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Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:

10. Irene Dunne Survived the Shipwreck in My Favorite Wife (1940)

Nick’s wife, Ellen, has been missing for seven years after a shipwreck and is presumed dead. Of course, just when he finally declares her deceased and tries to move on by marrying someone else, Ellen returns, having been only stranded on a desert island all those years. Madcap screwball comedy ensues. The hilarious reveal comes early on, though, when Ellen (played by Irene Dunne) shows up at the new couple’s honeymoon hotel and causes Nick (Cary Grant) to do a stunned and tilting extended take while an elevator door slowly eliminates his view of his supposed-to-be dead first (and favorite) wife (Dunne). The situation was slightly combined with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train for the plot of Throw Momma from the Train, except that the (ex-) wife who ends up actually alive in that film was not nearly so beloved.

9. The Body on the Floor is Not a Corpse in Saw (2004)

We aren’t exactly fans of the franchise (we’ve only seen this first installment), but the reveal at the end of the original Saw is amazing. Throughout the horror film, which is set primarily in a dirty bathroom occupied by two chained-up men forced into a morality game, there is a seemingly dead corpse lying in the middle of the floor. But ultimately the body gets up off the ground and turns out to be the mastermind, the “Jigsaw Killer.” Do we buy that anyone could remain that still for so long? Not exactly, but it’s a neat trick and plot twist nevertheless.

8. Rock Hudson is a Human Reboot in Seconds (1966)

Sometimes we wish that Hollywood would come along and reboot our lives the way they reboot film franchises. Seconds is kind of like that, as it involves a company that gives people second chances by faking their deaths and transforming their appearance. The film’s protagonist goes through the process of becoming a “reborn” and receives the face of Rock Hudson, which is a pretty good deal no matter how much the service cost. But in a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life way, the character decides that he wants his old life back. Unfortunately, unlike George Bailey, he’s technically already gone through with the “suicide,” and it’s not so easy for a change of heart.

7. Jack Nicholson Swapped Identities in The Passenger (1975)

Somewhat akin to the concept of Seconds, only less sci-fi, a TV journalist (Nicholson) assumes the identity of a dead man who has been staying at the same small African hotel, and he reports his own death instead. A word of advice learned from this Michelangelo Antonioni film, though: when picking a new life, choose one that isn’t so criminal and hated as a gunrunner. Also, don’t be surprised if your wife comes looking for the person you’re pretending to be in order to find out what happened to “you.”

6. The Dead Woman Wasn’t Laura in Laura (1944)

It’s a common narrative idea to have a detective become obsessed (even fall for) the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating. It’s not as common, though, for that woman to suddenly show up alive, the way Laura (Gene Tierney) does in Otto Preminger’s classic film noir. Where has she been all this time? Oh, up in the country where there are no newspapers or any other means of her hearing that she’s apparently been killed. And the body that was found dead in Laura’s apartment? Oh, that was another woman Laura’s fiancée was seeing on the side. The revelation scene here is great because both the detective (Dana Andrews) and the non-dead character are in shock — he because she’s alive and she because she’s “dead.”

5. Jerry Orbach’s Assassination is Staged in F/X (1986)

Mobster’s deaths are often faked in the movies, but in this film the feds get smart and hire a special effects artist from Hollywood to make the assassination look realistic. The twist here is that for a while the artist (Bryan Brown) thinks the supposed-to-be fake shooting was real after all, and he has been framed as the killer. But then it turns out the mobster (Orbach) is indeed still alive. But then he’s killed for real. But then the effects artist takes on the guy’s identity, so it seems he’s still alive. The movie isn’t really as confusing as it sounds.

4. The Floating Body is a Special Effect in April Fool’s Day (1986)

1986 was a good year for movies involving deaths faked by fictional special effects artists. In this prank of a slasher film, based somewhat off Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, nobody really dies. We find out in the end that everyone’s murder has been faked with great detail by a hostess and her hired effects team. Technically that means that April Fool’s Day counts for more than one false death, so we picked the inaugural death as the single false death, because it is the one that sets the fear and mystery in motion (well, really, the guy crushed by the boat does this, but he doesn’t “die,” so we can’t use him). The movie was remade last year for a direct-to-video release, but apparently there are a few actual deaths in that one.

3. Kim Novak Only Plays One Person in Vertigo (1958)

We never fully bought this Hitchcock classic when we were young, and even though we grew to love it and appreciate it, the premise is still a little ridiculous. Obviously Judy Barton is the same person as Madeleine Elster, who seemingly jumped/fell to her death from a bell tower earlier. She’s played by Kim Novak, too, and looks so much like the other person, even if her hair and clothes aren’t the same. But people in movies (even James Stewart) don’t always recognize disguised persons so easily, especially if they think they saw the person die. Of course, that minor issue can be set aside for the sake of the story and its themes, but just barely.

2. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Digitally Killed Off in The Running Man (1987)

One year after F/X and April Fool’s Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in this sci-fi action flick about a violent game show that kills off convicted criminals for the entertainment of civilians. And like those two movies, it employs the idea of special effects for false deaths. When it appears that one particular contestant (Schwarzenegger) can’t lose, the show’s host (Richard Dawson) stages the guy’s gruesome death using CGI. Of course, the unstoppable running man can do more than not lose, he can win, and that consists of killing the game show host and proving that he’s alive and innocent to the viewers at home (or wherever). Never mind that there’s a second person (María Conchita Alonso) whose death is faked in that CGI sequence; if she hadn’t been with Schwarzenegger she would have died for real anyway.

1. Harry Lime is Hiding in the Shadows in The Third Man (1949)

Probably the most famous reveal ever that a character is living, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who supposedly died of a broken neck after being hit by a truck, stands in a shadowed doorway but is identified when a spot of light briefly illuminates his face. This one couldn’t possibly be a spoiler for anyone due to how iconic it is.

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Robin Hood of Depression America, on the lam from a fledgling FBI led from a desk by J. Edgar Hoover (an unrecognizable Billy Crudup) and on the ground by Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, on growling Batman autopilot). Dillinger meets a girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard) in a Chicago nightclub and decides, on the spot, that she’s going to be his girl; she resists a bit but he’s kind of a bully, and she kind of likes it, so soon they’re having epic, virtually abstract sex. Then there’s a bunch of shooting and running around — half the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, partially because I could barely see it, partially because I could scarcely understand the dialogue, much of it mumbled and/or drowned in score — but eventually Billie ends up in jail. She won’t snitch on “my man Johnny.”  Spoiler alert: Batman finds him anyway.

Depp interprets Dillinger as a nattily-dressed gentleman murderer/celebrity thief with a fraction of the winking zeal he brought to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films stand as examples of how rote genre exercises are sometimes the best vehicles for balls-to-the-wall star power, Public Enemies has the inverse problem: the style and structure of the film mutes its megastar, reducing him to an image mostly devoid of personality. This is not necessarily an unexpected direction for Mann: Miami Vice, though arguably more inspired by the music video-as-emotional-placeholder ethos of the original TV series, featured two lead performances that worked on a purely visual level … in large part because Colin Farrell and Gong Li were both tasked with linguistic challenges that they could not meet. Casting women who cannot speak English intelligibly seems to be a growing trademark of Michael Mann films: in Enemies, Cotillard tries out a handful of accents, none of them convincing for an American coat check girl circa 1933. Increasingly, Mann seems to be making movies that might be better off silent.
As far as I could tell, Public Enemies tells us that there’s a Depression going on in two ways: with very occasional visual reminders, such as an image of a hobo slumped in front of a palatial bank that Dillinger is about to rob, and with a title on the screen. Otherwise, this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti’s camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides. Instead, both poles are flattened out, and whatever tension could conceivably be milked from a story with a long-proscribed ending collapses in kind.
But there is one area in which Public Enemies nods to the gangster movies of old that does succeed. The gangster myth, especially as manifested in the 1930s flicks that reinforced the fame of someone like Dillinger in his own time, only works if the gangster and his lifestyle are linked to love and desire. Being sexy is not something that Johnny Depp has to work at; this is something that just requires Johnny Depp to show up. Though Cotillard is not convincing as a US Citizen, she would have to work much harder than she does to be unconvincing as a woman in love with Johnny Depp. The romance between Dillinger and Billie does what gangster romances are supposed to do: it humanizes the criminal and demonizes the cops and the feds who are trying to keep the lovers apart. The best moments in Public Enemies — a brutally violent interrogation scene in which Billie is humiliated in virtually every way short of rape, a scene where Dillinger takes a casual walk through the office of the men who are trying to jail him — have a kind of surreal quality, in which the boy and girl, embolded by a passion that’s making them crazy, are driven to test what they can get away with. It’s because of these moments that Public Enemies can’t be called a complete failure, or even a must-avoid. It’s not a bad film, it’s just badly made.