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Movies With Disabled Heroes

OneWingedBird

OneWingedBird

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Aug 3, 2003
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Just musing, even within the simplistic worldview of many movies, there's no actual reason that a character being physically disabled or mentally ill should make them any more or less likely to be good/evil/indifferent, though when i think about it, if we started making a list of movies with bad guys that are disabled (including disfigurement) or mad, it could go on for a very long time...

...but can anyone think of movies with heroes that have disabilities? The only one's coming to mind for me right now are the X-Men series for Professor Charles Xavier (assuming we don't class the mutations as a disability in this context), and The Avengers for 'mother'.

There must be more... ideas anyone?
 
One Armed Swordsman, New One Armed Swordsman, One Armed Swordsmen, For Your Height Only, The Amazing Mr No Legs...
 
And don't forget the umpteen films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman.
 
Rear Window (hero in wheelchair)

Cutter's Way (disabled Vietnam veteran)

Wait Until Dark (blind woman foils drug dealers)

Do The Elephant Man and similar biographical films count?
 
Born on the Fourth of July (Biographical)
Reach for the Sky (Biographical)
The Man without a Face
Charly (about a man, played by Cliff Robertson, with learning difficulties who is "cured" as part of an experiment)
and on TV there is A Man Called Ironside
 
And don't forget the umpteen films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman.
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Damn, how did i miss that one...

Add in Mute Witness, which surprisingly, has a mute heroine...


Do The Elephant Man and similar biographical films count?
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Prob. not, unless anyone has a major objection, lets keep it fictional. think that real life portrayals have a different spin on them...
 
As I mentioned here:

There is a great kung-fu film called Crippled Masters that is about a guy with no legs and a guy with no arms who team up to kick behootney! It's actually entertaining and amazing, inspirational even.

Here is a cheecky review:

http://www.badmovies.org/movies/cripmasters/

And it's IMDB page:

http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0122029/
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Also, Blind Fury has Rutger Hauer as a blind Vietnam vet who kicks rear.

Dr. Midnight is a Golden Age DC superhero who can only see at night, so he uses it to his advantage by wearing dark glasses (to see in normal light) and uses the darkness as his shield.

Would Steve Austen (The Six Million Dollar Man) and the Teen Titan's Cyborg count?
 
Does a leg in plaster count? I'm thinking of Rear Window.
 
Children of a Lesser God.
It would be nice to see more disabled people in films or on TV where their disability is merely incidental.
 
Star Wars (Vader and Luke's prosthetic limbs)
Ironside (Wheelchair)
Forrest Gump (Mental impairment, Lt Dan)
Evil Dead (Chainsaw strapped to stump)
Rain Man (Autism)
Any other Tom Cruise Film (TCB syndrome*)
My Left Foot
Dance Me to My Song
Tim
Twelve Monkeys
Gattaca
Any Dalek epsiode of Dr Who featuring Davros
Total Recall







* Total Charisma Bypass
 
The protagonist/hero in Inside I'm Dancing (also 'Rory O'Shea Was Here' in America) was completely paralysed. He'd translate for his best friend who had cerebral palsy.

That film was how I first got a crush on James McAvoy.
 
The Van Helsing-esque vampire hunter in the movie Deafula is deaf.

But since everyone is deaf in this particular movie world, I'm not sure that counts.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123790/

Same goes for The Terror of Tiny Town, the all-midget western.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022913/

There's Chained for Life, starring the Hilton sisters, real-life Siamese twins, but it's more of a melodrama and they do nothing heroic, per se.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043397/

And lest we forget, Tod Browning's Freaks.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022913/
Your definition of heroism for this film depends on how much you hate that wily blonde bitch. Eh, everyone hates her.
 
Saturday morning cinema now sounds like something that really dates you. Come to think of it, those shows could put years on you in three hours. And nothing dragged so badly as the adventures of one Hoppalong Cassidy, a singing cowboy with a bit of a limp. There were lots of these short features and I recall the unkind whistles which would greet his name on the screen.

Moving sharply up-market, Spencer Tracy starred as a one-armed stranger uncovering prejudice and vendetta in a small town in the 1954 wide-screen tale, Bad Day at Black Rock.

I recently saw a clutch of pictures by the garish Almodóvar. Live Flesh features a cop whose injuries spur him on to become a champion player of paraplegic basket-ball. Echoes of other movies abound in this fevered post-modern context: Rear Window has been mentioned but what about Buñuel, who fetishized prosthetic limbs in Tristana?

The Spiral Staircase has a dumb heroine. Renoir's The Woman on the Beach has a blinded artist as central character, maybe not a hero though. Pulp classic The Big Combo features a deaf gangster, whose hearing aid comes in handy as a torture device.

The question was about heroes, I know, so trawling the cast-lists for figures whose physical disability reflects their negative characters might be straying into rather conventional territory. There would be plenty of material, I think. The mother of Marnie, for example. Jimmy Stewart also begins as a stick-supported corset-wearing fellow in Vertigo. Speaking of which, Kim Novak connects us to The Man with the Golden Arm, where Eleanor Parker spends much of the picture in a wheelchair. At the other end of the scale, The Song of Bernadette presents the suffering of the central character as a paradoxical sign of Grace.

I'll shut up now. :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Moving sharply up-market, Spencer Tracy starred as a one-armed stranger uncovering prejudice and vendetta in a small town in the 1954 wide-screen tale, Bad Day at Black Rock.
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How could I forget that! Especially the scene where Tracy beats the crap out of Ernest Borgnine.
 
Interesting semi-related news

Did 'Blood Diamond' Producers Back Out of Deal With Amputees?

The producers of the upcoming Blood Diamond have denied reports that they had reneged on an agreement to provide prosthetic limbs to amputees used as extras in the film. The New York Post quoted one amputee, Nkululo Mnisi, as saying that Warner Bros. had promised to buy him and 27 other extras the prosthetic devices. But producer Ed Zwick, in an interview with L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke, said that such reports are "the work of someone who clearly bears the film ill will." Zwick claimed that those involved in making the movie set up a fund to aid the villagers who appeared in it. He said that the fund is being used for everything from classroom repair to road repair to prosthetics. Zwick added, "People are still continuing contributing to the fund months since production ended. They were really trying to affect positive change. The fund has gotten to a number of things on the list, but there's more to go. And in the list of things to do, prosthetics are part of that list."
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Memento (memory-impaired protagonist)
 
Secretary - main character is depressive/self-harmer

Series 7: The Contenders - Jeffrey Norman has testicular cancer

A couple i'm not too sure about myself:

Time Bandits, (does dwarfism count as a disability?)

Serenity / Firefly - for River Tam being bloody barking due to brain damage and MKUltra-esque conditioning (not sure there as it's not a portrayal of an actual illness/disability, though it's still superbly carried off by Summer Glau)
 
Dumb And Dumber-The two main protagonists were severely mentally impaired.

Stuck On You- (Siamese Twins)

My Left Foot


And there was that BBC thing they did about Joey Deacon (it was serialised on Blue Peter , but they did a one-off adaptation too. There was a kid at my school at the time, he was called Joey Deacon too....and his life became an instant hell. Now calls himself Joe.)

Suppose Davros was kind of disabled too....that was a pimped up wheelchair he was sat in.
 
Recently "Brothers of the Head" - cojoined twins
 
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