Quentin Tarantino names “one of the greatest performances ever made”
There are few actors and directors who, when they’re talking, you better take note. When it comes to actors, we’d listen wholeheartedly to the likes of Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis, and, as for filmmakers, we’d listen to every word of the likes of Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, and Quentin Tarantino have to say, with the latter having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of cinema.
Working in a video store in his youth, Tarantino’s database of movie references was ticking away long before he’d ever even picked up a camera. Indeed, it’s not just cinema that Tarantino pays attention to either, absorbing information from music, arts, culture and more, telling The Talks: “[My] head is a sponge. I listen to what everyone says, I watch little idiosyncratic behaviour, people tell me a joke and I remember it. People tell me an interesting story in their life and I remember it”.
A lover of world cinema, Tarantino isn’t willing to discriminate based on genre or country in which any given film was made, with his list of favourites including an eclectic range of classics. Among his list are the western flicks The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Sergio Leone and the influential Howard Hawks movie Rio Bravo from 1959, which would go on to inspire countless other filmmakers.
Speaking about Hawks’ movie during a tour of Video Archives, the very store in which he worked, the director stated in Quentin Tarantino Hollywood’s Boy Wonder, “This is, as far as I’m concerned, another one of the greatest movies ever made…Ricky Nelson is so cool in this movie and Dean Martin gives one of the greatest performances ever made too. Performances are a big thing of mine”.
Martin was perhaps better known for his music career, giving the world such iconic hits as ‘Everybody Loves Somebody’, ‘That’s Amore’ and the Christmas hit ‘Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!’.
Yet, Martin also was an incredible performer, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with such titans as John Wayne and Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo. The star also thrived in Henry Levin’s Murderers’ Row and Phil Karlson’s The Silencers, even being nominated for three Primetime Emmys for his time on The Dean Martin Show.
As well as Martin, Tarantino also praises the performance of John Travolta in Brian De Palma’s 1981 movie Blow Out in the same video, stating: “I think it’s one of the greatest movies ever made, it’s Brian De Palma’s finest film, which means it’s one of the finest movies ever made, because, as we all know, Brian De Palma is the greatest director of his generation. John Travolta, by the way, gives one of the greatest performances of all time in this movie”.
Take a look at the full video below, in which Tarantino bounces frantically around the video store, picking out some of his all-time favourites, including such films as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and his own movie Reservoir Dogs.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.