Lee Marvin
White-maned, slit-eyed, often slack-mouthed with drink or bloodlust, Marvin was incorrigible from childhood, a force that couldn't be contained by anyone but himself. In "Point Blank," he's murdered and betrayed by his wife and his best friend. Then, somehow, Walker's back, a frosty zombie of a man who harrows all his old haunts, tracking down those who stole his money and his life. His affect as flat as death, he methodically climbs the criminal food chain to threaten the man at the top. Marvin takes existential cool to the extreme, to glacial depths of despair brought on by the realization that no one's ultimately in charge and life's little more than a pyramid scheme. As an insubordinate officer in "The Dirty Dozen," Marvin's tapped to lead a squad of convicted killers and rapists on a wartime mission. All wolfish grins, nasal snarls and criminal empathy, he handily faces (and beats) down his belligerent recruits. Marvin's cool finds its proper temperature among his unabashedly bad men; in the presence of hypocritical officers, he ices over, flaunting his contempt. Lee Marvin epitomized hipster as ambulatory provocation.

Toshiro Mifune
Following a few steps behind Toshiro Mifune's out-of-work samurai during the credit sequence in "Yojimbo," we mark the unprepossessing pilgrim's scraggly hair, the irritable scratching that signals fleas, the shabby robe and cheap rope sandals. More than once, the fellow shifts his shoulders, the muscle-easing movement of an aging fighter. Yet, surrounded by a ragtag bunch of crazy killers, Mifune withers them with a contemptuous gaze, then flashes from immobility into fast-motion swordplay. The creeps are dead almost before they -- and we -- register his movement. Throughout "Yojimbo," this unshaven, weary-eyed samurai claims every "frame" he enters, becoming the still, authoritative focal point around which lesser men arrange themselves. Striding wide-legged down a dusty street, his arms tucked in his voluminous sleeves, Mifune looks every inch a king of samurai cool. (Check out Marvin vs. Mifune in "Hell on the Pacific.")

Clint Eastwood
"Sometimes a glare is as good as a gun," opines Eastwood in "In the Line of Fire." Early on, in Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, The Man with No Name hardly spoke -- and when he did, it was in that mesmerizing rasp that signaled imminent death. The brand of cool Eastwood perfected had to do with the strictest conservation of energy and emotion, a contraction of character so radical only that familiar lip-snarl of contempt (by way of Bogart?) signaled he hadn't gone stone-cold. (Maybe that's why he was so good at playing dead men, pale riders and high plains drifters.) To this day, Eastwood moves, like his hero Robert Mitchum, with the controlled grace of a big cat, prowling among domesticated beasts. Sure, he cracked wise as Dirty Harry, but that rogue cop's style was too in-your-face to be truly cool. No, Eastwood achieved authentic hipster status as he aged -- as actor and director -- going deeper into self and style with films such as "Unforgiven," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." Jazzman Eastwood understands that less is always more, and that less inevitably leads to nothing.

Al Pacino
One of Pacino's finest and most beautiful creations, old-school gangster Carlito Brigante ("Carlito's Way"), projects elegant definition, signature presence as a Puerto Rican samurai who returns to his old neighborhood after five years in prison. Marrying content to style, action with self-awareness, this retired drug lord saunters through crowded Brooklyn streets like an old-time gunfighter. Bearded, sporting shades, decked out in a black suit, full-length leather coat, cowboy boots -- Carlito's a Manhattan Mifune among style-challenged dregs. An anachronism, full of romantic angst, he's -- in his dying words -- the Last of the Mohicans.

Daniel Day-Lewis
Day-Lewis is perhaps the only contemporary actor who could so totally embody frontier cool, the 19th century equivalent of the hyper-hipness of Michael Mann's modern-day, urban outlaws (see Crockett and Tubbs in "Miami Vice," Dennis Farina and friends in "Crime Story," De Niro and gang in "Heat," etc.). Sinewy, long-haired, his dark gaze as clear and riveting as a panther's, Day-Lewis embodies that New World hybrid D.H. Lawrence was half in love with: a natural-born killer, quick-witted, physically agile and inhumanly self-contained. Stones in the way of progress, he and his equally cool Indian kin are American heroes already out of time.

Cary Grant
Once a music-hall acrobat, Grant took to aristocratic graces easily. Seemingly in control of every situation, this darkly elegant fellow could head up a cadre of commercial pilots somewhere in South America ("Only Angels Have Wings") or seduce a jittery virgin ("Suspicion") or dodge a lethal crop duster ("North by Northwest") without raising a sweat or mussing his hair. In "Only Angels," he holds his professional "family" together by refusing to show any chinks in his armor, pretending to be unshakeable in the face of any loss. He twines himself around vulnerable Ingrid Bergman like a lustful snake in "Notorious," then lets the woman he loves prostitute herself to expose German plotters. Confronting the blonde (Eva Marie Saint) who seduced him and set him up for death-by-crop duster, his contempt for her sexual duplicity is as cutting as acid, but Grant's trademark savoir faire is merely stirred, not shaken. Even when he played square in a screwball comedy like "Bringing Up Baby," Cary Grant never fell out of style.

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