The other day I was watching "Star Trek Insurrection" and I noticed that Anthony Zerbe was playing Vice Admiral Dougherty. One of Zerbe's most famous roles was as Milton Krest in the James Bond film "Licence to Kill" where he's memorably dispatched by being locked in a decompression chamber whose air tube is broken by drug dealer Franz Sanchez causing a sudden decompression which causes his head (or a cleverly constructed latex version of it) to explode. The prop was recently sold at auction and there were some pictures of it online for a while but they're done now...
Anyway, I did that "Oh, it's him" thing in my mind having not really noticed last time I saw it years ago but then when he was dispatched in "Star Trek Insurrection" I noticed (sorry for the spoilers) that his head was pushed into a skin stretching machine ... of course we didn't see the gory effects because this is Star Trek but I started to wonder if Zerbe had become typecast as "the man with the exploding head". That may seem fanciful but I remember Gareth Thomas complaining that after Blake's 7 he was constantly cast in roles in which he was killed so perhaps it's not that outlandish... Perhaps it's one of those "homages"...?
On a tangent on the DVD for "Licence to Kill" Robert Davi suggests that he partly based his portrayal of Franz Sanchez on Donald Trump because he wanted the gangster to be like a businessman who has gone over the edge and become a kind of gangster but still regards his criminal outfit as a business. There's an interesting observation by film historian Richard B Jewell on the commentary for "Little Ceasar"'s DVD release [the actors were not available for comment due to death] where he talks about how a theme of gangster movies is how in many ways criminal organisations mirror legitimate organisations ...they just skip the inconvenience of operating within legal regulation. Anyway, life imitating art or ...?
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