Well, the wait has been an excruciatingly long one, but this week it’s finally over – The Dark Knight, our long-awaited second installment in the head-and-shoulders best superhero franchise currently running, is here at last.

With it, of course, comes the most talked-about performance of the year: Heath Ledger, in one of his final film roles, as The Joker. From everything I’ve seen and heard thus far – and, man, has it been a lot – this is a performance that’s going to get talked about whenever people talk about the greatest bad guys in movie history, so this week I thought I’d take a look back at some other big-name actors who were at their best playing the worst of the worst.

Sir Laurence Olivier as Dr. Christian Szell, Marathon Man

Alright a knight, an Oscar-winner, and the best-known Shakespearean actor on the planet, the ever-dignified Olivier decided to add another title to his resume in 1977: scary-ass mofo. His ex-death camp doctor Christian Szell wasn’t even the main villain in William Goldman’s espionage thriller Marathon Man, but that didn’t stop him from handily stealing the show – the scene in which he tortures Dustin Hoffman’s in-over-his-head hero with a variety of cringe-inducing dental implements has become one of the best remembered squirm sequences in film history, and rightly so.
Olivier earned one of his many Academy Award nominations for the role, reportedly inspired by real-life Nazi torturer Josef Mengele, and also placed the innocent-seeming question, “Is it safe?” up there with the most terrifying lines ever uttered in the movies.

Henry Fonda as Frank, Once Upon a Time in the West

In the 30s, he played a fresh-faced Abe Lincoln. In the 40s, he played a lovestruck Wyatt Earp. In the 50s, he played the most levelheaded of the 12 Angry Men.
In the 60s, he played a dude who shot a little kid in the face, point-blank, then chuckled about it afterward.
Sergio Leone’s epic horse opera Once Upon a Time in the West conjures up one of the most dog-eat-dog western settings this side of Deadwood, and the baddest dog of them all is Henry Fonda’s sneering hired killer Frank – so evil, in fact, he apparently only needs a first name. What makes Frank such an icon of western villainy isn’t just his decidedly casual sadism – it’s also the fact that Fonda’s got such an fatherly, heroic-looking face, it makes the sight of him gunning down an entire family or violently having his way with co-star Claudia Cardinale that much more disturbing to witness. By the end of the nearly three-hour film, you’re clawing at the armrests waiting to see him get pumped full of hot lead.

Dennis Hopper as Frank Booth, Blue Velvet

Nobody ever accused Dennis Hopper of being a particularly grounded guy, but his zoned-out characters in films like Apocalypse Now and Easy Rider at least seemed harmless enough to share a doobie with.
No so Frank Booth, the wild-eyed, sex-crazed, Roy Orbison-loving psychotic that makes Norman Bates seem positively well-adjusted. Played with a mix of soft-spoken menace and full-volume hysterical mega-insanity – sorry, but they haven’t yet invented a word that can accurately describe Frank Booth in a fit of rage – this character is terrifying even by the high standards of David Lynch’s wonderfully warped filmography, and arguably represents the finest work of Hopper’s lengthy career. Whether he’s dazedly lip-synching along to "In Dreams" with a fellow weirdo played by Dean Stockwell, beating the crap out of aw-shucks small-town protagonist Kyle MacLachlan, or horrifically redefining the “S” in S&M, this is one film character that you pray doesn’t have a real-life counterpart.
And, yes, I know that Dennis Hopper is probably the least-famous actor on this list, but I had to include him simply because Frank Booth would eat all of these other villains for breakfast – with a basketful of kittens on the side and a tall glass of anthrax to wash it all down.

Jack Nicholson as The Joker, Batman

Ledger may go down in history as the best onscreen Joker ever, but Jack Nicholson’s hedonistic perma-sneer perfectly suited the tone of Tim Burton’s original Batman film.
Nicholson demanded top billing to appear as the villain in Burton’s dark-yet-campy interpretation of pointy-eared hero’s origin story, and as good as star Michael Keaton was in the title role, ol’ Jack earned his top-dog spot in the credits with a performance that didn’t humanize the Clown Prince of Crime but rather played up his most entertainingly comic book-y qualities. Backed by Prince’s throbbing funk soundtrack and killer production design that perfectly realizes a sort of trippy cartoon version of film noir, Nicholson’s Joker is the loudest and most colorful instrument in a symphony of cinematic excess – and his work is one of the big reasons why Burton’s Batman still has plenty of admirers despite the overwhelming fan support of Nolan’s deeper, grittier caped crusader saga.

Al Pacino as John Milton, The Devil’s Advocate

Satan’s a character that tends to chew scenery in just about anything he shows up in – see, for instance, The Bible – so it’s surprising that it took until 1997 to cast Al Pacino as a thinly veiled version of Christianity’s number-one supervillain.
Trading the usual cloven hooves for a pair of thousand-dollar wingtips, Pacino plays the prince of darkness as a multi-millionaire Manhattan lawyer named John Milton, who bedevils innocent legal hotshot Keanu Reeves into joining his Satanic law firm (now that’s a redundant phrase, har har har) and does his bidding from a ridiculously luxurious office that would make Gordon Gekko green with envy.
Pacino doesn’t get to do his requisite screaming flip-out thing until pretty late in director Taylor Hackford’s overlong but trashily fun combination of legal thriller and religious horror flick, but his performance is an insidiously great one because he’s just way too damn persuasive about why being evil is so awesome – it might have been Billy Joel who said the sinners have much more fun, but nobody argues the point quite as eloquently as this sharp-dressed S.O.B. does.