The two “perfect” movies Dennis Quaid can’t stop watching: “Every time it comes on”
Filed among those actors who you know are going to be good in basically everything you see them in, Dennis Quaid has been doing movies for a long old time now, but if the reaction to his latest film Broke is anything to go by, there’s plenty of juice in the tank to go.
The Netflix original is one of those word-of-mouth hits, rather like the fantastic Rebel Ridge from 2024 that keeps creeping up the streaming platform’s top ten until a lot of people are talking about it. It’s a modern-day western that tells the story of a down-on-his-luck rodeo rider played by Wyatt Russell who gets trapped in a blizzard, having a bit of an existential crisis and trying to convince his father, played by Quaid, that he shouldn’t have to join the Marines.
It’s the latest in a solid run of work by Quaid that includes the film about anti-government extremists Sovereign, with Nick Offerman, and a fantastic performance in Demi Moore’s The Substance. Quaid was stomach-churningly grotesque as the television chief that embodied the grimmest side of Hollywood, corrupt, perma-tanned, sweating, power-crazed and shovelling seafood into his mouth in astonishing close-up. He was terrifically hateable and served to encourage the right amount of sympathy for Moore’s desperate fading star.
Speaking of great Quaid performances, it’s well worth rewinding back some 42 years to the epic space adventure The Right Stuff, which earned a ‘Best Picture’ Academy Award nomination in 1983. Inexplicably a box office bomb on release, it tells the story of the various test pilots who were to become the first US astronauts, in an exhaustive but never less than engrossing adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel.
With a running time close to four hours, it is a movie that rewards the dedication to sit through it in spades, at times funny, sometimes thrilling and always fascinating.
Quaid went on to act in another type of space, this time Innerspace, in a bit of a cult 1980s classic alongside Martin Short before issues with cocaine addiction and weight gain led to a struggle for more than ten years. He made quite a comeback, however, in Oliver Stone’s American football drama Any Given Sunday and then had an underground hit with the excellent Frequency with Jim Caviziel.
He’s since had a very solid couple of decades, picking up award nominations for films like Far From Heaven and as Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship and when asked about his own favourite films, Quaid goes for tried and tested, outlining some classics from his formative years as an actor, mostly in the late 1960s and ‘70s.
He told Rotten Tomatoes: “I think my favourite movie is Lawrence of Arabia. To me, it’s just about a perfect film, in the performances and what it means to me. I saw it as a boy, and I just can’t stop watching it, every time it comes on. All David Lean’s movies, really. I love Doctor Zhivago, too.”
Elsewhere, he picked out the little-known but brilliant Scarecrow with Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, plus the Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway masterpiece Bonnie and Clyde from 1967. Quaid also went with Jack Nicholson’s Five Easy Pieces, the thriller from 1970 about an oil rig worker visiting his dying father.
Finally, for another faultless choice, Quaid selected the finest Mafia film of all time, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, explaining, “I’m gonna say The Godfather, the first one. That’s another movie that’s just about a perfect film, you know, from a great filmmaker in his prime”.
