though, he is actually the first bad guy (bar a handful of dopey guards) to fall victim to Flint’s brilliance. Our hero, Flint, is found by Gruber in a toilet in a smoky bar, but Flint swiftly delivers a karate chop that stuns the villain before he is stabbed to death.
So while the name Hans Gruber immediately recalled images of Alan Rickman sitting atop the Nakatomi Plaza in a suit, delivering cool messages of villainous intent over the phone to John McClane, one ought not to forget his unfortunate namesake who tried (and failed) to dish out the bad guy attitude over two decades before.
