The political message is ham-fisted but crystal clear: A nuclear holocaust will ruin us all. And then apes will take over the planet. Or something.

“Planet of the Apes,” despite a couple of iconic images like that final scene, is a dreadful film, a compendium of clumsy dialogue, one-dimensional characters, risible plot turns and long silences broken by incomprehensible meaningful looks. But it has stayed with us because in conception, if not execution, the film had something to say.

This was before PETA became a household word, before things like animal experimentation controversies could muddle the film’s message, which might be the case with Tim Burton’s new edition. The original film’s metaphor, in those civil rights-riven times, was plain: How would whites like to be treated the same way they treated blacks? Black leaders never really got behind the film, perhaps because, however bad the African-American condition was at the time, they did not feel that a comparison to apes was particularly helpful to their cause.

Ah, the ’60s.

The first film and its four successors through 1973 explored other social issues as well, including slavery, religion, veganism, interspecies smooching, genocide as sport and even animal experimentation. In the late ’60s, entertainment often came with a message, but “Planet of the Apes” looked for a different audience. The stuffed shirts got “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Stanley Kramer’s all-star look at an interracial marriage.

Everyone else had “Planet of the Apes.”

America at the time was awash in social upheaval, controversy, internal struggles and war. American soldiers were being slaughtered for unclear reasons far across the sea. Antiwar sentiment was churning. Race riots ripped the country’s underbelly, and our political and civil rights leaders were being assassinated.

Elsewhere, things weren’t much better. U.S. Green Beret-trained Bolivian soldiers had executed Che Guevara in 1967. That same year, U.S. planes were bombing Hanoi, and Israelis and Palestinians were at war over the Sinai Peninsula. Concurrently, NASA had suspended all manned space flights after the deaths of three astronauts, who burned to death in a launchpad fire. “Planet of the Apes” also became the methadone treatment for NASA junkies after a fix.

While the films addressed a variety of social issues, they certainly didn’t try to solve or address them all. And there were huge blind spots. When the original appeared, feminists were appalled that Nova, Heston’s mate, was mute and subjugated. In the second film, “Beneath the Planet of the Apes,” Don Pedro Colley was cast as a character called “Negro.” (Some blame the writer of “Beneath” for that one, but the stumble was more likely endemic in Hollywood: Colley went on to star in “The Legend of Nigger Charley” in 1972 and “Black Caesar” in 1973.)

Still, more often than not, in the “Planet of the Apes” movies social issues were made anthropomorphic and in your face. Lead characters died. Shit hit fans. People made mistakes. Worlds blew up. What follows is a brief survey of plots and messages from the five original films, from the horrors of nuclear holocaust to talking monkeys to the golden rule: “Ape shall not kill ape.”

“Planet of the Apes” (1968)
Charlton Heston starred as Taylor, a sardonic astronaut who crash-lands on a futuristic Earth populated by apes and the primitive humans they love to hate. Taylor’s buddies are killed, stuffed and used for scientific experimentation. Taylor befriends two chimpanzee doctors, Cornelius and Zira, and escapes into the Forbidden Zone to find his fate. The film had a $5.8 million budget and brought in $26 million at the box office, an enormous amount at the time.

“Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970)
Cornelius and Zira save astronaut Brent (James Franciscus). He follows Taylor’s trail to a subterranean lair of nuclear-bomb-worshiping mutant humans who would rather blow up the world than allow apes to see their icky, vein-bulging mutant heads. The mutants love their bomb, and prepare to use it to destroy the ape population, but first they sing a lovely hymn to it in a cathedral located in a decimated New York subway. When the apes arrive to put a stop to the plan, they knock over the warhead, ignorant of its potential. Soon after his beloved slave/mate, Nova, is killed, it is Taylor who sets off the trigger that destroys the world, not the mutants or the apes.

“Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (1971)
The film opens with a sea landing of three “apestronauts,” who arrive in the spaceship Brent (Franciscus) left behind in the future, and come to modern-day Earth. “Escape,” written by Paul Dehn (who wrote all of the ’70s “Apes” sequels), is the worst offering of the series, yet also its most memorable. Cornelius and Zira somehow escaped from the future (the one in which Taylor destroyed the Earth) and return to the present, much to the surprise of everyone. The talking apes become instant celebrities, are wined and dined, are taken on shopping trips and dress in colorful 1970s polyester fashions.

The two celebrity apes become victims in a presidential plot to save mankind, and are killed by Dr. Otto Hasslein (Eric Braeden), who is fearful of a future ruled by apes. Plenty of TV character actors appear in this one, including Bradford Dillman, William Windom and Sal Mineo. Cornelius and Zira hide their baby in Ricardo Montalban’s circus, and it is saved from execution.

“Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” (1972)
Billed as “The Revolution!” “Conquest” has Cornelius and Zira’s grown son, Caesar (who was hidden in the circus for 20 years), rise up against the tyranny of mankind, where apes have become slaves and suffer stinging epithets such as “DO!” and “NO!” Caesar liberates the apes from bondage after leading a violent revolt against the powers that be. His first order of business is to enslave the slave masters so that everyone can get along peacefully. Slaves enslaving slave masters — what a concept! They get what they deserve.

“Battle for the Planet of the Apes” (1973)
In “Battle,” which takes place 12 years after Caesar’s revolt, king of TV character actors (and Hollywood country bumpkin) Claude Akins plays one hell of a mean gorilla general, Aldo. He’s sick of Caesar and his stupid post-apocalypse rules of order, especially the ones where he doesn’t get to shoot a bunch of humans. In this, the last big-screen “Apes” feature of the original series (a television series and a cartoon would follow), not only does Aldo want mutant humans and friendly slave humans eliminated (read: genocide), he also kills Caesar’s son, Cornelius, and plots to kill Caesar too! Kind of like tapping into the assassinations of Malcolm X, a pair of Kennedys and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. all in one. One-stop shopping at the assassination metaphor market!

The film starts with Aldo in writing class with a bunch of children and a few other “slow” gorillas. Aldo botches a writing assignment, and his human teacher teases him. Aldo gets all fired up and rips up another kid’s assignment, to which the teacher yells “NO!” Well, that starts a classroom riot, because written right there in the ape lawbooks is that the word “NO” can never come from a stinkin’ human’s mouth and point in the general direction of an ape. For some reason this human “slave” has never heard of such a thing, because everyone has to explain it to him. What rock has he been under? He’s a slave! And he never heard of that law? Humans are stupid animals. In the teacher’s defense, an orangutan (played by a very apelike Paul Williams) named Virgil (the Einstein of the group) explains to Caesar that the teacher “uttered a negative imperative.” Sounds like the N-word to me.

This film has it all. Human against ape, mutant against human, mutant against ape and even (cringe) ape against ape. Cornelius, Caesar’s little son, stumbles upon General Aldo, who tries to persuade his fellow gorillas that they all need to get ahold of guns, get rid of Caesar and start killing humans. When Aldo discovers Cornelius listening in from above, he takes his sword and hacks off a tree limb the lad is clinging to. Cornelius falls to his death. (Ape kills ape, a big no-no.)

When the dust settles, the mutants are dead, and apes and humans live in peace, but not forever. The final scene in “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” shows caramel-voiced orangutan lawgiver John Huston, preaching peaceful get-along dogma to a gathering of ape and human children. They gather around a statue of their long-dead leader Caesar, near a serene mountain pool. At the end of the moralistic sermon, a young black human girl shoves a chimp boy, and he shoves her back. Caesar’s statue cries like a forgotten Christ. It’s a tragedy!

The strangest thing about the films is that while all of the allegories are as obvious as a cudgel, the theme that carries across all the movies is much darker. Co-written by Rod Serling, the original “Planet of the Apes” screenplay echoed the nihilistic antihero/anti-solution Serling used so well in his “no hope scenario” television series, “The Twilight Zone.” All the films had a bummer downside. Each ended horribly. There was little hope for salvation.

But in a way, that was the appeal. They movies were, in essence, American tragedies. The “Apes” films held up a carnival mirror to American society. The result was a cross-eyed, camped-up metaphorical mess, but it managed to please the public.

Why? Because frankly, Americans felt they deserved the spanking. We were no longer a nation of sheep, but a nation of cynical sheep who collectively believed things were in bad shape. We had only ourselves to blame.

When you’re a kid, the scant two months between Halloween and Christmas seem interminable. Tim Burton bridges the gap with his wickedly delightful stop-motion animated feature “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which features Santa Claus being kidnapped and — gently — tortured by a trio of giggling little hobgoblins and their beastly boss. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

But that’s just one angle of the story. “The Nightmare Before Christmas” tells the tale of how Jack Skellington, a dapper denizen of Halloween Town, becomes entranced with — and later obsessed by — the neighboring village of Christmas Town and its corresponding celebration. As the gorgeous patchwork girl who has a crush on him, Sally, looks on, he rallies his fellow townspeople to create a Christmas of their own. They get into the swing of things without missing a beat, gleefully wrapping trinkets in coffin-shaped boxes and packing scorpions inside nesting dolls.

Burton didn’t direct “The Nightmare Before Christmas” — that job went to Henry Selick — but its gently twisted macabre humor and gorgeously executed visuals mark it as his creation. (Burton conceived the characters and the story when he was a young animator at Disney; some 10 years later the company gave him the opportunity to make this movie.) His Halloween Town is a dreamscape of black, white and gray crosshatching accented with orange. And his characters are indelible: Jack is a daddy-longlegs Fred Astaire in pinstripes, with an infinitely expressive skull for a face. Sally is a rag-doll ballerina, tipsy and unsure on her spindly legs — her fumbling-doe grace is a huge part of her charm.

The special edition DVD is rich with extras, including test sequences that show how the animators perfected distinctive gaits for Jack and Sally. The making-of featurette is fairly rudimentary and may not be particularly enlightening for those who already have a fair knowledge of stop-motion animation techniques. Still, it gives a sense of the scope of the project and the massive challenges involved: For example, each moving character needed to be manipulated 24 times to come up with just a second of film. (The movie’s running time is 76 minutes.)

The most valuable extras of all, though, are Burton’s two early short films, “Vincent” (1982) and “Frankenweenie” (1984). The fervently poetic animated feature “Vincent,” done completely in rich pen-and-ink-style black-and-white, tells the story of a young boy who wants desperately to be Vincent Price. (Price, incidentally, narrates the film.) Young Vincent concocts a dark but fanciful daydream world for himself, complete with a true love who’s been buried alive; his mother, meanwhile, tries to convince him that he’s just a normal boy and should go outside and get some fresh air. “Vincent” is like an Edgar Allan Poe miniature filtered through Chuck Jones — funny, elegant, creepy and touching all at once.

“Frankenweenie” — also rendered in gently nostalgic black-and-white, although it feels even more vivid than Technicolor — is simply a small masterpiece. It’s one of my favorite horror films of all time, right up there with the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein” films (to which “Frankenweenie” pays loving tribute). Young Victor (Barret Oliver) grieves when his beloved pit bull, Sparky, is hit by a car. His parents (Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern) are concerned, but they trust him to get back on track. Inspired by a lecture in science class (rendered by hilariously deadpan Paul Bartel), Victor gathers up some tubes and wires and rigs up a contraption to electrify Sparky back to life.

When Sparky revives, emerging from the white blanket draped over him on the “operating” table, he’s newly decorated with raggedy stitches and little bolts sticking out of his neck — but he’s still the same old Sparky, jumping up and down with delight and greeting his master with affectionate licks. Victor’s neighbors don’t understand, though; they think Sparky is a monster and try to destroy him. In the space of less than half an hour, Burton tells a story of operatic proportions, replete with brave acts, sick jokes, meaningful epiphanies and lots of love. And, of course, a happy ending. Burton’s vision is undeniably warped and gloomy — it’s part of what we love him for. But he always wears his heart on his mad scientist’s sleeve.

That’s no accident. As production designer David Snyder notes in one of the special DVD features, there wasn’t a lot of time or money allotted for the project, so he and his crew had to use colors and shapes wisely to get the right look. Their motto, he says, was: “If it ain’t bright, it ain’t right.”

Everything about “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” from its toy-box colors to its superb, hyperanimated Danny Elfman score to the butch-waxed hairdo and wooden-puppet walk of its star and mastermind, Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), is pure pleasure. Pee-wee’s beloved bicycle — a gleaming, souped-up version of every ’50s dream bike you ever saw advertised in the back of a comic book — has been stolen. Spoiled rich kid Francis (Mark Holton) may or may not be the thief. Pee-wee’s search for the missing bike leads him to strange and exotic locales like the Alamo, a movie studio, a biker bar and a truck stop complete with nearby dinosaur exhibit.

The dinosaur exhibit was a real California location, not a set, Reubens and director Tim Burton explain in their audio commentary, and it’s just one example of the movie’s insanely creative use of found objects and places to fashion a very unreal and wonderful world. “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” was Burton’s first full-length feature, and every scene is a marvel of visual ingenuity. One example: Pee-wee’s home is furnished with a breakfast machine, a Rube Goldberg-type contraption that features, among other things, a flying pterodactyl skeleton with little clamps on its toes, from which it drops two pieces of bread into the appropriate toast slots.

Reubens’ and Burton’s commentary is entertaining, if fairly low-key — Burton comes off as a grown-up version of the shy kid who’d prefer to retreat to his room with a set of paints and a science-experiment kit. Every now and then one of them comments on how they wish they’d snatched up this or that prop, and you can’t blame them — who wouldn’t want a mini-rocket-ship ride in his living room? With “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” Burton established himself as a movie director with an art director’s touch. In his commentary, he notes that he has a penchant for moving things around a lot to get just the right look. “I guess I’m just a frustrated interior decorator,” he says. If only we could get him to redecorate the world.

In Burton’s loose, highly stylized re-imagining of Washington Irving’s “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) isn’t a knobby,
awkward schoolteacher but a constable who’s prone to rather
dignified-looking bumbling. The story opens in 1799 New York: Ichabod has
been assigned to investigate a number of horrific murders upstate, in which
people’s heads have been lopped off (with a fire-hot sword, no less) by the
Headless Horseman. The Horseman was formerly a ruthless Hessian mercenary
(played in the flashback sequences by a deliciously deranged Christopher
Walken) who’d been beheaded and plopped into a sloppy grave by
Revolutionary War soldiers, and who now haunts the nearby wood doing his
dirty work.

Crane — who keeps his painfully obvious observations in a beautifully
illustrated and calligraphic book, a symbol of his yearning to mask his
inadequacies with pure style — doubts that the Headless Horseman is really
a ghost and begins to suspect that the town elders are somehow involved.
Meanwhile, he also faces recurring nightmares based on his own childhood
trauma, as well as a burgeoning attraction to a young woman of the town,
Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), who dabbles in witchcraft.

Depp isn’t Irving’s Ichabod Crane, but it hardly matters. With his
translucent, silent-film-star skin and lovely hollowed cheeks, this Ichabod
is a tortured, if not terribly bright, goth dreamboat. Depp gives even his
awkward, clueless stabs at scientific observations an almost debonair
quality. And the way he hides behind his young friend and helper (Marc
Pickering) in times of terror plays up his endearing fragility. Depp’s wit
and cunning are nicely understated here, lurking just beneath his somber
black topcoats and high, winged collars. His stammering and fake-confident
strutting give the movie just a touch of brightness, without disturbing its
brooding undertones.

Ricci suits Depp nicely as the inscrutable and luscious Katrina: she’s both
a quiet sexpot, capable of ruffling the rather straitlaced Ichabod’s
feathers, and a mysteriously calming presence. (In one scene, she meets
Ichabod in the wood, astride a white horse and draped in a white cloak
embroidered with red roses; the sight of her is simply breathtaking.)
Miranda Richardson as Lady Van Tassel, Katrina’s stepmother, is crisply
enjoyable, and her bald-eyebrowed look alone is a source of weird
fascination. Burton has a knack for choosing the right look for each
character — think of the way the bruised-looking, sleepless-night eye
makeup Depp wore in “Edward Scissorhands” seemed to underscore the
character’s essential conscientiousness — and he uses those skills
beautifully here.

Burton also has a keen eye for casting. As the town elders, Michael Gambon,
Richard Griffiths, Jeffrey Jones and Michael Gough all have that perfect
look of depraved authority. And in a witty homage to Hammer horror films, he’s cast Christopher Lee as a stonily severe judge.

The plot falls short on discernible logic now and then, but that’s hardly
an issue. “Sleepy Hollow” is all about visuals, music and mood, about being
swept away by what’s on the screen. Danny Elfman’s music is haunting and
jaggedly elegiac, the perfect underpinning to the movie’s look.
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki brushes nearly every frame with a bluish
cast: This Sleepy Hollow is a wonderland of misty coolness, of horizons
defined by craggy trees, of shaded woods holding tight to their secrets.
The Horseman himself is a magnificent and horrifying creature, galloping
out from the maw of nowhere, his sword brandished like a warrior’s spear,
his cape floating around him like malevolent squid ink.

And since this is a Tim Burton movie, it only figures that latent childhood
fears should figure prominently. “Sleepy Hollow” has an R rating, although
the cartoonishly grisly flying heads aren’t particularly distressing (and
overall, the movie is nothing like its mean-spirited predecessor “Mars
Attacks”). What makes “Sleepy Hollow” so adult and finally so indelible is
the gorgeous, spellbinding quality of its nightmare visions; these
terrifying dreams are imbued with an almost tranquilizing beauty. A
youthful mother lights a revolving lantern for her young son, sending
visions of witches on brooms and spooky goblins swirling around the walls.
Yet the sequence isn’t played for creeps — if anything, there’s more a
sense of wonder to it than anything. Ichabod’s visions of his own beautiful
young mother are softly shaded, shimmery, tinted with vaguely erotic
undertones like those old-fashioned hand-colored photographs. She whirls in
a garden, her dress fanning out like a pinwheel of water around her,
calling his name. The delight in the child Ichabod’s eyes as he watches her
is so complete that you know for sure he’s going to lose her — and he does.

But Burton is possessed of an extremely delicate touch. While I wouldn’t
recommend “Sleepy Hollow” for kids, I wouldn’t hesitate to vouch for
Burton’s integrity in terms of the way he deals with the fears of his
adult audience. So much of the movie is lovingly devoted to those
fears. Burton doesn’t play them cheaply, or to grab at heartstrings;
instead he lavishes tenderness on them.

Children don’t need to have their fears examined (plenty of time for that in adulthood). But grown-ups, busy living life, making money and raising kids of their own, tend to make the mistake of coddling their inner child, if they pay any attention to it at all. In “Sleepy Hollow,” Burton sees the inner child as a small adult, like the ones you find in 18th century American primitive paintings, earnest toddlers wearing tragically grown-up clothes while clutching kittens or toy hoops. It’s a way of conferring respect and a kind of dignity on the spiritual life of children, instead of treating it as something sweet and simple and eventually outgrown. Burton keeps in direct contact with it himself, and for the rest of us, he’s an able guide. The other side of the looking glass lies just beyond his camera lens. All we have to do is keep awake — and step through.

Now he’s taken on an American icon, Ichabod Crane, in Tim Burton’s
exquisitely phantasmagoric adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow,” titled, simply, “Sleepy Hollow.” He’s given it his usual
(that is, unusual) Depp charge. He transforms the icon into a complicated
modern figure while staying true — in some mysterious, intangible fashion —
to its post-revolutionary America sardonic grotesquerie. (Irving set his
fable in the 1790s and published it in 1820; the movie takes place
specifically in 1799.)

The Crane of Irving’s story is a Connecticut schoolteacher who
ventures into the haunted rural New York spot called Sleepy Hollow in search
of a well-off wife with a well-set table. What he gets is a terrifying
confrontation with a spectral Hessian trooper known as the Headless Horseman.

Crane becomes, in Burton’s movie, a progressive policeman exiled from
New York City and ordered to test his theories of deduction on a series of
horrific beheadings. The Headless Horseman is the obvious culprit, but Crane
suspects a human of manipulating the monster for his or her own gain. This is
still the tale of an outsider obtruding on the customs of a close-knit
hamlet, with harrowing results. But in the film, Crane’s main characteristics
are rational intellect and swooning effeminacy — not, as in Irving’s story,
petty pedantry in the classroom and over-eagerness to please outside of it.

“One of the original images in my mind was a character who lives in
his head versus a character with no head,” Burton writes in his introduction
to “The Art of Sleepy Hollow” (Pocket Books, 1999). But Burton and Depp’s
Ichabod wants to break through his solipsistic mind-set and arrive at the
truth, even if it blasts his preconceptions. That’s part of the reason why,
for all their camping, Burton and Depp succeed in making Crane come off as a
good marital catch. In the story Crane is a ladies’ man only in comparison to
country bumpkins; he merely dreams of wooing comely farmer’s daughter Katrina
Van Tassel. In the movie he wins pretty Katrina (Christina Ricci)
fair and square.

Surprisingly, as Depp told the press last week at a conference to
promote the movie, he initially envisioned Ichabod along the lines of
Irving’s story or the old Disney cartoon. When he first thought of playing
the lead in a Tim Burton version of the Sleepy Hollow story, he says, “I
started sort of doing Snoopy dances thinking, ‘Yeah, I get to wear a long
snipe nose.’”

“Long snipe nose” is not a phrase you expect to pop out of a
contemporary movie star. But as Depp says, “In the classic Ichabod Crane from
the book, Washington Irving’s description is really beautifully written. And
it is, in fact, a long snipe nose and huge ears, and it talks about his hands
being very far away from his body, and long feet.” (Depp’s memory is spot-on:
“The cognomen of Crane,” writes Irving, “was not inapplicable to his person.
He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs,
hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for
shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small,
and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe
nose, so that it looked like a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck, to
tell which way the wind blew.”)

Depp admits, “There was a fairly hefty silence when the upper echelons
found out” that he wanted to create a crane-like Crane. So instead he molded
himself into a male ingenue, mixing the aura of a tortured poet with the
unisex glamour of late Carnaby Street.

How, I wonder, would the earlier look have fit Crane’s actions in the
film anyway? After all, in Burton’s version, Crane may not be conventionally
romantic (“I hope not!” Depp interjects), but he does still get the girl.

“There were stages,” Depp explains, somewhat obliquely. “The initial
script was very good, very solid, but Tim and I talked about this early on —
we knew we were going to throw in as much humor as possible. There were
opportunities that had been missed.” Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker
(“Seven,” “The Game”) hit the comedy “on a couple of notes, here and there,”
but in general was more somber than Burton. It was playwright Tom Stoppard’s
uncredited polish (he did similar, credited work for “Shakespeare in Love”)
and Depp’s collaboration with Burton (his third, after “Edward Scissorhands”
and “Ed Wood”) that caused the black comedy to bloom.

With or without elaborate makeup, Depp was determined “to invent the
character from the ground up, obviously using the basis of Washington
Irving’s character, and trying to make him interesting and different, and
push him as far as you can go. Where you’re just on the verge of ‘believable’
and ‘not-so-believable,’ and quite possibly almost bad acting.”

This “fun” approach is rooted in Depp’s love for the extravagant thespian displays of
the Universal horror classics with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and the
Hammer studio’s British remakes with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
(Director Tod Browning, who made “Freaks” and Lugosi’s “Dracula” as well as
several of Lon Chaney’s silent milestones, is one of Depp’s favorite
filmmakers. Depp refers to Chaney himself, “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” as
“one of my heroes.”)

Yet Depp’s primal approach to character goes beneath and beyond
follow-the-dot connections. “When I read a script and it’s something that
grabs hold of me immediately, I start getting these flashes of people or
places or things or images. For ‘Scissorhands,’ for instance, I kept thinking
of dogs I had as a child, you know, and newborn babies. With ‘Sleepy Hollow’
it was the sort of drive that Basil Rathbone had as Sherlock Holmes — to take
that and use that, but what’s going on behind that is total and utter
confusion. Whereas Basil Rathbone knew exactly what he was talking about —
he hit every note — Ichabod would hit it but would, in fact, miss it.”

Depp says he added the “ethereal quality” of his late friend Roddy
McDowall and the “energy and righteousness” of, yes, Angela Lansbury. Depp
remembers registering Lansbury as “this force” in “Death on the Nile,” but I
suspect he means another Agatha Christie mystery, “The Mirror Crack’d,” in
which Lansbury played the sleuth Miss Marple (the inspiration for Lansbury’s
heroine in the TV series “Murder, She Wrote” –”energetic and righteous” indeed, not riotously depraved like Lansbury’s washed-up writer in “Nile”). “So these were the
ingredients,” says Depp. “You just mash them all together and see what you
come up with.”

Depp acknowledges that the Ichabod Crane of “Sleepy Hollow” is
“keenly in touch with his feminine side.” Indeed, Depp thinks of him as “a
fragile young girl.” And to Depp, this point of attack was “dangerous” — as
risky as his goal in “Ed Wood” to blend Ronald Reagan, the Tin Man from “The
Wizard of Oz” and disc jockey Casey Kasem. “In the first few weeks,” he
says, “you’re actually positive you’re going to be fired.” But in “Sleepy
Hollow,” Depp brings to his bizarre concoction an authority and humor that
command respect. He knows that “even if you’re playing a heightened character
and living inside a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths
to those characters.”

Burton once said, “There’s a sadness about Johnny I just respond to
– and I find it kind of funny.” Accordingly, in “Sleepy Hollow,” Burton
hands Depp’s Crane an astonishing childhood trauma that returns to the grown
man in a dream. It suffuses Crane’s attitudes toward logic, magic, love and
virtue with a melancholy that’s palpable yet also funnily fantastical.

“You do something a little bit different — and what’s the risk?”
asks Depp. “You fall flat on your face or make an ass of yourself or you get
fired.” He’ll take those risks to toil on a subject “that hasn’t been beaten
to death” or that may only reach the screen “just this one time.”

From the moment Depp met Burton (in 1989) to convince the director
to cast him in “Edward Scissorhands,” Depp felt they had a mutual
“appreciation for life, human behavior — what is considered normal and what
is not considered normal.” They also shared “a connection in a deeper sense
of having felt pretty ‘outside’ growing up, freakish, you know, weird.” Like
Burton, Depp “had been obsessed, at a very young age, with horror movies and
monster movies — I found great sanctuary in those dark places, like
‘Dracula.’”

In the introduction to “Burton on Burton” (Faber & Faber, 1995),
Depp wrote about how uncomfortable he was, as the star of the teen-oriented
Fox television series “21 Jump Street,” to talk to Burton about “Edward
Scissorhands”: “I was TV boy. No director in his right mind would hire me to
play this character.”

But no one has mistaken Burton’s right mind for anyone else’s. Depp
can’t help recapitulating for his interviewers how this pair of misfits drank
three or four pots of coffee each at their initial meeting, with the actor
gnawing on his coffee spoon and finding it still in his hand when he went
back to his hotel. The resulting partnership has endured through a trio of
movies. “If Tim wanted to remake ‘The Lonely Lady,’” quips Depp, “I would
play the Lonely Lady with pleasure.” On “Sleepy Hollow” they’ve achieved
their most voluptuous, least sentimental work.

When a reporter asks whether he’d ever participate in a “21 Jump
Street” reunion, Depp replies, “It depends on the director.” With the right
person Depp feels it could be funny, surreal, strange, with undercover cops
turned into plainclothes Norma Desmonds, “still trying to look like high
school students — loads of pancake makeup, plastic surgery. You’d have to
get David Lynch or Harmony Korine,
someone with a real solid sense of humor.”

The mention of Lynch reminds me that, watching “Sleepy Hollow,” I
thought of it as an 18th century “Twin Peaks,” and Depp’s Crane as a fey
ancestor of Kyle MacLachlan’s Agent Cooper. Like “Twin Peaks,” “Sleepy
Hollow” accepts the irrational and uses rational, Sherlock Holmesian means to
explore it. But Depp sees constable Crane more like vampire-hunter Van
Helsing in the Dracula movies.

“It is exactly the formulaic structure of that
type of movie. We’re twisting it here, bending it there, pushing it around
and bullying it a bit. We’re trying to take it a step further but at the same
time not being disrespectful to that structure and formula and saluting the
people who have done good work in it.” Among those he counts Christopher Lee,
who plays Crane’s law-and-order boss, the Burgomaster. Depp says he found it
“frightening” to act with Lee. “You are looking into the eyes of Dracula and
he’s about to jump down your throat, and it’s real, and it’s scary.”

Depp treasures the memory of his collaboration and friendship with
another mainstay of movie horror, Vincent Price, on Price’s final movie,
“Edward Scissorhands”; the aged actor, like his young friend a Gemini, sent
Depp a birthday card every year. The last time Depp saw him was shortly after
the death of Lillian Gish. “We lost Lillian this week,” Price said. “I’m the
only one left.” But when Depp told him, “I’ve got a feeling you’re going to
outlast us all,” Price’s eyes widened and he exclaimed, “Oh, shit!” “He was
tired,” Depp says. “He wanted to go somewhere else. But he was amazing.”

However, Depp balances his reverence for the ghosts of movies past
with a taste for the cutting edge (Nicolas Roeg’s avant-garde terror flick
“Don’t Look Now” reduced him to making “some horrible involuntary noise”) and
for outright kitsch (he cites Barnabas Collins, the vampire hero of the
’60s vampire soap “Dark Shadows,” as a major childhood obsession).

And he does keep looking for outside stimulation. Although he’s directed a film
himself (“The Brave” — which I, like most people, haven’t seen), he’s not
the kind of star who wants to direct his directors. John Travolta walked off
a Roman Polanski film, “The Double,” and effectively scuttled it, reportedly
because he wouldn’t take Polanski’s direction. Depp, on the other hand, leapt
at the chance to star in Polanski’s forthcoming “The Ninth Gate”: “Polanski
made some of the most close-to-perfect films that I’d ever seen, like
‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Tenant’ and ‘Repulsion’ and that stuff. It was a long
time ago but it can’t go away; it’s got to be there somewhere, and I think it
is. I just thought it would be a great experience to get into the ring with
him and see what it was like. And it was interesting. No shit.”

The actor jokes that he’s not a fan of Johnny Depp’s: “I don’t buy
into him; he’s overrated.” He’s petrified of complacency: “I think that, as
an actor, if you get to a place where you’re satisfied and happy with it,
you’re dead, it’s over, you’re not hungry anymore, you won’t try things any more.”

When asked to name a scene he’d love to play, he says, “My brain is
making a connection between two things. You can see how my sick mind works.
Did you ever see ‘The Execution of Private Slovik’? It’s unbelievable, with a
really beautiful performance from Martin Sheen. The last couple of minutes of
the film has Slovik walking toward his execution, saying, ‘Hail Mary, full of
grace.’” What Depp would like to do is apply the workings of that scene to
the last moments of an entirely different character — Rasputin, imperial
Russia’s mad, seemingly unkillable monk, who defied diverse modes of
assassination (guns, poison, bludgeons) before being dumped in a river and
drowned. What interests Depp would be playing Rasputin “beating death for
all that time” and charting “what his thoughts might have been during the
last moments of his life, kind of what Martin Sheen was doing” for Slovik.

Throughout the “Sleepy Hollow” press conference, Depp politely asked younger reporters
if they understood his references. Depp may still have a way to go before his
presence infiltrates the movie mainstream, but he’s elastic enough to bridge
generation gaps. I called the director of “The Execution of Private Slovik,”
Lamont Johnson, to pass on Depp’s good words; I wondered whether Johnson, a
staggeringly vital 77-year-old who has helped launch performers as varied as
Jeff Bridges and Molly Ringwald, had formed an opinion of Depp’s acting. This
director had to admit that he knew Depp mostly from reviews and reputation.
“Johnny Depp?” he laughed good-naturedly. “He’s been praised to me by my
granddaughters.”