Robert Heinlein

Today is the birthday of Robert Anson Heinlein.  As many readers will know Robert Heinlein was a science fiction writer whose heyday was in the fifties and sixties.  Like many Science Fiction writers of that time he wrote about a future where space travel and aliens were, if not commonplace, at least part of the known world(s).  Unlike those other writers, who have mostly faded into obscurity, Robert Heinlein is still read today and his ideas still have a currency that lends them to be debated.  In this respect he is almost unique.  I would like to share a few observations about why that is.  If it seems a little odd to be celebrating a science fiction writer on a web-magazine about men and style, then I have to say that Robert Heinlein had some very important things to say about men.  

I have read Robert Heinlein all my adult life and he shares a comparable place in my literary gallery with Ernest Hemingway.  Indeed there are some real similarities between them.  There is much to write about Robert Heinlein and it cannot all be contained in one article.  For now I will concentrate on Heinlein’s men.  I hope to write more in due course. 

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein brought an intellectual maturity to SF and a willingness to make his stories explore complex and important ideas.  His stories inhabit a consistent future history, where starships, ray-guns and technology have taken men to new worlds.  However Robert Heinlein had a rare ability to use the SF form to write provocative novels about subjects as diverse as race, politics, the function of the military and the place of rituals in modern society.  In his later novels he turned to metaphysics and the hard questions of why are we here?, what happens after we die?  However his real genius was to write adventures that men could relate to, be excited by and enjoy.

Man Alone

Heinlein’s men are heroes, though they do not start out that way.  In Double Star, a failed actor becomes a double for a politician under threat of assassination, and inadvertently becomes the bridge between humans and an ancient and sophisticated Martian culture.  In Starship Troopers, Juan Rico is a spoilt rich boy who finds his manhood as an infantryman in a war against a genocidal race of alien bug creatures. 

 Robert Heinlein believed passionately in self-reliance, the need for an individual to avoid conformity and follow his own ideas and visions.  He coupled this with a intelligent and worldly understanding of modern western society, characterising it as technically dependent and with a need for conformity.  His ability to write elegant lucid stories with a mature adult sensibility brings these two contradictory worlds together in colourful and provocative adventures.

 We read his stories because they ask the question “How does a man live in a world he has not made?”  It is the same question we ask ourselves.

 I think that one of the reasons we read him is that he never cheats us.  His future societies may have starships and rayguns but they are realistic, they suffer the same problems that every complex society has, bad laws, stupid people, natural upheavals.  The effects of these societies feel real to the protagonists, and they feel real to us.  Heinlein’s men have to understand their society and decide what their moral principles are.  Which we all have to do. 

 For Robert Heinlein never gives his heroes a free ride.  They have to form themselves mentally and morally, usually while getting caught up in a plot to enslave all human colonists on Mars (Red Planet), freeing a future America from a religious dictatorship (Revolt in 2100) or trying to stop an invasion of alien mind parasites (The Puppet Masters).  With Heinlein it’s always running and putting your jacket on at the same time.  I believe this is one reason why he is still so readable.  The stories have a breakneck excitement, complex ideas are explored in prose of Hemingwayan terseness and every mistake the hero makes could cost him his life.  The hero’s resources are his skills, his moral principles and his self-reliance.  It could as easily be us as the hero.

Real men and real communities

Heinlein’s view was that government was a necessary evil.  The societies he approves of, (the ones he imagines in his books) are American in spirit, filled with free thinking individuals, intelligent decision makers and a desire for progress that is joyous and unafraid.  In “The Moon is a harsh mistress” he came the closest anyone has every come to describing a working libertarian community.  His luna is a penal colony, filled with convicts and ex-convicts, all transported by the governments of Earth.  Their fight for independence from a tyrannical Earth, is funny, inspiring, heartwarming and exciting.  Nearly fifty years after its publication The Moon is a harsh mistress remains an inspiration for libertarians. 

Here is the great contradiction in Robert Heinlein’s writing.  He is utopian enough to want good government but knows the price of it.  He writes perceptively of the need for good communities, for shared moral principles and good manners, for hierarchies of abilities and the need to recognise the importance of critical knowledge and skills.              

However shared values are among the things that deny his heroes their freedom.  In Stranger in a strange land, his best-selling tale of an Earthling raised by Martians and taught great powers, Robert Heinlein asks the question how do you build a society when each man has the power to stand outside of it, or destroy it.   

 For Heinlein politics is a necessary evil but definitely evil.  He values liberty over government, is scathing about politicians (he was a political activist before becoming a writer).  He saves the worst of his venom for repressive societies that destroy the human spirit, communism being the foremost amongst them.  Time of course has proven him right but in the sixties novels like Starship troopers, The Puppet Masters and Revolt in 2100 were a crusade against socialist conformity.

 Heinlein sees humanity’s best hope as free people tolerating (at best) a weak government, a kind of federated universe.  Even here he knows that freedom will be constrained.  In Glory Road, The Moon is a harsh mistress and Farnham’s Freehold, Heinlein makes it plain that freedom is on the frontier, where civilisation and its rules have not yet encroached on life.  No-one has written more perceptively about the innate contradictions between men and their community.  Real men assert themselves for justice and the community resists this.  Heinlein knew this and makes heroic stories out of this.     

Men and magic

But we do not read Heinlein for his socio-political shading, gripping though that is.  We read him for his men.  Juan Rico and his journey from spoilt kid to courageous and honourable fighting man, the actor Lorenzo Smythe,an unlucky man who gets a second chance late in life and has the courage to take it,  “Oscar” Gordon, the man who does not fit in, who answers a newspaper ad starting “Are you a coward?”, who gets the chance to slay dragons.

Men and magic and adventure

These novels are men’s adventures, from a tradition that goes back thousands of years.  Robert Heinlein may be a master of political thought, hard science and military history but it is the adventure that is the thing.  One man against the world.  His heroes are modern Francis Drakes, D’artagnans, and dragon slayers. 

 The simple truth is that Robert Heinlein’s books are a joy to read.

 Robert Heinlein says it better than I can.  I have the following excerpt from Glory Road pinned up in my office:

 “I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom.  I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me ,  “The games afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi  on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.

 I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake.  I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon.  I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid.  I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be – instead of the tawdry, lousy fouled-up mess it is.   

Robert Heinlein’s men are risk-takers, lovers and fighters.  Great men have that sense of wonder.

 What did I learn from Robert Heinlein?  Adventurers have the best lives. 

Thank you Robert Heinlein.

“I am the epitome of Twentieth Century cosmopolitanism, but I should have an explorer in the time of Magellan”

  Errol Flynn.

Today is the birthday of Errol Flynn, one of the most handsome and manly men ever to make movies. 

Errol Flynn’s start in movies 

Errol Flynn burst onto the screen in Captain Blood, Michael Curtiz’ wonderful swashbuckler.  He almost came out of nowhere, but not quite.  After a bumpy life in which he had bought and run a tea plantation (and gone broke), run a copper mine (also went broke), he pitched up in England as an actor.  At the age of 25 he made a movie called Murder in Monte Carlo, for Warner Brothers.   This got him to Hollywood, where he had the huge good fortune to come to the attention of Jack Warner, the movie mogul and, of course, the head of Warner studios.  Jack Warner was one of the smartest men who ever lived and he saw Flynn’s virility, masculine beauty, athleticism and charisma and made this unknown the star of his movie. 

 Well, the Sea hawk was a huge success and Errol Flynn became the huge star we remember.

Errol Flynn as Captain Peter Blood

 There is no other actor like him.  Charming, sophisticated, witty and handsome, he filled the screen.  Women adored him.  But for all that, he was a man’s man and men admired him too.  Movie critic Pauline Kael once said of Cary Grant that to simply see him on screen makes us feel happy.  Errol Flynn had a similar quality.  When he appears on screen we feel our spirits lift and we know that nothing deter us, we can fight on to victory.    

For Flynn’s movie characters were what every man wants to be, venturesome, courageous, honourable, light-hearted and romantic.  The reason that he played though characters so well is that, as a man he was all of those things.  But there was something more, something special.  Errol Flynn was smart, witty, quick and knowing.  His persona was that of the worldly man who had bumped around, had his ups and downs.  What was different about him?

 He always loved life. 

 He was never cynical.  How important this is.  He has the manly quality par excellence, he imbues other men with confidence and joie de vivre.  By example he shows us that, whatever happens to us, life is a fight and a joy and a glorious journey, so keep smiling. 

Errol Flynn as Robin Hood

Flynn’s movies

 You can see it in his movies.  As Geoffrey Thorpe (a thinly disguised Sir Francis Drake) in the Sea Hawk, he is patriotic and calls on the patriotism of others, to fight tyranny.  We know in our hearts that his patriotic fervour is real.  Real men are patriots. 

 In Dawn Patrol we believe in his Captain Courtney pilot and officer, who is an honourable man, because it is transparently clear that Errol Flynn believed in honour.

 And then there is The Adventure of Robin Hood.  I was very lucky in how I saw this movie, because, for all my affection for Errol Flynn’s movies I had never seen “Adventures”. 

It was a cold winter and the occasion was a showing (at London’s National Film Theatre) of a fully restored print of The Adventures of Robin Hood. 

House lights go down and the screen lights up, Erich Korngold’s wonderful score plays and the credits scroll.  The first scene is the confrontation between Much the Miller’s son (Herbert Mundin) and the evil Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone).  Suddenly Robin Hood rides into shot and Errol Flynn’s presence fills the screen.  To a man the audience clapped!  Some of them stood and clapped!  It was a spontaneous recognition of the sheer charisma and good feeling that Errol Flynn brought the screen.  It was a wonderful moment that had a huge impact on me and I have never forgotten it.   

Ambushing Guy of Gisbourne, from The adventures of Robin Hood

Flynn’s manliness

Errol Flynn calls out to the adventurer in all men.  The English actor David Niven was his good friend and by all accounts Errol Flynn was a loyal and generous friend.  However he was still Errol Flynn, headstrong, impatient of authority, liable to get a friend into scrapes.  Niven’s autobiographies, especially Bring On the Empty Horses, is full of wonderful Flynn  stories.  My favourite has to be the grapefruit story.  Flynn was signed up to play the lead in “The charge of the Light Brigade”.  It was a big budget movie and hugely important to Warner Brothers.  However they were worried by Flynn’s drinking.  So the studio ordered him not to drink and told him they were going to enforce a “dry” set.  So Flynn set about circumventing what, to him, was a wholly unfair restriction.  He got a large syringe and methodically injected a crate of grapefruit with vodka.  He then took these with him to the set….

 The studio heads rang the studio and asked if Flynn were drinking.  No, came the reply, and he is eating healthily, lots of fruit!

 Now that is a man!

 This is a short article but I must pay tribute to Errol Flynn as a serious actor.  His athleticism and sheer style led many people to overlook his qualities as an actor.  But one of my favourite roles is Errol Flynn as Mike Gilbert, a good man lost to drink, in The Sun Also Rises.  Here he honestly, carefully and respectfully lays bare the self-loathing and helplessness of the alcoholic.  It is a difficult performance to watch, much less to like, but it is magnificent.      

Errol Flynn was a real man.  He was not perfect and he knew it, he talked honestly about his mistakes and flaws.  However he always tried to live up to the virtues that ment so much to him.  Politically correct people often sneer at these values, the underlying argument being that manly men are a sham and that these values like courage, honour and patriotism are worthless and unreal.  The great glory of Errol Flynn is that he was a fallible man, lived out his failings in public and was unrepentant about living for adventure, and for values that real men stand for.       

Errol Flynn sailing

God bless you Mr Flynn, for a life of courage, laughter and adventure.

Further Information

Errol Flynn’s daughter Rory, runs his offocial website here.  It gives a real sense of who Errol Flynn was and the homepage introduction says it all, succinctly and sincerely

10 Flynn Movies

Here are my ten favourite Flynn movies:

 The Adventures of Robin Hood

One of the finest movies ever made and one of Errol Flynn’s best performances.  He was gentle, manly, debonair and fearless as Robin.  Add to this Michael Curtiz inspired direction, Erich Korngold’s music and the great Basil Rathbone and you have a masterpiece.     

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 The SeaHawk

My second favourite Flynn movie.  His English privateer Geoffrey Thorpe is a masterpiece of passion and patriotism and there is the most magnificent swordfight at the movie’s end.  Also, an indirect and urgent plea for the US to join England in the war against the Nazis.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 Elizabeth and Essex

Flynn’s performance, slated at the time, is now considered to be a piece of craftsmanship acting.  By turning off his worldliness and making Essex a victim of his own passions, Flynn gives us a man doomed for all the wrong reasons.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 Dawn Patrol

First world war air combat, a brave, honourable and chivalrous pilot in a war made ruthless by new technologies.

Get it in the US here

Kim

As Mahbub Ali, the rascally trader with an eye for girls, Flynn is great.  Mahbub Ali is of course an intrepid spy for the British in India.  Interestingly, Flynn underplays his part here and becomes the quiet heart of the movie.  

Get it in the US here

 Dodge City

Just huge fun.  Cowboys, clichés and adventure, Flynn plays this with one eyebrow permanently arched and some great lines.  

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 Captain Blood

The evolution of Peter Blood, from disgraced doctor to buccaneer.  Flynn’s blood is honourable, whilst knowing full well the perils that honour may bring.  A man with a sword against his enemies, an adventurer’s dream.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

Adventures of Don Juan

Flynn was older now and the pace of this movie is sometimes suspect, but his ability to play heroic men of conviction is undiminished.    

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 The charge of the Light brigade

Flynn as the man of duty and honour, whose worldly nature and sharp mind tell him that charging the guns is suicide but whose commitment to honour allows him no other choice.  Simply beautifully played.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

 The Sun also Rises

A magnificent performance here, as rich drunk American Mike Gilbert, and the sort of part that Flynn always wanted to play.  Hemingway’s novel called for a good man fallen into desparate alcoholism, and Flynn gives a pitch-perfect performance.  Hemingway and Flynn were both manly men and their meeting in this movie was absolutely right.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

Today is the birthday of Pierce Brosnan, he is 56. Happy Birthday, Mr Brosnan.

The first time I saw Pierce Brosnan was back in 1995. “Goldeneye” had just been released and everybody wanted to know who the new Bond was. Pierce Brosnan was the guest on a UK TV programme “TGI Friday”. The host introduced him, and immediately played a clip from Goldeneye. The scene was set in a sauna, with Bond indulging in some repartee and rough sex-play with Famke Janssen’s scantily-clad Russian assassin, whose speciality was crushing the life out of her victims with her super-strong thighs. The scene was sloppily salacious and frankly very old Bond, too reminiscent of Roger Moore being beaten up by gimmicky women villains. The clip ended, and the TV host implied that Brosnan had seen Famke Janssen’s breasts in the scene. He laughed and said “Well you know how it is, you’re a boy, you look.” This with a slight shrug, he changed the subject.

It was the reply that intrigued me. Honest, respectful to his co-star, dryly funny, but somehow private. He clearly was not going to go into ego-playtime even when offered the opportunity. This actor made me want to see Goldeneye. But in the 10 years since I am not sure I have found out that much more about Pierce Brosnan. He talks about being transplanted, at the age of 10, from rural Ireland to urban London and being an outsider. Like many men who are outsiders, he is emotionally reticent and, for a movie star, shy about himself. All movie stars say they are shy private people, but I think this is mostly bullshit. I think Pierce Brosnan is the real deal.

And since Goldeneye I have been a Brosnan movie-watcher. I am going to use the occasion of Mr Brosnan’s birthday to talk about his movies. Because if he will not talk about himself, his movies do say a lot about him.

A word about this article. It is long. When I started it I had not thought about the body of work that Pierce Brosnan has produced since 1995. However I wanted to really look at his movies and that meant writing about a lot of them (thirteen to be exact). It was not a difficult task, for even at the outset I could see that he was a versatile actor and that his movies span a number of genres. I hope that you find the article good enough to read to the end and that you enjoy my thoughts on an actor who I think is very interesting and very different.

Goldeneye

Goldeneye was a huge success, and for me it was because Brosnan gave Bond back his arrogance, his certainty, his surety. Brosnan was a fit young actor and he took over the movie, every move fast, sure and confident. The arrogance that Connery had was back, along with a dash of cruelty for its own sake. Brosnan also gave Bond a brio, a joyful lust for smashing things up that made Goldeneye such a thrill-ride. Brosnan moved Bond back to being physical and manly.

Bond, a tank and lots of destruction....

There was one other key factor. Brosnan played Bond as ambivalent. The Bond dry humour was now mordant, a far cry from the patrician “I say old boy!” of Roger Moore. It was no longer clear whether the dry humour was funny or just plain cynical. His humour was now as much triumphalism as wit. Brosnan played Bond as slightly bitter but still a loyal assassin with a job to do. Bond was now as implacable as the Terminator, with Brosnan playing him as a man whose superbly-controlled anger will take him past any enemy.

Bond with Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen)

If Connery was the iron-fisted and slick personification of post-war British power and Roger Moore was the British upper-class at war, Brosnan was the spy for the uncertain Nineties. Sworn to duty but too sophisticated to be unaware of the contradictions of his role, he reconciles it all in a manly way, by taking action. Brosnan gives us a glimpse of the inner workings of Bond and after that we could not be complacent, could not relax, because we had to be alert for more surprises from the cynical spy. Goldeneye was a marvellously perceptive and assured performance, especially from a first-time Bond.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Brosnan made Bond his own in Tomorrow Never Dies. Several small things made for a very assured performance. Brosnan made Bond more arrogant, more assured. He did this by making Bond still, a centre of power. He did it by taking away all unnecessary physical action and by making Bond imperturbable in the face of a situation. Once again it was about uncertainty. Roger Moore would raise an eyebrow and make a comment to show he got it, and the comment showed that he had preserved his Brit sang-froid, and was unmoved. Brosnan subtly narrows his eyes to show he’s got it and has a poker-play expression which can change instantly to amusement or outright fury. There was this sense that mayhem could kick off at any second.

Brosnan’s physical presentation of Bond changed. Bond became more deft, balanced, his actions quick and careful. There was a now a kind of master Samurai sense about him, that he could see four moves ahead and was simply anticipating the battle.

And Brosnan shows us how a secret agent loves,…very carefully. His encounter with his lost love Paris Carver (Terri Hatcher) is notable for the tenderness, the soft look, the gentle touch, that are absent from his more casual couplings. And then Brosnan takes Bond to a new place. When Bond comes across Paris’ murdered body, he opens the man up, in a way we have never seen before. It is not just the loss, but the meaninglessness of the death, the finality, the loss of future. This is a small scene but its key to Brosnan’s Bond. Brosnan makes Bond mourn like a real man mourns and it makes the audience feel closer to him.

Paris Carver (Terri Hatcher) and Bond

And of course, this unleashes in Bond the anger necessary to destroy the villain Elliott Carver. Brosnan plays Bond like a man who has an internal switch, which, once activated, he will stop at nothing.

Changing the game….

I believe that the next movie, though a commercial failure, paradoxically showed what a great actor Pierce Brosnan is.

Grey Owl

Moving from mystery to eco-statement, Grey Owl was Richard Attenborough’s bio-pic of the life of an Objibway Indian/Scottish half-breed fur trapper who became one of the first champions of the native environment (in this case the Canadian wilderness) and a huge celebrity in England and Canada. The mystery lay in the fact that Grey Owl was in fact an Englishman who had been adopted into the Ojibway tribe, and is eventually exposed as such.

Brosnan gives us a gruff, mostly humourless man, who is ill at ease in the white world. Once again there is a kind of stillness, a zen in which Brosnan cloaks the character. Brosnan builds a man of utter simplicity, who undertakes each task with total concentration. This is a wise man, who judges the world in his rare utterances. Where Bond had arrogance, Grey Owl has power, and native wisdom. Brosnan does power very well and his Grey Owl is an imposing figure.

Once again it is the small moments in Brosnan’s performance, gem-like scenes where he lets us into the inner character. There is a wonderful moment early on in the film, where Brosnan is acting as a guide for a young woman he does not particularly like (but will eventually fall in love with) and takes her to his adopted Ojibway tribe. The chief starts promoting Grey Owl as a husband, to his evident discomfort. The small tics, the nervous glances that give Brosnan away, are beautifully done.

Archie Grey Owl and Anahereo at their wedding

There is a deliberate rhythm to Brosnan’s Archie Grey Owl. When he is in his place and his power he is fluid, deliberate and spare, with no wasted movement. However, as his secret starts to overwhelm him, his actions begin to stutter, his guilty pauses get longer, sentences that start out calmly explode into anger. Brosnan’s performance grows and grows, and he shows us the immensity of his guilt growing with it. The tension in the man becomes tangible and heart-wrenching as Brosnan increasingly bares the two halves of Grey Owl’s soul. The progression from (supposedly) simple woodsman to troubled eco-celebrity is marked by Brosnan progressively showing the depths of this man’s emotional pain.

This is a masterful performance, Brosnan is the film, because the subtle complexity of his performance outclasses every other aspect of this film.

And back to Bond..

The World is Not Enough
This is a great Bond movie, mythic, manly and with a sense of real danger. This one works so well because it taps into one of Brosnan’s great strengths, the ability to play men who are both powerful and troubled. In The World is Not Enough, Bond is compromised by his failure to save the life of a British industrialist (and friend of M). He is further compromised by M’s use of him, to spy on a woman who may be endangered by Bond’s actions. Once again, Brosnan shows us a man who lives on the edge, showing us the little signs of a man who is getting closer and closer to being a merciless killer, but never overplaying those emotions.

A tougher, more deadly Bond

What is so great about this movie is that Brosnan gets the tone perfectly right. This is a very real menace (stolen Russian nukes to be detonated in a major city) and Brosnan’s Bond has never been harder or more deadly. But this is also Bond, and Brosnan is truly funny here, the jokes and quips are perfectly timed, delivered in that slightly menacing tone. The sight and situation gags are done perfectly and Brosnan is as slick as hell in doing them. Here Brosnan gives us the Bond he had always promised us, the mature, cosmopolitan sensualist, a man in great physical shape, who happens to be a killer.

Masterpieces and changes
For me Brosnan really hit his stride with The World is Not Enough and I think this emboldened him to become even more creative. His next movie was a risky undertaking and turned out to be a masterpiece.

The Thomas Crown Affair
A re-make of the original Thomas Crown Affair by Pierce Brosnan’s own Irish Dreamtime productions, this is a superb movie that knocks the original into a cocked hat. This version plays out an art-heist that is colourful, exciting and fun. Brosnan plays the head of a Mergers and Acquisitions boutique bank, whose rogue alpha male superiority leads him into pulling heists.

One of the problems with the original was that Steve McQueen did not understand who he was playing. In the romantic and action scenes he was fine, in the scenes where he plays Crown as a businessman he was embarrassingly bad. The truth is actors rarely understand how to play businessmen. They play them well when they play them as greedy, as stupid, as unable to relate to other people. They do know how to play them positively, as gamblers, risk-takers, fighters and winners.

Having been in Mergers and Acquisitions myself, my assessment is that Brosnan’s Thomas Crown is pitch-perfect. Early on there is a wonderful scene, where Brosnan strides confidently across the floor of his boutique bank, left hand in his pocket. He slips from one conversation to the next and as he nears his office he stretches out his right hand and says to the guy sitting at the next-to-last desk “Give me good numbers Jimmy”. Gesture, timing, tone of voice, posture are all perfect, the complete high-risk banker. Brosnan is just as good in all his other scenes. He clearly understands who this man is and he shows us, the audience, all the little facets of character that make this man the successful Alpha male he is.

Thomas Crown and Catherine Banning (Rene Russo)

Brosnan really inhabits this role. He has often been considered the successor to Cary Grant and here he shows the qualities that got him nominated. He is funny, suave, sophisticated and charming. Playing a rich banker gives him the chance to play wealthy and cultured and he does it with silky ease. He is a classic body-shape and the clothes in the movie (bespoke tailored by Campagna of New York) are perfect on him, he has the sensitivity and sensibility to understand the importance of those tailored suits.

And this movie is a feel-good movie, there is no violence, the real world is somewhere outside, along with Mergers and Acquisitions. Brosnan dominates the movie, yet the scenes are with Rene Russo as his love interest/adversary are balanced, intimate and beautifully paced. Brosnan is a generous co-star as he shares the screen with Russo. And Brosnan plays off Russo, perfectly in character. There is a pivotal moment where the masterful, successful Thomas Crown has to admit to Russo that she is the first woman to visit his secret Caribbean home. By doing so, he loses a skirmish in their battle of wits and admits, by implication, that their relationship is more than just sex. He plays it with just the right amount of confusion and embarrassment.

The Thomas Crown Affair was notable for the passion of its love scenes

And Brosnan plays Crown as a manly man, successful, a solitary risk-taker having the adventure of a lifetime, who is suddenly confused by the appearance of love. This movie was Brosnan acting as a classic Hollywood movie star and he did it to perfection. Audiences loved it.  For me it is a favourite film.

Deliberately messing it up….

The Tailor of Panama
This was the movie that told us that Brosnan was never going to be content to be an action hero. It starts with Andrew Osnard MI6 (Brosnan), being exiled to Panama in disgrace. So I thought it was going to be a kinda Bond spy movie….

Well, everybody gets it wrong sometimes. The Tailor of Panama is a truly black comedy about British and American interference in other countries. And Andrew Osnard is a truly evil man, even by spy standards. Amoral and self-obsessed, he invents a wholly imaginary conspiracy against the Panama Canal, with the intention of rehabilitating himself with his boss and getting back to a plum posting.

Osnard intimidates Harry the Tailor (Geoffrey Rush)

To do this he finds vulnerable and foolish people and uses them without mercy. He intimidates, blackmails and threatens these people in order to make them do his bidding. Brosnan holds nothing back in the role, is truly frightening, completely evil. Osnard watches these people like a cat watching a mouse, takes pleasure in their pain and then you can see him calculating how to inflict more. He is intelligent, articulate and with a quickness and a savagery that scares the life out of his victims. Brosnan finds a cruel, sadistic part of himself and has no compunction about unleashing it onscreen. His face does the work here, the smile becomes a sneer, the twinkle in the eye becomes a glare. There is no concession to his earlier hero persona at all, he takes a hammer to it in this movie and clearly has a great time doing it.

Osnard seducing Harry's wife (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Along with a wonderful cast he makes a movie so blackly funny, you have to laugh or you would cry. An unexpected departure for an actor who clearly had something to say.

Die Another Day
Next came Die Another Day, Bond is betrayed, to the North Koreans. Brosnan gives us a Bond who is not only vengeful but paranoid, slightly world-weary and short of patience. There is a new ruthlessness about Bond and Brosnan plays him as a man who wants satisfaction, whose impatience shows in his abruptness and his short fuse. And it’s time for Bond the hedonist, who meets his like in CIA agent Jinx (Halle Berry). As Bond, Brosnan throws himself into sex with Jinx and their sex scene is passionate, athletic and feels very real. This was Brosnan’s darkest Bond, his thinly veiled anger with M being acted out the set of his shoulders, the light in his eye and the tone of his voice. In many ways this was Brosnan’s Bond at his most real.

The duel from Die Another Day

When Daniel Craig made Casino Royale, a lot of nonsense was talked about James Bond, by newspaper journalists who had no understanding of Bond or his story. Like many men I have long been a James Bond fan. I loved Casino Royal and thought Daniel Craig was a tough hero. But the real Commander Bond? The archetypal Bond of Fleming’s books?

Brosnan was the better Bond. Sean Connery defined Bond and consequently cannot be beat, but Brosnan comes a close second.

Evelyn
I have to be honest; I did not want to see Evelyn. I had heard that it was sentimental, set in fifties Ireland (a period in English history defined by poverty and parochialism) and about a trial, none of which interested me. But my wife, that gorgeous girl, told me it great and she was surprised, given my appreciation of Brosnan, that I was not interested in it. At the time I was absorbed by Brosnan the action hero, worried that he had descended into soap opera.

I was an idiot. Evelyn is a wonderful movie and I am happy to tell you why.

Evelyn is the true story of Desmond Doyle, an Irish painter and decorator, who, in fifties Ireland, has the misfortune that his wife leaves him. His three young children are taken into care by the Catholic Church, acting at the behest of the Irish government. Desmond loves his children and this working-class man pits himself against the state to reclaim them.

Brosnan is marvellous as Desmond Doyle, he gives a breathtaking performance. His Doyle is a loving father, irresponsible and charming. Brosnan already had that part down pat, the cheeky grin, the quip, the smooth charm. But he goes much deeper into the character, playing Doyle as a frightened, desperate man. Brosnan gives us a man who simply cannot be still, whose courage comes in sudden bursts. He switches emotions so quickly, so that we can see Doyle go from a courageous speech to shrinking with fear, looking around furtively for an escape from the consequences of his own courage. Brosnan hoods his eyes, bites his lip and draws furiously on a cigarette, eloquent in fear and frustration. But when Doyle talks of his love for his children, his voice is calm and clear, full of love and conviction. Brosnan gives Doyle a voice from the heart, a conviction that will move the planet on its axis.

Desmond Doyle singing for tips

But above all of this, it is the painstaking care and respect that Brosnan shows for Desmond Doyle’s life that makes this such a marvellous performance. If Doyle acts like a fool, Brosnan shows that it is lack of knowledge that makes act that way, that he has a quick mind and an honest heart. He never coarsens Desmond Doyle or insinuates he is less of a man for growing up in poverty. Rather his Doyle is very honest about his life, has an innate pride in himself (for all his fear) and knows that his children are his life.

And Brosnan makes Doyle grow through the movie. His speech becomes calmer, his actions more considered and we thrill to his new-found self-esteem and urge him on in his fight to get his children back. Yet even in the final climactic scene when Desmond Doyle fits with everything he has got, the fear is still there. And I had to ask myself how do I know that? Watching that scene again, I realise that Brosnan had kept Doyle’s frightened quick breathing whilst adding in all the other physical changes that showed Doyle’s growth. Though it is almost imperceptible, you can hear Doyle’s fear as he fights for the breath to reclaim his children. The scene and the acting is simply magnificent.

The more I see Evelyn, the more I see what a wonderful movie it is. It is a Frank Capra movie for our time. Full of struggle, but respectful of ordinary people’s lives, it manages to be fun, uplifting and joyous at the same time. Simply wonderful.

After the Sunset
After the Sunset continued the rounding out of Pierce Brsosnan’s movie persona. Set on a Caribbean holiday island, After the Sunset is a lightweight romp that advertises itself as a heist movie but quickly turns into a comedy. The joke is that Brosnan is a master jewel-thief who is smoking hot at heists, but it soon becomes apparent that he is a bit of loss at anything else. So it was a disappointment for us Thomas Crown fans, but the more I see the movie I realise that it has a lot going for it.

The first of these is that Brosnan plays jewel thief Max Burdett without ego. He happily plays sloppy and stupid and lets Salma Hayek’s fiery Lola play off him for laughs. There is a laugh-out loud scene where Brosnan’s Burdett meets the Island’s crime kingpin, Henri Moore (Don Cheadle) who tells Burdett that he has developed a life philosophy based on the songs of the Mammas and Poppas. The scene cuts to Brosnan driving his car, listening to “Go where you wanna go”, nodding his head like an idiot, with that earnest puzzled look on his face. Perfect.

Burdett and Agent Lloyd in trouble.

It also gave Brosnan the opportunity to play out his dry sense of humour to great effect. This works so well in a scene with his nemesis, Agent Lloyd of the FBI (Woody Harrelson);

Lloyd: Just because you’re British you don’t have to hide your feelings.

Burdett: I’m Irish, we tell people how we feel. Now Fuck Off.

Timing and delivery were dry, delivered with relish. Watch it and see.  The battle of wits between Burdett and Agent Lloyd is truly great fun. 

Like Grey Owl, After the Sunset is less than the sum of its parts. But Brosnan gives us a character we can care for. Once again he is the movie.

Matador
Brosnan made Matador after the Eon productions told him that they did not want him for a fifth Bond. If Matador was not Brosnan’s revenge movie for being denied a fifth Bond, I will eat my hat.

Julian Noble is a hit-man with delusions, a “facilitator of fatalities” as he puts it. Sleazy, unwashed, with a vile little moustache and nasty clothes, he has a taste for booze and young girls. Unwholesome does not even begin to cover it. Brosnan revels in the role, deliberately making Noble as offensive as possible. And it is non-stop, just when you think it cannot get any worse, he gets that little bit more provocative, Julian’s tone gets just that bit more self-justificatory and whiny. And Brosnan so obviously loves doing it, he revels in playing a human Gollum.

Julian Noble, sleazy hitman.

Julian is burnt-out and starts to suffer panic attacks at the precise moment when he is meant to be killing someone. One night Julian meets Greg Kinnear’s businessman in a bar in Mexico. Brosnan is hypnotic as he befriends the businessman with all the sleazy charm he can muster. Julian is obviously soul-deep lonely and Brosnan plays this as a switchback of bluster and blubbing. He starts by being macho and loud, switching in a second to being plaintive, weak and whiny, then back to bluster. Brosnan has always had the ability to hold two opposites in a character and here he uses that gift to its fullest extent. If there was an ambiguity in some of his previous roles its ambiguity squared here. And Brosnan inhabits this unflattering role to its fullest extent. Matador is quite simply one of his finest performances.

a maelstrom of buddy-buddy embarassment

Brosnan acts out Julian’s loneliness. There is an outrageous scene where he walks through the lobby of a plush hotel clad only in a tiny pair of speedos and black ankle boots. The clientele are appalled but any reaction is better than no reaction as far as Julian is concerned. Thomas Crown it is not. And the other side of the coin is the Brosnan charm, which he deploys to the full as he tries to wheedle Greg Kinnear into being his only friend.

This is a car-crash movie, you are fascinated and horrified at the same time, you cannot look away. The worst thing is the Brosnan charm. You can actually see yourself becoming buddies with the monster that is Julian, and then shudder at the thought. And it is not the plot, or the action, it is simply this incredible monster that Brosnan has built. A performance built of courage, insight and great acting talent.

Having made the break with conventional expectation…..

Seraphim Falls
Brosnan has talked on the record about how he had failed to get roles because he was considered too handsome, too pretty, how Matador and Julian Noble was his answer to that.

In Seraphim Falls he goes to what is for him an unexplored movie style, the western. The movie opens with a cowboy, heavily bundled in furs, cooking a rabbit in a snowy forest. He looks up and we see a hairy, bearded man and realise its Pierce Brosnan. His face looks as if carries all the sorrows of the world. He stands and looks around at the snowy vastness of the Ruby Mountains of New Mexico. All is peaceful; the only sound is the crackle of the fire. As he starts to kneel to his food, a shot ring out and he falls to the ground.

And it is a pretty shocking opener for a western vengeance movie, a chase though the wilderness of America. Brosnan is being tracked by Carver (Liam Neeson), who is obsessed with killing Gideon (Brosnan). Is Gideon the good guy or the bad guy? Should we want Gideon to live or Carver to catch and kill him?

Gideon and Carver (Liam Neeson)

In a way Seraphim Falls is the measure of Brosnan’s work as an actor. A few years earlier we would have assumed that Brosnan is the hero. But now, after The Tailor of Panama and Matador, we just don’t know. I think that he has always calculated his screen persona to have this effect. I think he revels in finding ways to keep it fresh.

Brosnan plays Gideon as a man burdened by a terrible guilt. Once again, a lot of his interpretation is in the physicality of the character. He walks as though pursued by something he cannot shake off. He is always looking inward and his conversations with others are notable for the degree to which he is detached and simultaneously holding some inner dialogue.

Gideon

And here the rage, the power, is in him from the beginning, a rage to live. Gideon wants to live and flees from Carver. Brosnan plays him as a wild animal of man, a soldier, a killer, a mountain man. Gideon is resolute, almost silent, his face locked in a grimace of anger, guilt and a confused desire to survive. Brosnan gives him the walk of some homicidal soldier, marching along, part killer, part beast. And yet when he speaks, his voice is educated, measured and knowing, a soft growl. The voice does not belong to the body; it belongs to another man, another time. This is one of the deliberate contradictions that keep us watching Gideon.

Brosnan plays Gideon as a dried husk of a man, tough as leather, driven onward only by his own indomitable will. He stares but does not see, he kills competently, without remorse, he moves on. Yet, in the company of a simple farming family he weeps with such anguish that that we share his pain, yet we still do not know why he cries. In any other actor this would become tiresome, but this is what Brosnan does so well. His performance is calculated and magical; he shows us how the strength of a man can battle with his inner pain and still function. We understand that Gideon is tied to Carver in some fatal way, but we do not know how. He invites us to come see the crisis, the battle of the self, and like every hero’s journey, we are drawn to know the answer.

With respect to Liam Neeson’s measured and powerful performance, this is Brosnan’s movie. There are long stretches where there is only Gideon and the landscape. We stay with the movie because Brosnan progressively reveals the growing desperation of Gideon, the increasingly desperate stare, the cracking voice, the confusion in him as he recedes from humanity and cannot really understand what people are saying.

Without Brosnan, Seraphim Falls could be just a western chase movie. He elevates it, by giving us a character study that enthrals us, as his story unravels.

Butterfly on a Wheel (“Shattered” in its DVD release)
…is a mystery within a mystery. Gerard Butler (the 300) is Neil Randall, a corporate high-flyer and Maria Bello is his wife Abby. They have a wonderful life, a designer home and a beautiful baby daughter, Sophie. Suddenly a violent psychopath appears in their life. The psychopath is Tom Ryan (Brosnan) a mystery man who tells them he has kidnapped their child and will kill her if they do not do as he says. He then proceeds to wreck their lives.

Tom Ryan is the absolute concentration of anger, hatred and cruelty. Holding their child is frightening enough but it swiftly becomes clear that Ryan is only just this side of sane, and Neil and Abby’s fear that they might tip him over the edge, increases the tension ten-fold.

Tom Ryan taunts his victims

This is a Brosnan master-class. There is no gradual build-up, just an outpouring of anger, hate and control at a colossal level. From the moment he appears on screen, Pierce Brosnan gives a blistering performance of great intensity. Some off this we have seen before, the quickness of an animal, the inhuman stare, the sadistic enjoyment of another human’s plight. Some of it is new, like the unnerving Irish voice, cold, measured but about to slip over the edge into ranting madness. He makes Ryan mercurial, changing mood on the young couple in a split second. Hell, this is scary stuff; you really do not know what is coming next. If Brosnan was evil in the Tailor of Panama and Matador, he was redeemed by the fact that those movies were black comedies. Here he is pure evil, the personification of death, or is he?

Neil and Abby want to know why this man is persecuting them, and for different reasons so do we. Tom Ryan clearly has a motive, but what could it be to drive a man to these extremes of hate? The clue is in the duality that Brosnan plays so well, Ryan is another character under tension from two extreme and opposite forces, and the revelation of these explosive energies is the climax of the movie.

There’s a powerful intuition about Pierce Brosnan’s acting. “Butterfly” is frenetic, high energy, it unfolds at a very fast pace. Brosnan matches it; he is scary because he is fast, physically and mentally quicker than Neil and Abby, outwitting them at every turn. In so many of his movies Pierce Brosnan understands the tempo, the pace and the timing that will make the movie a success. This is one of them.

Married Life
This movie just passed me by, I don’t know how it was marketed, maybe my attention was elsewhere. But I was intrigued by the concept of the movie and glad I caught up with it.

Married Life is set in 1949, and initially centres on a relationship between two friends, two businessmen, stockbrokers I think, in upstate New York. The milieu is the professional middle-class and the requirement back then was for men to dress well for work. So the early scenes are all beautifully cut suits, fedoras and brightly-polished shoes, in bars of polished brass and glossy cherry wood. Pierce Brosnan is one of the few modern movie stars who understand how to wear clothes well, and in that respect alone he is right for the part.

Brosnan is Richard Langley, a handsome, elegant bachelor who is a very successful ladies man. His best friend is Harry Allen (Chris Cross), who is known to be very happily married to a lovely wife. The movie opens with Harry telling Richard that he is having an affair with a young beautiful blonde, Kay Nesbitt (Rachel McAdams) who he loves. Unfortunately, as their lunch ends, Harry chooses to introduce Kay to Richard, who is instantly attracted to her. In that moment, in a very genteel, imperceptibly quiet way, all their relationships start to go to hell.

Richard Langley, man about town.

This is a subtly drawn, intelligent and wryly funny story of a group of friends, whose secrets are exposed and who have to deal with the resulting chaos. It needs actors who understand how to discipline themselves, play their parts like a jazz ensemble, not over-emote. In a stand-out cast, Brosnan is the best, the living heart of the movie. As Richard he has the task of stealing the love of Kay and betraying his friend Harry. But Brosnan refuses to play the role as a conventional cad. His Richard is considerate, softly-spoken and ever so slightly duplicitous. Brosnan’s ability to portray worldly confident men serves him well here, because he simply inhabits that friendly confident grin, the considered aside lightly delivered. Nothing is too visible, too showy, he acts with the lightest of touches.

It is also a cerebral role, with Richard delivering the 50s style narration that holds the movie together. Once again he has a role with two contradictory pulls, though without the intensity of previous roles. Richard is a man and without making a fuss about it the movie delineates the difference between fifties men and modern new age men. Richard is puzzled by his sudden attack of love but rather than spend time analysing it he goes after what he wants, Kay. Brosnan plays Richard as an essentially good man, who will not stop until he has got what he wants. It is the way that Brosnan plays out the set-backs, the embarrassing moments, the final betrayal that gives this film so much of its enjoyment. Watching Brosnan derail Richard’s smoothness, panicky pauses as he tries to say the right thing, the relaxed slouch as he (internally) frantically backpedals is a delight.

Richard Langley and Kay Nesbitt (Rachel McAdams)

The role of Richard suits Brosnan down to the ground, with its style, thoughtful action and quiet good humour. He tackles it with love, verve and quiet dedication. This is an actor at the very top of his game, who knows how to produce an original screen presence and evoke many emotions in the audience, as he leads his character to the story’s culmination. In the final analysis Married Life is a character study, a quietly intelligent movie that asks some very searching questions about being married. Pierce Brosnan gives us a character that is truly worthy of the movie. This is not Bond, not Desmond Doyle, but it is virtuoso acting.

The story up till now…..

So here I am, with my view of Mr Brosnan’s movies. I have been slightly partial and missed out a couple of movies from the last ten years. I have missed out Mamma Mia. I admire Pierce Brosnan for having a punt at it, much as I admire any man who has a go at anything outside his comfort zone. But as a role I do not think it tells us anything about the actor.

A personal plea…

Like many men, I rate the Thomas Crown affair as one of the greatest movies of all time. Also, like many fans of the movie, I have been waiting a long time for Thomas Crown 2. I do not know about all you other men out there but I want that movie. So please Mr Brosnan, make the movie soon!

Anyone who has stayed with me through this long piece will have guessed that I am a fan. But writing this has made me see Pierce Brosnan’s work more clearly and I think it is truly worthy of appreciation.

He is a movie star but more importantly he is a superb actor. He is a great actor because he understands how to give us a character. He does not burst onto the screen and emote for 2 hours. He builds a character, showing him to us bit by bit, building a person and, in the end, we see that character as he does. If some movie stars are one note, Pierce Brosnan is a symphony.

In all of his films he shows an enormous respect for his roles and for the audience. This would not be enough if he did not fill them with life. But he always gives energy to his characters, a truth that makes them very real. But it is his discipline, his hold on the integrity of his characters that make him a superlative actor. He builds characters for us to see and marvel at and that is the one true and best thing that an actor can do.

Thank you very much for your movies Mr Brosnan, they are much appreciated and greatly enjoyed.

Reference Information

Here are movies discussed in the article, in the order in which they appear:

Goldeneye

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Grey Owl

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The World is not Enough

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The Thomas Crown Affair

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

The Tailor of Panama

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Die Another Day

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Evelyn

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

After the Sunset

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Matador

Get it in the UK here and the US here. 

Seraphim Falls

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Butterfly on a Wheel

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

Married Life

Get it in the UK here and the US here.

It was the birthday of Tinto Brass this week, Italian film-maker and sexual provocateur. Tinto Brass is famous for his soft-core porn movies, from Salon Kitty in 1983 through to Mon Amour in 2005. Though he is now 76, Mr Brass is hard at work on a new film Ziva, about a lonely light-house keeper’s wife. A very happy birthday to Mr Brass, with my best wishes for many more.

I first encountered Tinto Brass when his movie The Key was released in England (1984). The Key was set in wartime Italy in the 1940s and is the story of an older man who has lost his passion for his younger, very sexy wife (the wife is played by the beautiful and sensual Stefania Sandrelli). By chance his lust is re-ignited by seeing his wife dance with their son-law to be and he begins to fantasise about an affair between the younger man and his wife. Invigorated by this idea, he starts to plot an affair on their behalf, with lust and total mischief in mind. Of course nothing works out as planned. All of Tinto Brass’s interests are there, passion and lust and the impossibility of controlling it, voyeurism, the innocent sexuality of beautiful women, a lust for life against the cold embrace of death.

So there was a lot more to a Tinto Brass movie than I had expected. More than just porn, he had something to say, real characters to say it with.

Stefania Sandrelli in The Key

Tinto Brass started out as an avant-garde filmmaker, making surreal, impressionistic movies. Sometime around 1970, he decided he really wanted to make erotic movies. It turned out that he was good at it. In 1975 he made the controversial and sexy Salon Kitty, loosely based on a true story about Nazi sex orgies. It was a huge success in Europe.

Salon Kitty gave Brass the chance to explore one of his favourite themes, passion, lust, life resisting death. The Nazis, being the personification of death, served as the perfect metaphor. For Brass, sex and lust is the energy of life and war, fascism is the death force. For Brass, Salon Kitty is about the insanity of the army of the dead trying to control life. Brass returns to this theme again in later movies like the Black Angel, an obsessive affair between an Italian noblewoman and an amoral SS captain. Brass makes his movies lusty, virile and a celebration of sex and a denial of evil.

But not to make this piece too serious. Tinto Brass is mostly about fun, pleasure and sex. In fact most of his movies are works of mischief and lots of fun. In his movie Cheeky the beautiful Yulia Mayarchuk is the innocent abroad, the irresistible nymph who upsets everyone’s orderly lives.

Yulia Mayarchuk in Cheeky

In All Ladies Do It, Claudia Koll bursts out of being a stuffy housewife to become a temptress and drives her husband to distraction in the process. In his most recent film Mon Amour, a beautiful wife watches as her husband loses his passion for her and her response kicks off a chain of events that are sexy as they are funny.

Anna Jimskaia in Mon Amour

And this is Tinto Brass’s biggest gift. Sex and lust (and he deliberately mixes the two up) are uncontrollable, he says. Many of his protagonists start out from the same place, they think they have sex under control, it’s a minor activity, a decorous arrangement with a partner. Suddenly, a little lust creeps into their lives and Bam! The whole applecart is upset and in the process beautiful sexy women lose their clothes.

Brass’s heroes are the men who know that sex is important, to be celebrated and lust is to be given full rein to. There are the lovers, as Italian and studly as you might expect. Casual, powerful, elegant and hungry, the lovers are Brass’s alter-ego in every movie. There are the husbands, who Brass looks on favourably. They may start out confused and behind the curve but when they discover their manly sexy selves, everything ends well.

But you have got to watch Brass’s movies for the women. Brass adores women. In fact he can hardly bear to wrench the camera away from them. The camera lingers over these beautiful women, clothed, unclothed, talking, walking, making love, throwing crockery. I really enjoy the way Brass films women getting dressed. He knows that women dress to look sexy and he catches every bit of that primping and sexiness on film. It’s a reverse strip-tease that he never tires of showing us. And everything he does in his movies conspires to celebrate women’s beauty.

In a way, it’s not quite porn, or at least not as we know it, Jim. Porn often conspires to rush past women’s bodies. Somehow it becomes flick the camera past the face, breast, bottom, leg, start the action. Porn often races to the vagina because it thinks that is all we want. One of the ironies of porn is that some of its women are truly beautiful but the camera never stops to look at them or ask them their story.

Tinto Brass is the movie poet of women’s bodies. He lingers on their mouths, their lips, lets us see their breasts, bottoms, legs. Critics say that Tinto Brass is obsessed with bottoms and there is no movie of his that does not have a cavalcade of beautiful bottoms. But it is more than that. Colour, composition and lighting are all used to make his actresses’ skin look luminous, their bodies irresistible. Every part of them is revered. In Brass’s movies women are lush, yielding and sexy.

And he does it all for men, so he tells us. He celebrates lust on our behalf. Tinto Brass knows that lots of men like to look. And he is unashamedly a voyeur. So his movies become stories of catch-and-release, women preening in mirrors, lovers peeking round doors, forbidden photographs that turn up at the wrong moment, an errant gust of wind that lifts a skirt to show long legs, seamed stockings and a suspender belt. And no-one does sexy underwear on beautiful girls as well as Tinto Brass. God Bless him.

Serena Grandi, promoshot for Miranda by Tinto Brass

I also like Tinto Brass because he respects men’s fantasies. Often movies (apart from porn) seem unable to just show men and women enjoying each other. Sex in movies is pretty much politically correct these days. Tinto Brass is happy to tell all the stories, the guy who gets lucky with the French maid, the party that turns into an orgy, the student who just cannot resist her mature professor. However what makes these movies so interesting (and enduring) is that they have real characters. For Tinto Brass, sex and eroticism is a way of revealing character. When lust and love enters the life of a Brass character, he or she acts in ways that show us who they really are.

And Tinto Brass is happy, these are fun movies. Mostly, Tinto Brass movies are sexy, sophisticated farces. He is a very smart man and there is always more to had, in the story and the show. The movies are filed with visual tricks, clever references to other movies, an artist’s love of colour and light (Brass is in love with water, it is his most-used metaphor). But the message of the movies is clear, being clever is trivial, sex is all-important.

As usual, Mr Brass sums it up best himself. Here are some pictures of Tinto Brass presenting his philosophy of life.

Tinto and Cast

Director on set

It may be that this man has the best job in the world…….

Happy Birthday Mr Brass.

Further viewing:
Here are my five favourite Tinto Brass movies and one compilation set:

Improper Liaisons

Improper Liaisons is a series of shorts which includes one of my absolute Brass favourites, The Last Subway (La Dernier Metro? Really? I know…..). A beautiful young woman, a young man and a striptease, but not quite what you might expect. Marvellous, life-enhancing and very sexy.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

The Key

Stefania Sandrelli is beautiful and tempted by her son-in-law, Frank Finley is her satyr of a husband. How much trouble can you start by taking polaroids of your sleeping nude wife? Answer. A lot.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

Cheeky

Julia Mayarchuk is the blonde innocent who, between losing her clothes and accidentally construing double-entendres, is pursued by men and women intent on making love to her. My wife likes this one, says it is funny and sexy, and I second that recommendation.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

P.O. Box

As Tinto Brass became more famous, many Italian men mailed their fantasies to him, asking him to turn their stories into film. Being the egalitarian that he is, Tinto Brass did just that. This is Brass at his most voyeuristic but with a kindness about sex that other moviemakers cannot seem to find.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Mon Amour

Dario is a writer with a commission, a chic flat and a beautiful wife, played by Anna Jimskaia. However Dario has neglected his wife, the passion is gone and Marta (his wife) finally snaps. Mon Amour has a sort of breakneck comic pace, some acid humour and girls gone wild. If Mon Amour has a moral I guess it is that if you have a beautiful wife, you gotta make love to her at every opportunity.

Get it in the UK here and in the US here

The Tinto Brass collection

This is a good compilation to start your Tinto Brass collection. The eight movies in the collection are Paprika, Private, Cheeky, Black Angel, The Key, Miranda, All Ladies do it, Frivolous Lola.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Gran Torino is out on release soon and I am looking forward to it. I have been an Eastwood fan for as long as I have been an adult. By all accounts Gran Torino is a great movie and has been doing great box-office in America.

Over at Esquire, they have interviewed Clint Eastwood about life, the movies and everything, it is a short but thought-provoking interview. It reminds me of Nelson Riddle, the famous musical arranger, being interviewed about working with Frank Sinatra. Riddle was asked how one worked with a genius like Sinatra. Riddle’s answer was that he “set up the arrangment and got out of the way”. This is the approach that Cal Fussman takes with Clint Eastwood, asking the question and just letting the good man talk.

The article is here

 Tom Ford is 47 today – Happy Birthday!  I cannot think of another man who is as iconic in contemporary men’s fashion as Tom Ford.  Right now no-one is making better clothes for adult men of style.

History

Tom Ford was born on August 27^th I961 in Austin, Texas.  At 17 he enrolled at New York University and studied art history.  He left after a year to study architecture at the Parsons School of Design.  When he left he worked first for Cathy Hardwick, an American sportwear brand and then in 1988 he joined Perry Ellis.  At that time Ellis was a premier brand and had a distinctive menswear line.  At a time when menswear was becoming gimmicky, Ellis had seen that menswear classics could be updated for the modern age and was producing handsome manly menswear.  It is interesting to speculate on the effect this had on Tom Ford.

Ford left Perry Ellis after two years and moved to Europe.  This was the key move of his career, he felt that if he were ever to become a great designer he had to leave America.  He felt that his own culture was inhibiting him and that style was looked down on America.  Interestingly he saw the difference between American and European luxury goods as being the craft tradition of European fashion, hand-tailoring, family firms and traditions.  He believed that Europeans had and respected style.  

His move to Europe in 1990 coincided with Gucci offering him the position of women’s ready-to-wear designer.  The truth was that no-one wanted the job.  Gucci had been badly mismanaged since its heyday in the seventies and in 1990 was a byword for overpriced tat.  Gucci had lost its reputation as a quality brand and was virtually bankrupt. 

Gucci

It was here that Tom Ford showed his true genius.  High fashion was falling over itself to create adolescent fashion, down-market brands like Tommy Hilfiger were dominating the market and other brands were falling over themselves to emulate them.  Tom Ford realized that America and Europe were becoming wealthier and that there were people who wanted clothes that were designed and made well, were attractive and wearable.  Ford’s designs were sexy and easy to wear and he referenced European high fashion of previous eras.  The Tom Ford woman was sexy and desirable and the clothes were a huge hit. 

The Ford Gucci man’s look was really important.  At that time (as now) many menswear designers were fixated on clothes for younger men, adolescent and boyish.  Tom Ford took the sexy menswear of the seventies and streamlined it.  His suits were long, tight over the hips, broad at the shoulders and very manly.  Suits were made of silky wools and mohairs, in sophisticated colours.  He presented adult contrasts, the dark suit with the white shirt, the light suit with the dark shirt.  The Ford look was confident, competent and predatory.  Adult, sexy men of the world.                        

Ford was his own model.  A good-looking man wearing his own clothes, he was the best advertisement for his own brand.  There must be a thousand pictures of him wearing a black suit with a white shirt unbuttoned to the chest.  He looks stylish in every one of them.  Though he is gay, he is truly stylish masculine man.   

And the punchline is that Ford is a superb businessman.  When he joined Gucci it was worth very little.  When he left it was worth more than 4 Billion dollars. 

Tom Ford now

So now he is even more interesting.  Starting in 2006, his Tom Ford menswear line is making a global impact.  As a brand Tom Ford is on the leading edge.  He saw, as some leading style analysts have seen, that the luxury brands were losing their status, as they market themselves across bigger and bigger territories.  His own menswear is exclusive, in his own words “aimed at the men who want the very best”.

Tom Ford is an admirer of Savile Row, the bespoke experience and the exclusivity of Savile Row clothes.  His menswear is exclusive, with the additional elements of being fun and a little more fashionable.  His clothes are manly, adult and beautifully made.  The suits are cut slim, the jackets have an open chest ( a la Savile Row) with wide lapels.  Like Savile Row suits they flatter men. 

For me his suits a are little eighties, beautifully proportioned and powerful-looking.  Only Tom Ford could bring back the double-breasted suit and make it look good.  Manly and powerful but with fine subtle tailoring rather than eighties excess.  Ford has talked about how fashion brands produce clothes for the very young and how they exclude older men with style and taste.  He is producing clothes for those adult worldly men.  The provocative advertising for his menswear tells us that clothes are all about good taste, sex and power, definitely not for kids.

Tom Ford is a great designer of original style.   Happy Birthday Tom Ford!  

More information:

www.tomford.com

Ernest Hemingway, a tribute on his birthday 

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers.  He changed the shape of American literature for all time.  In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day.  His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.      

There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway.  But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man.  I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men. 

A brief biographical note

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21^st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.  He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2^nd 1961. 

As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing.  However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life.  From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft.   In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months.  He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight.  Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front.  At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital.  This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life.  His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing. 

He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child.  Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published.  Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave.  His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity.  By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man.  However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.       

My introduction to Hemingway

I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction.  Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school.  As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair.  This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.

I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are).  I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing.  That he could make a story around them seemed incredible.  He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking.  Things I knew about.  Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.  As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.   

As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway.  His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that.  I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris.  I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.  

His Writing

We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully.  His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive.  From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject.  To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true.   In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this.  Here he talks to himself about writing;

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”   

                                                                           A Moveable Feast

He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language.  Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.    

This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.    

The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer.  Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener.  In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees.  Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;

“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead.  In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys.  Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”      

                                         Across the River and into the Trees

I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.   

The big questions

We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war.  He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis.  In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men.  Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death.  That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win. 

In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it.  How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be.   In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.   

His heroes are surprising vulnerable.  They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins.  However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated.  What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost.  If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man.  Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places”  I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.

Truth and love.

We read him and love him because he is true. 

I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.

The truth is he was not.  All the things he wrote about he did.  The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars.  He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars.  Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent.  He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger. 

Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts.  Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive.  He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”.  That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part.  Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous.  About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations. 

The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger.  I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing.  He writes about this in ways that most men can understand.  In the 20’s and 30’s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.   

Honour

One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour.  Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed.  However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves. 

Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard.  Hemingway’s men have personal honour.  Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right.  And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed.  Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour.  Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit.  We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory. 

Style and men

Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle.  He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented  sportsman who was at home all over the world.  Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings.  It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined. 

Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.

Hemingway had great style.  His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him.  He was a connoisseur of food and wine.  He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons.  He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees.  Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men.  Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best.  Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today.  The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.

Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death.  However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them.  For me he has always been an inspiration. 

The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right.  She said;

“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”     

Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies. 

Books 

A Moveable Feast

A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties.  Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably.  Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.

  Available in the UK here

  Available in the United States here  

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War.  Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission.  Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.   

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here      

The Old Man and the Sea

The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin.  Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.

 Available in the Uk here   

 Available in the United States here       

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously.  From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives.  Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the best introduction to Hemingway.

 Available in the UK here   

Available in the United States here       

A Farewell to Arms

Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse.  A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here       

Movies

Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen.  We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement.  Here are five movies that did it well.

Islands in the Stream

This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books.  However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving.  George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good.  Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.

 Available in the UK here

 Available in the United States here

The Old Man and the Sea

Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book.  Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.

 Available in the United States here   

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.  In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer.  Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer.  One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here  

The Killers

Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical.  Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie. 

 Available in the UK here   

For Whom the Bell Tolls

This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman.  A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit.  It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here

There are also many websites which offer further information about Ernest Hemingway.  Here are some I like:

http://www.lostgeneration.com/

http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/

http://www.timelesshemingway.com/

Update.   Welcome Instapundit readers, hope you enjoy our reflections on Mr Cary Grant.    

Today is the birthday of Cary Grant, who was born on the 18th January 1904 and died November 29 1986. 

Happy birthday Mr Grant, wherever you are.

For me Cary Grant is the very personification of manly style.  

He was unique and even after all these years no actor comes close to replicating his witty charm, his style or his joie de vivre.  I did not “get” Cary Grant when I was younger but started to appreciate him as my knowledge of the world broadened and deepened.  There is a great deal to Cary Grant and his style and one needs to have enough depth to appreciate him.  Here are a few of my appreciations of him.

One of the most important and most obviously manly things about him was his athletic, animal physicality.  I was reminded of this when I last watched “To catch a Thief”, which many consider his finest movie.   The second scene of TCAT introduces Cary Grant as John Robie, at home in the South of France.  Robie is a resistance hero and jewel thief.  In the scene he wears a finely woven striped crewneck pullover, grey pleated Italian trousers and tan loafers.  Around his neck he wears a red-atterned silk foulard, tucked into the pullover.  So far, so metrosexual.

Suddenly he hears the screech of a police car racing into his drive.  His walk becomes swift (but still unhurried) and as he reaches the stairs to the first floor he takes them in an effortless loping leonine run.  The change in Grant is electric and shocking.  He goes from calm to action in a split-second.  Suddenly this debonair handsome man shows the reflexes of an athlete, or of a killer.     

Cary Grant started out in showbusiness as an acrobat and that clearly helped.  But somewhere in his evolution he built a harmony of mind and body that informs all of his roles.  Comfortable in his own skin, he is capable of becoming a physical powerhouse in a moment and we, his audience, sense that.  Men particularly, sense the presence of dangerous men.  With Cary Grant there is always a sense that there is power in reserve, that this is a very dangerous man. 

He does it again in North by Northwest, in the famous crop-duster scene.  As the light aeroplance chases him across a ploughed field, he runs like an athlete (he was actually 55 at the time).  Not only that but he looks back mid-run to check the plane’s position.  Ever tried that?  We would be lucky not to fall and break our necks.  Cary Grant makes it look easy.

Strangely enough the actor that reminds me the most of Cary Grant is Clint Eastwood.  There is a similarity in their calm stillness and their confident presence.   

Cary Grant and his clothes.

The thing that everyone knows about him is his clothes.  He was always immaculately dressed.  He believed that a gentleman had a duty to dress well.  He also knew that clothes were a key facet of one’s style and he knew that women love stylish men.

Despite being born in poverty and having very limited schooling, Cary Grant believed passionately in learning.  He learnt everything he could about style.  He learnt about clothes from tailors, he watched wealthy American men to learn about manners and he made friends with intelligent learned men of all kinds.  When one stops to think, it is amazing what this poor boy from a broken home made of himself.

He learnt what clothes could do for him.  A wider, broader collar to de-emphasis his muscular neck.  English-cut suits to make his lean athlete’s body look wider across the shoulders.   Made-to-measure suits with high armholes to lengthen his silhouette and make him look taller.  He learnt this and hundreds of other details to build his style.  Like many men who start off poor, Grant prized good clothing and relished the opportunity to look good in the world.  I always felt this way and Cary Grant confirmed the feeling for me. 

Grant understood style, his clothes were classic, in proportion, colours complementing each other.  And is this not that what men of style try to do?  Don’t we stand in front of the mirror, making sure the tie complements the suit, that the cufflinks are right?  Style is also about getting the details right.  Cary Grant taught me that.

Cary Grant and women

Cary grant loved women and they loved him.  He once said “Women are one of my favourite causes!” Over the course of his life he loved many women.  This love of women informed both his style and the characters he played on-screen.   

Cary Grant was very competitive, especially when it came to women.  He would court women persistently, cleverly, with charm and good manners, until they in turn fell in love with him.  When other men tried to attract a women he was courting, he treated them as competitors to be beaten.  Which, in my view, is absolutely right.  A man does not let other men take things from him without a fight, especially intimate relationships.

In his movies he uses his competitiveness over women to good comic effect. 

In His Girl Friday (1940)  he plays hardbitten newspaper editor Walter Burns, who is still in love with his ex-wife Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell.  Russell turns up with her soon-to-be new husband in tow.  She wants to move to the quiet of the country and be a stay-at-home wife.  Burns (Grant) takes them both out to lunch and proceeds to slyly mock “life in the country” to ribbons.  It is one of the funniest scenes on film.

He did it again later that year in The Philadephia Story, one of those perfect Hollywood movies that define American cinema.   He plays C.K. Dexter Haven, a debonair man-about-town who is obliged by circumstances to attend the forthcoming wedding of his ex-wife, played by Katherine Hepburn.  Haven (Grant) still loves his wife and dislikes her nouveau riche husband-to-be, who he suspects is marrying her for her position and money.  Grant plays this out to perfection in a scene where he quietly skewers the husband-to-be for his pretension, pomposity and niggardly ways.    

Incidentally if you want to see great actors playing off each other, get this movie and watch the scenes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart together.  Pure cinematic genius.

 The other, more important aspect of Cary Grant’s love of women was his respect for them and his interest in them as people.  In an age when women were treated as less than men, his enlightened understanding stood out.  Almost all of the women in his life remained his friends and they all had something good to say about him.

In the movies the fact that he was listening to his leading ladies made the dialogue seem more real and the scenes more alive.  If we go back to ”To Catch a Thief” again, Grant’s jewel thief plays opposite Grace Kelly’s spoilt little rich girl, Francie.  Francie is often arrogant and snippy but Grant’s John Robie listens to everything she says, with courtesy and consideration.  The end result is that Grant’s character looks even more manly and assured and Kelly’s Francie becomes more real and touchingly vulnerable. 

And all of this rings true today, in real life as in the movies.  Women love men who hear them, men who have the courage and gravitas to engage with them honestly.  Cary Grant was the pioneer, the model to copy and the man who made loving women central to a man’s style.

So much of Cary Grant’s charm lies in his good manners and his consideration of others.  Everyone who knew him talked of his respect for other people and his simple joy in talking to anyone he happened to meet. 

 You know, I think that is the secret of his style, his joy in life.  His joy in clothes, women, movies and anything else he came across.

When he is onscreen he is alive in a way no other actor has every been.  His good humour, his confidence in the fundamental goodness of life is transmitted from the screen to us.  The great film critic Pauline Kael said that just by appearing he makes us smile.  Well, yes.  He is telling us that manliness is good and graceful, that a sense of humour and consideration for others is style and that it is a joy to be alive. 

There is so much more that I could write about Cary Grant but everything has to end somewhere.  However, there is one really important thing to say. 

Thank you Mr Grant, for  everything.

For those readers who want more of Cary Grant (and who would not?) here are my five favourite Cary Grant films.

To Catch a Thief

Stylish caper about a jewel thief on the French Riviera whose robberies are being blamed on Cary Grant’s John Robie.  Robie is obliged to catch the thief in order to clear himself.  Grant plays opposite Grace kelly who never looked more beautiful than in this film.  Her flair for dialogue and Grant’s generous and subtle acting make their interaction crackle and the jokes pop and there is a real erotic charge between them.  Directed by Alfred Hitchcock with consummate care and perfect timing.  

The Philadephia Story

 Cary Grant gives a wonderful performance, by turns tricky, funny, loving and kind.  His stylish socialite anchors this tale of a rich cultured American family beset by celebrity hunting media in the approach to a divisive wedding.  Katherine Hepburn is the bewildered patrician bride and Jimmy Stewart the smart-but-stupid reporter.  The repartee is sharp enough to cut paper with.

North by Northwest

Hitchcock again, placing Grant in harms way as communist assassins mistake him for an American secret agent.  The mood of the film becomes very black towards the end, with Grant having to draw on all of his resources to survive.   

Only Angels Have Wings

This really is a man’s film, with Grant as the lead pilot for a small air service that flys dangerous mail runs across the Andes.  Directed by Howard Hawks, it focuses on the bravery and professionalism of men in dangerous jobs, whose pride and ingenuity enable them to make near impossible flights.  The film is an emotional cauldron, with Grant’s Geoff Carter trying to hold onto the ruthless discipline that enables him to do his job, in the face of Jean Arthur’s love for him. 

Charade

Made in 1963 when Cary Grant was 59, Charade was a light thriller with Nazi gold and devious criminals, set in Paris. Charade proved that Cary had lost none of his magic.  Hugely successful when it was released, not least because Grant’s leading lady was Audrey Hepburn, who was the perfect foil for his sophistication and charm.  Grant plays a character who may be a thief, a spy or a bureaucrat and has enormous fun inhabiting each of these roles.  Audrey hepburn summed Grant up for all time with the following lines:

Reggie (Hepburn):  “Do you know what’s wrong with you?”

Peter (Grant):  “What?”

Reggie (Hepburn):   “Absolutely Nothing”

Books 

There are also two books that I like about Cary Grant:

Graham McCann:

Cary Grant, a class apart

Excellent on Cary Grant’s life, if sometimes a little light on his movies.

Richard Torregrossa

Cary Grant, a celebration of style.
Now this book is invaluable.  Do you want to know how Cary Grant looked so stylish?  Would you like to be like Cary Grant?  This book tells you where he bought his clothes, how he had them cut and how he customised them.  Torregrossa talks about Grant’s style and his life with insight and real information.

I first discovered Ernest Hemingway when I was sixteen.  

School was busy feeding me a diet of politically correct kitchen sink novels that I was supposed to “identify” with.  Poor kids growing up in rough neighbourhoods, against a backdrop of bad weather and alcoholic parents.  I hated all them all. 

Hemingway was a revelation.  He wrote about things I knew about, like boxing and fishing.  He wrote about them with a concise grace, describing their essential beauty.  He wrote in short, stripped down sentences, rythmic, trying to isolate the truth of every sentence.   Love, sport and manliness dignified in literature. 

Hemingway was my introduction to manly style.  His worldly, grizzled men, equally at ease in Paris and Pamplona, had a style that I wanted to emulate.  His women were beautiful and unsettling, often the equal of the men they were in love with, yet compromised by that love, compelled to act against their own best interests.      

Hemingway’s men are a combination of action and reflection.  Hemingway’s men are stoic yet I am always amazed at how much they feel.  The sensitivity of Nick Adams, the hero of  The first 49 Stories, the compassion of Harry Morgan in To Have and Have Not. 

Hemingway had a style that was complex and lived out both in real life and his books.  Read the books first, then delve into his life.  He contributed to my style, to both good and bad effect.     

I have his picture on my blog and I have more to write about him and his books.