Today is the birthday of one of America’s greatest presidents, Theodore Roosevelt.  However Theodore Roosevelt was more than just a great politician.  He was a lawman, soldier, historian, environmentalist and a leader of great vision and courage.  He defined manliness for the modern age and his enlightened vision of masculinity shaped our view of (successful) manhood up until recent times.

Until a few years ago I knew Theodore Roosevelt as the great “Trust-Buster” the president who broke the power of the monopolistic cartels that dominated American business in the late 1800s.  I knew of the Rough Riders, that mad collection of cowboys and Harvard polo players that Roosevelt turned into a cavalry regiment and how they fought the battle of San Juan Hill (on foot).  I knew that he was the driving force behind the building of the Panama Canal.

For a long time my abiding image of Theodore Roosevelt was from the movies.  It was Brian Keith’s magnificent performance as Roosevelt in John Milius’ wonderful movie “The Wind and the Lion”.   But Theodore Roosevelt’s real life is more interesting and more compelling by far than even his movie self.

And to be honest, I am writing about him because he had bags of style and really, really dressed well. Here is a short article about his life and some thoughts on the model of manliness that he left us.

Theodore Roosevelt, politician and dandy

A difficult childhood

Ironically for a man who is famous for action, Theodore was a weak, sickly child who contracted asthma before he was four and his own family doubted that he would live to adulthood. However even though fragile and often ill, TR had a lively nature, a fast mind and an inclination to mischievousness.  It was such an unlikely combination to evolve into one of the defining heroes of American history

He was born the son of Theodore Roosevelt Senior.  Roosevelt Senior was old money, the head of the long-established Roosevelt Importing Company and one of the most influential men in New York.  In many ways Roosevelt Senior was even more deserving of admiration than his son.  A true American patriot who believed passionately in democracy, it was said that he was comfortable in the presence of any man be they billionaires or beggars.  A photo shows him to be a big strong powerful man, with an air of innate authority.

As i mentioed Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly child, frequently very ill.  Yet as early as nine years old, TR’s will to succeed led him to take up weight-lifting, running and swimming, to improve his body.  At 12, on a trip to Moosehead Lake, he encountered two boys of his own age.  Though he was now stronger, they easily beat him in a fight.  Spurred by this defeat, he took up boxing.  It was an inspired act of courage and the foundation stone in making him the man he was to become.

Early life

Sent to Harvard Roosevelt, after a rathervarialbe education, whicch included trips to Europe, he quite simply excelled.  Already scholarly, partly because of his sickly enclosed childhood, he took to real study like a duck to water and graduated Magna Cum Laude.  Mind and body were now one and he possessed the iron self-discipline which was to serve him for the rest of his life.  Willpower and constant physical exercise had turned him into a strong, slim handsome young man. He had started the hunting trips that he later became famous for, at this time to Arostook County, Maine, which was still very rough country.  It was here that his new strength and his warmth and character stood him in good stead, as he charmed the roughneck lumbermen and the taciturn hunters.  It was becoming apparent that he had his father’s gift for talking to any man, regardless of his station.

However, in the midst of this journey into manhood, life dealt him a terrible blow.  In 1878 his beloved father, developed an illness, strange intestinal cramps.  Unbeknownst to the Roosevelt family, Roosevelt Senior had developed a fibrous tumour in his gut.  This swelled to gigantic size and he suffered terrible agonies, dying suddenly.  He was only 46.  Theodore Roosevelt Junior was 19.  Shattered by his father’s untimely death, he somehow found the will to return to Harvard.

At 22 he was married, to Alice Lee, a beautiful but very young woman of good family.  He had taken the decision to go into politics, for which it was obvious he had many suitable skills and talents.  Roosevelt had come to respect his own genius and reviewed his two possible routes into politics.  He could use his connections to powerful New York families and become a gentleman politician or he could lower himself into the grimy, corrupt political machine and really learn how to work the gears.  He choose the later option and in a letter to a friend, wrote “I have become a political hack”.

Political Hack and Dandy.

In January 1882, Theodore Roosevelt became a Republican Assemblyman in Albany, upstate New York. It was a very strange fit.  Albany was legendary for its corrupt cynical politics and TR was one of the least cynical men to enter the chamber, with a huge ego, a passion for justice and a courageous, if occasionally naïve manner. Also, TR was now a great dandy.  He acknowledged this himself.  When the concept of men dressing with style was in its infancy, TR revelled in good clothes and was a peacock and then some, with Savile Row suits and hand-cut boots. He was one of the most well-dressed men of his age.  So his entrance into the Assembly chamber produced no little comment.

However he soon made his mark, literally.  Politics in Albany was a violent and dirty game and the corrupt Tammany Hall Democrats were one of the most powerful political groups in Albany.  Drawn mostly from Irish immigrants to New York the Tammany men had no qualms about using violence to achieve their end.  They tried to put the frighteners on Roosevelt and he made it that plain that he would respond in kind.  This all came to a head in an Albany saloon, when a tough Tammany member, confident that he could beat up a “rich boy”, started a fight.  TR, dressed up to the nines, represented an easy target.

Now a lethal boxer, TR knocked the man flat in seconds. The Tammany man stood up, TR knocked him flat again.  He got up and tried a third time, TR knocked him flat again.  TR sent him off with the advice to go wash the blood off.  It was a salutary lesson for his opponents.

Scholar and Rancher

At the same time as he was beginning to make a name for himself as a politician, his first book was published.  It was a serious study of America’s Navy, The Naval War of 1812 and it was a critical and financial success and established Theodore Roosevelt as a historian of note.  But perhaps more importantly for Roosevelt was his first trip to the Badlands of Dakota, in 1883, for a hunting trip.  As a man of action he had always been close to nature but Dakota was going to bring out a closeness to nature that would change his life.   He had a spiritual epiphany and saw the importance of nature to man, and nature as greater than man and infinitely precious.  Soon after he became a rancher in Dakota, raising beef cattle.  Thses early experiences shaped him to become America’s first environmentalist and as President he legislated to protect and conserve the American wilderness.

Political Reformer

Theodore Roosevelt’s career as a rising politician contains too much to summarise here.  His fight against graft and political corruption, his reform of the Civil Service.  In his rise to power and prominence he held many roles and he was one of the most successful Commissioners of Police New York ever had.  The fearless Roosevelt even managed to eradicate police corruption, even it was only for his time in office. But Roosevelt’s real destiny came calling in 1887, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy,

Ready to fight

As Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt began to build up America’s Naval strength, much to the chagrin of his boss, John D. Long.  Secretary Long was a man who believed in the quiet life, while his Assistant Secretary saw America’s enemies becoming more threatening.  Theodore Roosevelt was right, he just did not know how prescient he was.

Cuba at that time was a Spanish possession.   The Spaniards, with the disregard for humanity that had characterised Spanish rule for centuries, treated the native Cubans as slave labour on colonial estates.  The cruelty and brutality of the Spanish ruling class was so great that the native Cubans rose up in revolt.  Spain’s answer was to send an army to suppress the peasantry.  Americans on Cuba were caught up in the violence. The US President William McKinley, implored the Spanish to respect the freedom and security of Americans on Cuba, who were effectively trapped between the Spanish Army and the revolt.  The Spanish Foreign Minister’s response was to tell the US to go to hell.  In fact the letter was so insulting that the US Government refused to publish it, fearing it would incite anti-Spanish feeling.  The Cuban Insurrectos managed to get the letter to the US press and the outcry was enormous.  It’s hard to understand today, but at that time the European powers treated the US as an unsophisticated no-account country, who had no power or presence in the larger world.

In February 1898, while Secretary Long was on leave, Theodore Roosevelt sent a naval vessel, the USS Maine, to Cuba to protect American citizens.  The Maine anchored in Havana Harbour.  On the 19^th of February the Maine was destroyed in a huge explosion, most of the crew were killed or wounded.  It was determined that it had been destroyed by a submarine mine.

There would be war.

National Hero

All his life, Theodore Roosevelt had been a warrior at heart, and now he had the chance to be one for real.  He resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, shocking the political establishment.  He took a commission as the commander of the volunteer army to be sent to Cuba, liberate the island and institute a free government.  And he did two things which marked him out as a man of genius.  Firstly he knew that he could not learn to command an army in such a short space of time so he took the role of second-in-command.  He took the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel under Colonel Leonard Wood, a seasoned military office who said little except to ask great things of his troops.

His second action was a mark of genius and has passed into history as a legendary story.  Theodore Roosevelt knew that his volunteer army would be up against seasoned Spanish troops and the expectation was that cavalry battles would be decisive. So Roosevelt recruited the men he knew could ride and who could fight.  From the West, he exhorted his fellow Cowboys to join him, and from his wealthy family connections he assembled a crew of noble brits, professional Polo players and sporty horsemen.  This spectacularly unusual mixture of men became the talk of America and Roosevelt’s Rough Riders were born.

And in Cuba, it all culminated in the battle of San Juan Hill where Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders decisively defeated the Spanish Army and Roosevelt became an American hero defeating a foreign enemy. The Spanish were driven out and a government of Cubans was instituted.

Theodore Roosevelt in his Rough Riders uniform (which he designed)

Vice-President and President

Theodore Roosevelt became Vice-President under President William McKinley.  It was while he was Vice-President that he gave the quote for which he is most famous “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.  However he was not vice-president for long.  On 6^th
September 1901 William McKinley was shot by an assassin.  He died eight days later and Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as President.  He served two terms.

His accomplishments were legendary.  He brought outrage on his government for his support of the emancipation of African-Americans, especially his support for Booker T. Jones, the African-American politician.  He earned the enmity of many of the plutocrat classes for his trust-busting activities. Though in truth, he felt no enmity in bending these powerful men to his vision of a fairer America.  By force of political will he caused the Panama Canal to be built and suddenly the world powers of Europe saw that America was a technological colossus that they had underestimated.  He made America a power to be reckoned with in the world and he did everything he could to make life better for the ordinary working American, to whom he always remained close.  He was the first and most powerful environmentalist, passing laws and legislating to protect the American wilderness.

And throughout all of this he remained real.  He was a father and a family man.  He loved to sail, he continued to hunt, he remained a horseman and an adventurer to the end of his days.

If there has been another modern leader like him, who was so conscious of his destiny, yet so grounded in real life, I do not know who it is.  Perhaps Winston Churchill, who had less of a common touch, but had that true sense of a leader’s destiny.

A model of Manliness

Theodore Roosevelt was the very model of the man of action.  He saw assertive action as superior to intellectual rationalisations.  Intellect was fine as a preparation but a poiunt had to be reached where action was taken. We now speak of “Analysis Paralysis” and we have that understanding because of the distinctions that Theodore Roosevelt drew.  Roosevelt emphasised determination and willpower over analytic explorations of life.

There is a sense that man are automatically manly, by virtue of their biology.  Yet this is not necessarily true, the values we in the West see as manly are not universally held.  Roosevelt believed that it took effort to be manly, that we at first learn the ways of
our society, learn their value and then seek to extend them.  That a man tries to achieve something in his life, to excel, to rise above other men in some way or form.  He believed that all men harbour assertive competitiveness and that, properly harnessed, this is a huge force for social good.

Roosevelt believed that the value in a man was in his ability to strive, knowing that luck played a part for good or evil.  In effect willpower makes manliness real, it harnesses courage to intent and sets a man on the path to challenging the world, regardless of how uncertain his victory might be.

So for Theodore Roosevelt, to be manly required risk.  That each man, as far as he was capable, should risk.  That a man is born into a society which shapes and defines what is expected of a man, and in doing so helps a man to define what willpower is.  And because there are so many ways a free society can lead a man to willpower, there are many ways for a man to become whole, courageous and individual.  And that there is a contradiction between what society demands of us as men and what we want to achieve, that a real man understands ans accepts this.  In efeect, a man accepts his own power.  Theodore Roosevelt thought that men should rise above their duty and that a true leader saw duty as the start point for bringing some better thing into the world.

Roosevelt makes a great case, if only because he brought so many good things into the world.  Also, the America he lived in, for all its ills, was one of the freest societies humanity has ever experienced.

And we still refer to his model today.  Ambition is not as well considered as it was, but men still operate out of a sense of striving to make life better, often in very individual ways.  The Roosevelt model raises our spirits, it says life holds no promises but somewhere in the din, we can hear Theodore Roosevelt’s voice, saying have courage and the outcome will be glorious, regardless of success or failure.

A great man.

Details

Books

I am hugely indebted to Edmund Morris for his Pulitzer-winning, best selling biography of Theodore Roosevelt.  Morris a talented, inspired writer, who makes the complexities ofTheodore Roosevelt’s life into a lucid and exciting story.  Edmund Morris makes reading a sublime pleasure.

The biography is in two parts:

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
• Theodore Rex

Also, to Harvey Mansfield for his landmark book “Manliness”, to which I return time and time again. This controversial, rich, compassionate book about what constitutes manliness has been my constant companion, while I have been writing this web
magazine.

Movies

Both of these movies are directed by John Milius, for whom Theodore Roosevelt is a true American hero.  If you know Milius’ movies you will know how he has an eye for adventure while giving you characters who have real and complex motivations.

“The Wind and the Lion”.
As time goes on it becomes more and more apparent that this movie is a masterpiece. Excitement, danger, colour, but underneath the adventure of Sean Connery’s Berber chieftain, lies one of the finest portraits of an American President ever committed to celluloid.

“Rough Riders”

Theodore (he hated “Teddy”) Roosevelt at the height of his powers, leading his Rough Riders into danger and victory in Cuba. This is almost a snapshot of its times, with some fine actors in an ensemble piece.  Tom Berenger is pitch-perfect as Theodore Roosevelt.

Willpower

For readers who are interested in how Willpower works and how to harness it, the definitive book on the subject is Baumeister and Tierney’s “Willpower” .  Our review of the book is here.

Today is the birthday of Hollywood actor Robert Mitchum.  Robert Mitchum helped define movie acting with his low-key but intense style.  Mitchum was a true outsider and it’s hard for us to imagine just how difficult living that life was, back in the conformist 1940′s and fifties.  I am a fan of Mitchum’s work, he was great movie actor and a smart man.  I have not had time to pen a long piece so here is a link to a long review I wrote about Lee Server’s brilliant biography of Robert Mitchum “Baby, I dont care”.

http://www.whatmakesaman.net/wordpress/2011/12/17/reading-this-week-robert-mitchum-baby-i-dont-care/

Enjoy

Today is the birthday of John Ford, one of the greatest moviemakers who ever lived. 

John Ford movies were part of my growing up, even as a teenager I knew that they were special, as did my brother, who was also movie-mad.  We watched every Ford movie that came on TV.

We tried to be cool, those hokey songs would ring out of the opening credits and in unison we would shout “Oh no, not The Sons of the Poineers”, the name of Ford’s barbershop quartet who sung those rousing cowboy songs.  But the truth is we watched and loved them all, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, even the The Informer.  But we loved the cavalry movies above all, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, She wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Wayne and Henry Fonda.  The Quiet man, Ford’s Irish fantasy, was something of a controversy in our home, because we were of poor Irish descent and we knew there was nowhere as nice as Ford’s fictional village of Innisfree.  The Quiet Man did not get a good press where I lived, but more on that later.

John Ford, growing up

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney in 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to Irish parents who had emigrated from County Galway at the tail end of the Potato Famine.  Like so many Irish families that faced the choice between starvation and emigration they struggled hard at first, to make their way in the land of opportunity.  For John Ford his Irish ancestry was always important and became an integral part of his artistic vision.

John Feeney was a dreamy, outdoorsy boy.  From early on, he had bad eyesight, yet paradoxically developed a strong and distinctive visual sense.  He was interested in drawing and was clearly an artistic boy.    When he was 12 he caught Diptheria, then a potentially fatal disease.  As it was, he was bedridden for a year, and in that time his imaginative inner life became even stronger.

However, Ford wanted the manly life of a strong, athletic Irishman, a man amongst men.  More by willpower than physique he became a star of the school football team, nicknamed “Bull” Feeney, the man no opposition could stop.

John Ford in Hollywood

John’s older brother Francis had made his way to Hollywood, which was just becoming known as a place that made movies.  Francis became famous as a director of early movie serials.  He got his brother John a job, first as a scene-shifter , then as a stuntman.  John Feeney became Jack Ford and quickly slipped across the line into directing movies.  By the time he was 24, Jack Ford had become a respected director in early Hollywood.  His reputation was as a no-nonsense director who got the job done on budget.  Jack, now John, Ford actively fostered his workman like reputation in order to prevent the studio from taking too close an interest in his movies.     

John Ford

 

John Ford’s movies: the picture and the story

Ford had an amazing sense of visual composition.  His mastery of the still shot has never been surpassed.  The action starts somewhere in the scene and progresses through the shot.  It goes from long-shot to middle distance to foreground and then on.  The camera does not move. 

He doesn’t just do this because he can.  By keeping the camera still and not resorting to cuts and close-ups, he keeps the story, not the actor, not the action in the centre of the movie.  We watch what’s going on in the moving picture.  He often starts his movies like this.

In Stagecoach, the Overland stage moves through the shot, into a second shot, almost as still.  It gives us time to see the story, it establishes an important part of the story (the stagecoach).  Though we do not really know it we are already in the story, there is no scene-setting. 

Monument Valley, a scene from Stagecoach

He does it again in a movie he made over twenty years later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The train comes into and through the shot, there are no people.  This is so right, because the railroad is a key player in the movie.  He keeps the railroad in the forefront of the story for a couple of scenes.  It is critical.

He does it again in the marvellous WW2 movie, They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron come into view before peeling off across the foreground of the scene. 

Actually, the opening scene of They Were Expendable is one of the most beautiful scenes in movies.  Like Flying Boats.Ferrari’s and any other mechanical perfection, motor-torpedo-boats are things of beauty.  Beautiful and dangerous, like sharks.  Ford has them fleet and fast skimming the waves of the Pacific , metallic and glistening under the bright sun.  They gracefully curve off into fast complex manoeuvres, sunlight flashing off the hulls.    Simply beautiful, as good as a painting by DaVinci.

Even though it does not do it justice, here is a still from that first scene.

Motor Torpedo Boat, opening scene of They Were Expendable

Ford’s Men

It is not just the story that makes John Ford the poet of American life.  It is also his portrayal of American men.  In my view no director has ever understood better the importance of individual spirit and self reliance versus the importance of family and community.  Ford shows the conflict between the two and in doing so gives us the greatest stories.    

Ford’s men are truly American, brave, independent, openhanded, direct and manly.  The Ringo Kid (John Wayne) in Stagecoach is his own man, willing to stand outside of the law to do what is right.  In the Searchers, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is willing to go to any lengths to rescue what remains of his family from the Commanches.

Late in his career, John Ford made the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  By this time Ford and his screen alter-ego, John Wayne, had refined their vision of the American man to perfection.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a wonderful movie, a concentrated distillation of Ford’s view of the old West.

Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, is like some big, sleek animal, a panther maybe, dangerous when roused.  Wayne’s graceful, insolent movements fill his every screen appearance with controlled power.  He is a spirited, independent man, who rules his own life.  He is dangerous and he knows it.  Here is part of his earliest exchange with Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart), a tenderfoot lawyer robbed and badly beaten by Liberty Valance.

“Liberty Valance is the toughest man south of the picket-wire.  Next to me.”

They Were Expendable

For me, Ford’s best portrayal of American men is in They Were Expendable.  Both Lieutenant Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Lieutenant (JG) Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) are obviously exceptional men.  Motor Torpedo Boat commanders at the outset of the Pacific War in WW2, they and their men fight valiantly against the Japanese tide sweeping the Pacific.  These are men who stand for freedom, in the sure knowedge that the immediate fight is unwinnable.  In fact it is wrong to say that this is about Montgomery and Wayne.  Every American man in this movie is dedicated to the spirit of freedom. 

They Were Expendable is a study in the beauty of brave men, from the ensign to the torpedoman.  These are men rising above pain and death, in the name of freedom.  In They Were Expendable they do it without fuss, without drama because that’s how a man does it.  It is the same hardscrabble grit and courage that tamed the American West.  There is no better movie about courage and patriotism and a man’s urge for freedom.  This is a movie of Americans with their back to the wall, and how their guts and courage carry them through.

Ford’s Family

For John Ford, family was the most precious thing.  If his men were individuals, yet they knew that they fought for family and life.

There is a wonderful scene in Stagecoach that shows this.  The stagecoach travellers, fleeing the Indian warparty are holed up at the staging post.  The alcoholic Doc Boone has just delivered the baby of the pregnant cavalry officer’s wife.  It’s early morning in the scene.  Dallas, a prostitute (Claire Trevor), who has been shunned by all the other passengers except the Doc and the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) walks into the room full of passenger’s carrying the baby.  Dallas is beautiful.  The light in her eyes as she holds the new-born is wonderful.  The Ringo Kid sees this, sees her truly beautiful spirit and falls even more deeply in love with her.        

It is even more poignantly shown, in They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron have fallen back to Bataan, unable to stem the Japanese advance.  Out of spares, torpedos and gas, somehow they continue to fight on.  In a lull in this hell, Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) sets up an officer’s dinner for Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) the American nurse he has fallen in love with.  As gentlemen, the officers host the dinner, building a make-do diner party in their bamboo office, using up their meagre rations.  Most of these men are going to die soon and they know it.  But they put that aside, they celebrate decency and civilisation, because they know they are fighting for women like Sandy Davys.  It is one of the most subtly underplayed and beautiful scenes ever filmed.

Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) and Rusty Ryan (John Wayne)

John Ford and Loss

So many of John Ford’s movies explore the same conundrum.  The individual stands on the threshold, he has the power to create civilisation, but civilisation cannot accommodate him, has no place for him.  He wants community and family but they reject his striving restless spirit.  It was never more simply played out than at the end of the Searchers.  Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) stands framed in the doorway of the ranchhouse, holding his arm as though it is the only thing holding him together.  Having rebuilt his family as best he can, he finds there is no place in it for him. 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I cannot watch Liberty Valance much anymore.  It is such an aching portrayal of a good man’s loss.  There is no hope, no optimism in the movie, and it is only watchable at all because it is one of the finest movies ever made.

Liberty Valance is powerful and haunting, the idea that one decision by a man can destroy his entire life.  The cowboy town of Shinbone is dominated by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) a thief and a murderer, evil incarnate.  Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is Ford’s “good bad man” a frontiersman, an individualist who respects the right of other men to live as they chose and only asks that they allow him the same freedom.  In Tom Doniphon resides the true spirit of the American individualist.

But events force Tom to make a decision.  Let Shinbone go its own way and let people suffer? Or face Liberty Valance and help Shinbone become civilised?  The decision that Tom makes destroys his life utterly.  Ford plays out the conflict between civilisation and the strong individual man and shows the outcome to be bleak. 

Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart)

I guess that is why I prefer They Were Expendable.  It shows men harnessing their spirit to an ideal, freedom from tyranny and a better outcome.

The Quiet Man

To end on an up note.  I mentioned earlier that The Quiet Man was scorned in my family when I was growing up.  I myself thought it was corny beyond belief. 

Ford’s village of Innisfree is really a kind of Brigadoon, a fantasy Ireland that is always green and pleasant and exists somewhere out of time.  But you know, as I get older, I warm to the movie.  It has in its favour the most dramatic passionate kiss ever filmed, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.

Wayne pulling in Maureen O'Hara for That Kiss - The Quiet Man

Ford builds a fantasy Ireland with every Irish myth writ large.  In Innisfree, you can drink with friends, get uproariously drunk and never have a hangover.  A sporting man can bet on the horses without restraint and share his winning with his friends.  Women are sparky sexy and eternally true to their good men.  You can brawl like a champion boxer and apart from a few bruises, everyone is good the next day.  There are no mortgages, politicians or protest marches.  

I get what John Ford was doing now.  Innisfree is not real. 

But it should be.           

God Bless you Mr Ford, wherever you are.      

Further articles that you might like:

From 1934, John Ford was a spy for the US Navy and during WW2 worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.  For our article on Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS, go here

We wrote about John Wayne here and here

Details

There are so many books on John Ford you could spend a life reading them.  Here is the one I recommend:

Roger McBride

Searching for John Ford, a life

Cary Grant.

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”  Cary Grant.

Cary Grant was born on this day, January 18^th 1904, in Bristol, England.  He rose from working class poverty in Britain to become one of the greatest American movie stars that ever lived.  Here is a short appreciation on the occasion of his birthday.    

For me, he was and is the very model of a successful man.  I long ago learned that there was so much one could learn from his movies and from him, the deeds of his life.  As I have grown older I have appreciated him more and more.  When I was younger I appreciated him for the way he dressed, his worldliness, his connoisseurship.  Now I am older I appreciate him for his self-awareness, his generosity of spirit and his love of life.  He was and remains my inspiration for writing What Makes a Man. 

The truth is, I still do not understand Cary Grant and I think that is a good thing.  His reason for not discussing his personal life was sound; he did not feel that he could be a model for anyone else.  He was ahead of his time here, understanding how we each play to our own psychology.  But his reticence is intriguing because it hides his huge achievement in inventing himself, in becoming Cary Grant. 

What he did was almost impossible, he started out poor, badly educated and badly parented, and became a movie star, a worldly connoisseur of art, clothes, food, a successful businessman and a father.  It is no accident that Graham McCann’s definitive biography of Grant is entitled “Cary Grant, a class apart”.  For Cary Grant invented a man for the twentieth century, a gentleman of quality but of no particular class.      

Cary Grant, early on in his career

 

Bettering himself

What we do know abut Cary Grant is that, from somewhere, he had a deep-seated desire to better himself, and he never lost that desire.  He was only nine years old when he first expressed an interest in clothes, he asked his mother for a pair of white flannels.  But this was no disinterested interest.  Cary had developed an affection for the butcher’s daughter and even at a young age, realised that good clothes would make him more attractive to girls. 

Initially it was his willingness to listen and learn that set him apart.  He went to New York as part of a vaudeville acrobatic troupe when he was twenty.  When the act folded he stayed in America.  By the time he was twenty-four he was appearing in musical comedy on Broadway.  He knew musical comedy was a route out of vaudeville and learnt to sing, paying for lessons with the money he earned from a variety of odd, often downright odd, jobs, that were related to show business.  In those days when his reviews came in, they were very mixed.  However Cary Grant was not dismayed, he read about his faults and duly set out to fix them.  Before he was through he added a touch of Noel Coward, a slinky elegance of movement and an accent that combined English diction with American pronunciation.

At the same time he started to become the Cary Grant we know today.  He became a “walker”, an escort for attractive women and in the process met a lot of accomplished and successful people.  By his own admission he learnt all he could from the people he met.  At twenty-four he started clipping articles on all kinds of subjects, something he did for his entire life.  It became his habit to make light of his achievements but the truth was, he had a ferocious work ethic.        

This shows up in small but inspired ways in the movies.  In the early scenes of “To catch a thief” Grant wears a trousers, striped shirt and scarf combination that set the tone for the movie.  These were not his own clothes, which Hitchcock felt were wrong for the character.  He found the clothes he wore by looking at the style of local men in the South of France (the setting for Thief) and buying in local stores.  Once again, looking and learning. 

Incidentally Grant’s shirt and scarf “look”, caught on hugely when the movie came out and lots of men took it up, unfortunately, “very badly” in the words of Thief’s costume director.   

There was a bit of a downside to this learning.  Like many man who teach themselves to be self-sufficient, Grant became used to doing everything himself.  His second wife, Barbara Hutton, in a rare critical comment about him, once said that “He was a frustratingly difficult man to care for”.     

Listening

One of the things that set Cary Grant apart from other actors and other men of the period was his ability to treat women with respect and listen to what they had to say.

All of his female co-stars said the same thing.  Cary Grant listened to them; he was not simply waiting for the chance to speak his lines.  He did this with great care and it gives his scenes with his co-stars a texture, a depth and a timing that other stars could not match.  Part of Cary Grant’s mystique as a star was his chemistry with his female co-stars.  This was partly because he was a truly sexy, handsome man. 

However it was also because he built that chemistry, by listening to them and making them believably human.  It was part of his gift that he brought that feeling to the screen.  There is a wonderful early scene in Indiscreet, where Ingrid Bergman’s lonely, beautiful actress is flirting with Grant.  Grant is clearly both flirting and hesitating at the same time, but more importantly it is clear that he is responding to Bergman’s conversational gambits.  There is a realism about the tone and timing that carries one deeply into the scene. Magnificent acting by both of them. 

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, in "Indiscreet"

 

Self-possession

If Grant was courteous and listened to women, he was still very comfortable in his own skin.  His self-possession is evident in many of his roles.  He would listen to women but he had his own view of the world, downright challenging.  This confidence, even aggression, made for great interplay.  In my opinion he never did it better than in the “The Philadelphia Story” as the divorced husband of the imperious Katherine Hepburn.  Grant’s  classlessness also works beautifully here, as he neither conforms to hierarchy nor flouts it.  By starting from a position of certainty he consistently out-manoeuvres Hepburn’s icy aristocrat.

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story"

Alpha Male

By the time we get to the making “To catch a thief”, Grant was perfectly Cary Grant.  The first part of Hitchcock’s genius was to have Cary Grant almost play himself, cosmopolitan, cultured, stylish, but with an element of dangerous alertness.  Here is the man that so impressed Ian Fleming that he wanted Cary Grant to play James Bond.  It is ironic (and a tribute to Cary Grant) that Fleming, a terrible snob, wanted the poor working class lad from Bristol to play his officer-class spy. 

Hitchcock’s second act of genius was to unleash the danger, the aggression in Cary Grant.  It starts with Grant’s trick with a shotgun to fool the police and it ends with his willingness to hurl Brigitte Auber’s girl burglar from a fourth-floor rooftop.  In between there are times when we are never sure whether we are going to get the well-dressed lover or the underworld parolee.

Now, Grant is the complete master of the woman he is with.  Grace Kelly is beautiful, selfish, arrogant and flirtatious as the wealthy but spoilt Francine Stevens.  However, Grant’s John Robie is unperturbed by her behaviour.  The more Kelly’s Francine tries to play Grant’s John Robie, the more he teases her, showing her who has the power.  There is nothing coarse here; Grant defeats Kelly with both wit and style, leaving her no alternative but to fall in love with the man who has bested her.

Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief"

The end for now

I am going to stop here.  Cary grant had formed the man he wanted to be by the time of “To Catch a Thief” and that seems a good place to stop.  There are so many other things to talk about, his generosity, his care and loyalty to his friends, his romantic weakness for women.  That will wait for another time.  But there is one thing that I still find amazing, after years of watching his movies and reading about him. 

The man turned out so well. 

Given his difficult start in life, there is no English class-war defensiveness in him, no embittered distrust, no predilection to make excuses for any part of his life.  His story is of a man who was determined to succeed and happy to do the work that he needed to do.

Cary Grant created Cary Grant and he created a very special man.

God Bless you Mr Grant, wherever you are.

Details

Movies

There are of course so many wonderful movies.  Here are five of my favourites:

To Catch a Thief

Cary Grant was never more urbane, more stylish or more interesting than in To Catch a Thief

The Philadelphia Story

Witty and exceptionally funny.  In some ways it is the ultimate  screwball comedy, in others there is no movie quite like it.  Sharp, funny and clever. 

Charade

Before Bond, Grant made a very classy, worldly American spy.  Setting the movie in Paris played to Cary Grant’s strengths as a stylish, cosmopolitan man.

Only Angels have Wings

Howard Hawks movie about mail flyers in the Andes.  The camaraderie works here.  Surprisingly, so does Grant as a tough aviator disdainful of romance.

Indiscreet

This movie has grown on me in recent years.  Cary Grant play a less-than-ethical character and yet is still appealing to the audience.  To carry that through an entire movie and not lose the audience is great acting.  

Books

Graham McCann

Cary Grant, a class apart. 

Though McCann sometimes feels like he is a little cold on his subject, this is the definitive biography, and treats Grant’s acting with the consideration it deserves.

Richard Torregrossa

Cary Grant, a celebration of style

This is a book of bits and pieces, but wonderfully illuminating on Cary Grant’s style, his relationships with his friends, his view of movies.  Like a mine full of nuggets of gold.

Yann-Brice Dherbier

Cary Grant, a life in pictures.

This is a new book which unfortunately contains some errors of grammar, and, I think, one error of fact.  That said, it is a beautifully researched book and contains some stunning studio photographs that have rarely been seen.

I found this Tom Ford documentary on the Fashion Copious site, which is one of the most interesting fashion sites I visit.  It has an intelligent quality, being both visually beautiful and with a definite opinion on what makes for good fashion.

I found the documentary to be fascinating, it really revealed how Tom Ford works, following him during his work.  The overarching storyline is the lead-up to the launch of Tom Ford’s first womenswear collection, which was about a year ago.  So even though neither his menswear or his men’s fragrances were included it was a very interesting documentary.

Looking at it a second time, I think that what makes it so interesting is Tom Ford’s willingness to reveal himself and his unique view of how style works.  I really felt I learnt something in watching this video.  I think that Tom Ford is the most interesting designer working at the moment, with Ralph Lauren coming a distant second.

See what you think, the documentary is here.     

We wrote about Tom Ford’s style evolution and menswear here

 To write about Ernest Hemingay is to tread in the footsteps of much greater writers.   Yet he inspires men to write.  His style, his lanaguage and his concerns reach out to so many men.  For some of us he becomes a teacher.  Ernest Hemingway’s books were precious to me long before I believed I could write.  It is his birthday, so here is a revised version of an article I published some years ago.  This is Part Two, Part One is here.  

Hemingway and 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.”     

He gave us a way of being men that is still good today.  His concept of personal honour, of being responsible for our own lives regardless of the lies that we are told, is the most important contributiuon that American art has made to the world.  Truly, God Bless you Mr Hemingway, for everything that you gave to the world and for the pains you endured in sharing that precious knowledge with us.

Details

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 single 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 Garden of Eden (Orig. title, Hemingway’s Garden of Eden)

Along with “Islands in the Steam” this is one of the finest Hemingway movies.  John Irvin (director) catches all of the tension of two newly-wed lovers adrift in Europe.  As they lose their identities and their gender  in each other, their lives are further rocked by the introuction of a sultry and sexy “countess” Marita, who becomes the catalyst for sexual games that spin out of control.  This is a superbly perceptive interpretation of Hemingway’s novel, erotic, tense and forbidding.  I urge Hemingway fans to see it.  

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/

Ernest Hemingway remains an abiding inspiration for me.   What I truly know about writing comes from him.  Some of what I know about being a man comes from him.  Those things I have got from him I am truly grateful for, for no on else could have given them to me.   

On the occasion of his birthday, here is a revised version of an article I published a couple of years ago. This is the first part and the second part is here. 

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.  That writing reaches across the decades still, and helped save the life of a very lost young man back in the early seventies.  My gratitude for what I learnt from his writing is boundless.

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he article continues here

I was on holiday and had not realised that Patrick Leigh Fermor had died, in early June of this year. His death saddens me, firstly because he was a great writer, with a literate densely descriptive style that was easy to read. Secondly and most importantly, because he was a true hero of World War 2. There were few like him and of course they are getting fewer. Patrick Leigh Fermor was 96 when he died, so congratulations for a good innings are in order.

I came late to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s stories, only a couple of years ago, courtesy of my friend Jim, a London taxi driver, who knows more about good 20th century writing than most professors of literature. So though I am a fan of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writing I am not the man to write another obituary of him. However this is a web-magazine about men and I want to acknowledge the passing of Mr Leigh Fermor’s, a real man in every sense.

Here is a link to a short obituary by a man who knew him. It seems to me to have just the right amount of irreverence.   “Better a hero than a celebrity” is here

Here are some of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s books, he was a wonderful writer.

Words of Mercury

My favourite of all of his books, evocative, funny, perceptive tales of people and place.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Roumeli

I like Roumeli, because it chimes with my own experiences of Northern Greece.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

A Time of Gifts

Possibly his most famous book, travellers tales raised to a new level.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Between the Woods and the Water

Here is the companion to Time of Gifts, the tale of his 1930′s walk through the Balkans.  Even better than “Gifts”

Get it in the UK here and the US here

In Tearing Haste

The letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.  Devonshire, irreverent, sparky, deliberately unintellectual.  Leigh Fermor, cosmopolitan, learned, experienced.  A wonderful contrast of opposites that come alive in these letters and bring out the best of both of them.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

This is the third part of a three part post on American movie director Franklin J. Schaffner.  Part One is here and Part Two is here.

Papillon

Another courageous man, in the unlikely shape of a small-time Parisian crook, “Papillon” so-called because of the large butterfly tattoed on his chest.  Set in the 1930’s, Steve MacQueen’s Papillon is sent to Devils Island, a horrific French penal colony in French Guiana, from which there is no return. 

Papillon

Once there, the convicts discover that the real prison is the island, a hostile jungle filled with poisonous snakes and savage crocodiles.  If that were not enough the sea cuts them off from the mainland and is filled with sharks.  For most prisoners acceptance comes quickly and they settle into the appalling conditions, their grim lives only punctuated by the sadistic brutality of the guards.  Life is cheap on Devils Island and the prisoners quick learn that they are worthless, except as slave labour. 

But not Papillon.  He is determined to escape.  Time after time he tries, fails and is horribly punished.  

Schaffner gets a magnificent performance from Steve MacQueen.  He ages, degenerates really, before our very eyes.  No movie star looks here.  As various wardens try to break his spirit, he changes into a damaged older man, his body battered, his skin grey from years in solitary confinement.  However his spirit continues to carry him and it is this that we watch. 

Papillon (Steve Macqueen) after five years in solitary confinement

Schaffner’s jungle is beautiful but absolutely lethal.  His human beings look weak and vulnerable in it.  It serves to make McQueen’s bravery even more potent.  Man against everything.  At the end of the movie McQueen finally escapes and somehow it becomes a victory for every man. 

Exposition and the story

 One of the reasons that Franklin Schaffner’s movies were both intelligent and successful, was that he had a marvellous gift for exposition.  Exposition, the telling of information onscreen, is the bane of every movie that tires to deal in complex ideas.  Franklin Schaffner excelled at effortlessly communicating ideas and concepts that had to be understood for the movie to work. 

In the Warlord he had to communicate the concept of Droit Du Seigneur (The right of a Lord to a bride’s first night of marriage) to an audience that had no understanding of it.  He did these by making the subject a heated argument amongst the principal characters.  In doing so he placed it in its historical, sexual and emotional significance, quickly and in a way an audience could understand. 

In Papillon many characters walk on and off camera, and impart critical information about Devils Island and the penal system, as a way of seeking Papillon’s help or getting his favour.  The Nazi counter-intelligence sub-plot which informs us about Patton is a stroke of genius.  These movies are textbook examples of how to do exposition superbly.

Papillon and Louis Dega (Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) on Devils Island

Islands in the Stream

In my view one of the few movies that truly understands Ernest Hemingway.  I suppose that it was no surprise that the man who told stories of Alpha males should film the great American novelist.

Again the teaming with George C Scott produced results.  If Scott was able to look like Patton, he was almost a double for Ernest Hemingway himself, in Islands.  Scott is Thomas Hudson, a sculptor, a father, a man who has dealt with his own demons by removing himself to a small Caribbean island.  His only friends are a few rough men, sailors and roustabouts who accept him for who he is.  A proud, troubled and difficult man, Hudson has a dark side that makes him aggressive and dangerous, especially when drunk.  The loose community of the Island gives him the freedom to expose that side of himself, from time to time.

George C Scott as Thomas Hudson in Islands in the Stream

Islands roughly follows the story of Hemingway’s novel.  In the first half, the movie concentrates on Hudson’s relationships with his sons and his divorced wife.  It is notoriously difficult to film Hemingway and these are amongst the most moving, perceptive interpretations of Hemingway ever filmed.  Franklin Schaffner captures the terse poetry of Hemingway’s language beautifully.  In the key scene between Hemingway and his beautiful, intelligent wife, very few words are spoken, yet it is crystal clear that they are still very much in love.  The scene is touching and ineffably sad.  That said, the first half of the movie also contains a shark attack scene, which is one of the most tense, dramatic and thrilling scenes ever shot in a movie.

The second half of the movie finds Hudson motivated to help refugees fleeing the war in Europe, to enter the Americas illegally.  This is different, action oriented, with a harsher tone.  The scenes here are clever and exciting, but they lack the delicate, lucid beauty of the first half of the movie.

Hudson and his crew run the blockade

This is a good but flawed movie.  The problem is not with the movie but the source material.  The writing of Islands in the Stream was a problem for Hemingway.  He started writing it and put it down.  The second half was written some fifteen years later, after many life changes.  The two halves were edited together after Hemingway’s death and published.  So Islands is really two books, a meditation on art and family, and a story of hard decisions made in pursuit of freedom.  The movie reflects that.

Franklin Schaffner made a good movie of all of this and that was huge achievement in itself.  Worth seeing for the quality of the performances and the real questions of manliness and courage that the movie raises.

Life and the Spirit

 In all of Franklin Schaffner’s movies there is an underlying connection to a greater spirit, a mystical energy that his warrior men are forced to engage with.  In the Warlord, Charlton Heston tries to take the virgin Bronwyn by force, before invoking the Droit Du Seigneur.  On both occasions strange events protect her, and force him to reconsider.  By invoking the Droit Du Seigneur and then breaking his side of the agreement he unleases forces which, initially, he does not understand.  Pagan idols gain a power over this most rational of men.

In Patton, there are strange, unsettling scenes where Patton tells of his belief in reincarnation.  There is a surreal and strangely moving scene near the beginning of the movie where Patton is seized by a vision and directs his driver to an ancient battle site.  Here, he goes into a virtual trance state and retells of his life as a Carthaginian commander, two thousand years earlier.  His ability to understand and anticipate the Germans verges on the visionary, almost like the gifts of a religious mystic. 

The most blatant insertion of a spiritual presence is in Papillon, where he has two surreal out-of-body visions which crystalise his determination to escape, at some kind of soul level.  These scenes contrast completely and utterly with the brutal realism of the scenes of Papillon’s life in prison.  The scenes are so powerful that they completely change our perception of the movie.  Even the troubled Thomas Hudson in Islands is touched by something spiritual.  As he lies dying, Thomas Hudson sees a bright, white light and the movie implies that he is seeing another existence, as a reward for his courage and endurance.

Somewhere in this attachment to the spiritual, is the essence of what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies great.  To be a Schaffner hero for a moment and myself overreach, Franklin Schaffner reminds me of Holbein.  Holbein was the dutch portrait painter who painted the powerful nobles of the English Tudor court of king Henry the Eighth.  Like Holbein, Schaffner draws portraits of powerful men and also like Holbein, he searches for the mystical connection to whatever makes these men what they are.    

The Big Why

The English philosopher R.A. Collingwood said that the purpose of Art was to ask the question but that it could not provide the answer.  Seen in that context, all of the  movies discussed above are art. 

Franklin Schaffner movies take the view that assertive Alpha men are necessary, if only to nurture freedom. 

Raw male power, Richard Boone as Bors in The Warlord

 In all of the movies discussed, each man has or comes to, a deep conviction that the world has to be made, that the world is a product of our decisions.  That regardless of our good intentions, both good and ill spring from our actions, that no man can achieve a perfect result, a perfect victory.  This integrity, this faith in the real world is what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies so vital.  It makes the movies adult and big in spirit and explains why they retain their ability to engage us.

I described the endings of Franklin Schaffner’s movies as satisfying which they are.  However he never tries to answer the big dilemmas that his heroes’ actions lead themselves to.  The Warlord ends with Heston’s Norman knight, wounded in body and soul, journeying back to his Duke to seek forgiveness for the chaos he has unleashed.  He is now a different man from when he left.  How will he be received?  Can he rebuild a life?  Will be able to live happily with the woman he has sacrificed so much for?  Does he deserve to?

In Planet of the Apes we never find out what happens to Taylor’s moral certitude (and superiority) when he finds out the truth about mankind.  The ending is almost a Rorschach test, we can all read it differently.  At the end of Patton, George Patton’s victory is flawed by political machinations and intimations of mortality.  Is he right or are his enemies right, about the need for war?

In Papillon, Franklin Schaffner makes a virtue of a necessity.  The story of Papillon has to end somewhere so we end with his successful escape.  But so much has happened to Papillon, he is a different man from when he was first imprisoned and we have been through all of those changes with him.  Quite simply, what will happen to him?  How will he live?

Even Thomas Hudson, whose life has been a succession of hard choices, makes us question.  Was there a value to his manly courage?  Was it worth it to die, alone and apart from friends and family?

These are great movies made by a perceptive and intelligent director, who had the courage to ask the big questions about leadership and bravery in ways that still engage and excite us.  Bravo, Mr Schaffner, wherever you are.

Details

The Warlord

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Planet of the Apes

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Patton

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Papillon

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Islands in the Stream

Get it in the UK here and the US here

This is the second part of a three part post on American movie director Franklin J. Schaffner.  Part One is here and Part Three is here.

Franklin Schaffner had a reputation as a competent director, coming in within budget and schedule, when he was given the job of directing Planet of the Apes.  It was to be a huge success and changed the way science fiction was perceived in the movie world.  Planet of the Apes made it clear that science fiction could both be an adult story and a global financial success.

Planet of the Apes

Ape Hunters pose after capturing humans

 

A starship with four astronauts aboard, three men and a woman.  As they enter their suspended animation capsules, their captain, Taylor (Charlton Heston) sets the controls for an automated jump through hyperspace, a jump that will cross time as well as space.

Blackness.

The crew come out of suspended animation with alarms screaming and the ship in a death dive, tearing itself apart.  Taylor struggles to land the ship.  As he pulls the crew from their pods he discovers that the woman crewmember’s pod has failed and that she has died of accelerated old age.

The ship crashlands in a lake in a mountainous desert region.  The planet seems earthlike, the air is breathable.  But where in the galaxy are they? And when?

Its Alpha male time again and then some, because we soon discover that Heston’s Taylor is an absolute bastard.  Hiking away from the crash, there is a marvellous scene where Heston’s surviving crew members rag on him.  In short order we find out that Taylor is cynical, arrogant, unfeeling, power-hungry and a born leader.  We also learn that he was fucking the female crew member and it is implied that he abused his power as ship’s captain to do this.

Heston is unfazed by this hostility and leads his crew through a mountainous desert, filled with menace.  Dry lightning fills the skies and the ground is cracked and broken.

Schaffner takes no little trouble to build our picture of this arrogant Alpha male.  The reason for this becomes apparent when Taylor is captured by the apes.  Only a man who truly believes in himself can survive when an entire world is pitted against him. 

Taylor, on trial by a council of apes

There is also a very funny counterpoint that Schaffner keeps running throughout the movie.  Heston is the embodiment of the proud assertive male, held captive by a female chimpanzee scientist.  Worse, she calls him by the pet name “Brighteyes”.  Even worse, she frequently tells Heston that she finds him “cute”. 

Schaffner also has to get credit for one of the most shocking, thrilling, scary scenes ever filmed.  Taylor has encountered wild humans, when suddenly they are being hunted by unseen foes, to the wailing sound of an alien hunting horn.  As they run through a cane break, armed Gorillas on horseback burst into view and begin firing on them.  Franklin Schaffner makes this happen in split-second shots, one shock after another and never gives the audience time to get its breath.  Masterful.

Planet of the Apes is possibly the least politically correct movie ever made.  Throughout the movie, Taylor never falters in his conviction that men and especially himself, are better than apes.  Compare this to the more recent remake of the movie, where humans are seen as “guilty” of some undefined crime against the universe and the apes are just as good, if different.  This moral relativism robs the re-make of much of the original’s power.

And the casting of Charlton Heston was a master-stroke.  We watch and accept Taylor because some part of us knows Heston as a good, kind, honourable man, from all of his hero roles in the past.  Heston subverts that role-type, but we never quite give up hoping that Taylor will evolve into the Heston hero that we know. 

But anyone who has seen the movie knows that Taylor cannot become the much-loved hero that Heston portrays in other movies.  Like almost all of Schaffner’s movies the ending has an integrity that bears out the movie’s themes.

Patton, Lust for Glory

Actually the sub-title could easily have been “the necessity of great leaders”, though it would not have been so catchy.  “Patton” hits all the bases and does a great job of portraying General George Patton.  This is a rounded, provocative, exciting biography of a great and complex man.  Schaffner gives Patton’s life the benefit of all of his perceptive intelligence.  Though Patton’s story lends itself to a sensational treatment, Schaffner never sensationalises the man.  Schaffner had the good sense to see that Patton was already larger than life.  

George C Scott as General George S. Patton

Schaffner makes it clear that how Allies needed Patton and shows how his inspired generalship helped win World War 2.  But he also shows the wily political soldier, sometimes good, as when he forces his British allies to make the right decisions in his support and sometimes bad, as when he politics for promotions and rank.  Schaffner also shows the lonely man, alone and sad, the victim of his own overreaching arrogance and pride. 

Schaffner’s gift for exposition really serves him well in Patton.  He has to do two things in what is in effect a blockbuster movie.  He has to explain how Patton became the soldier that he is and sketch in some of the military history that informs Patton’s generalship.  He also has to show the audience the strategic geography of the Normandy invasion, without confusing them, but so they understand the threat the Allies face.  He does both of these well.  He sketches out Patton’s life with an ingenious sub-story, whereby a Nazi counter-intertelligence team analyse Patton’s life.  These scenes, intercut with the battles, show us why Patton was a great general, the inner man driving the genius warrior.    

General Omar Bradley (left) and General George Patton

George C Scott looked like Patton, had the manner and body, and had the courage to play the whole man, good and bad.  I do not think that a movie like this will ever be made again, certainly not in Hollywood.  It is too intelligent, too visceral, too real.   By turns beautiful and harrowing, it thrills us with the heroism of our forebears and tells the real story of their sacrifice.  And the music has to be mentioned.  Throughout the film, Schaffner uses the sound of hunting horns to underline his scenes.  They make the atmosphere strange, they evoke feelings of danger, of fighting, of hunting, of blood.  A masterful touch in a magnificent movie.

A masterpiece.

Landscape and mood

 For a New York TV director who started out in tiny studios clad in sound proofing, Schaffner had an incredible eye for nature and for the landscape.  In fact, Landscape plays a crucial part in his movies.  He uses it as a backdrop to enhance or counter-point what his characters are doing, it never just “there”.  In the Warlord, the swampy ponds, the fogs, the weird twisted trees underline the unnaturalness of the costal plain and the pagan village.

In Planet of the Apes the landscape is rocky and unyielding.  There is no soft, comfortable place to be found.  The sky is full of lightning, the soil is arid and cracked.  Even the beaches and cliffs seem cheerless under the sun.  And of course the land holds the secret.  The apes know not to go to the Forbidden Zone, a hostile deadly land that tells of their origins.

The landscape has similar properties in Patton.  But here Schaffner does something different.  He uses the beautiful landscapes of Africa and Europe in a new way, to slow the tempo of the movie.  The camera pans slowly and widely over the entire distance of the landscape. providing a contrast to the cruelty of war.  Men are broken, nature is not.

In Franklin Schaffner’s movies, nature always has a role.  Polluted and deceptive in the Warlord, menacing and unyielding in Planet of the Apes.  In Papillon the jungle is jewel-bright and colourful but absolutely deadly.  In Islands in the Stream even the Caribbean is oppressive, a harsh bright sun and an open sea upon which men bob helplessly, no place to hide.   

Part Three of this post is here