Toxic Men We’re Missing Right Now
I posted this pic at Facebook yesterday. I keep looking at it, knowing that I know a little something, sometimes more, about all of them. Thought I should share with you all. Let’s take them in reverse order.
Sean Connery. Everybody’s James Bond. The best, the only. He was a movie star, emphasis on the word ‘star.’ I remember somebody wisecracked, “He’s the biggest star who never made a great movie.” We laughed, but it’s not quite true, as is usually the case with easy generalizations. Like Bruce Willis, whom we’ll be hearing about under Honorable Mentions below, he was at ease with his baldness, donned a toupée when required and went about his bald-being in real life like a real man. Truthfully, he was not right for the Bond role. He was not English but cheerfully Scottish and never not noticeable. Some secret agent, eh? He was physically imposing, unlike Ian Fleming’s anonymous Double-O killer. The only correct casting of Bond was Timothy Dalton, whose two movies in the role I still like, though box office said different. His first movie after Bond was The Anderson Tapes, a prescient thriller about the surveillance society we have come to live in since. He was bald in that. Cool. He made at least three other very good movies. He was in Marnie with Tippi Hedren, a Hitchcock film. Not many actors can claim that laurel, given that Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart got first crack at the prize Hitchcock roles. He was magnificent in Spielberg’s Indian Jones and the Lost Crusade. He made Highlander a great movie, playing a Spaniard against a Frenchman’s Scot. Go figure. And he did this:
Gregory Peck. He’s here because my wife loves loves loves him, and I know she’s not alone. I was always a skeptic about the Mockingbird movie. Suspected the book was really written by Truman Capote, who is actually a character in the movie. I didn’t think it was a great movie; it was kind of too easy and too full of stereotypes, like Gone with the Wind. I couldn’t believe they cast Peck as Douglas MacArthur. Wrong wrong wrong. But he’s on this list for two movies. He was fine in Hitchcock’s Spellbound with Ingrid Bergman. That’s something, right? Turgid Freudian nightmare with graphic sequences by Salvador Dali. I never watched even one of his gunfighter movies (he was a 4-F no show in WWII), but I did watch this:
And he also starred in a truly all-time great movie.
Michael Caine. I just love this guy. Defiantly cockney from Alfie to Harry Palmer to Harry Brown. Every Brit actor bio touches base with the Royal Academy of Shakespearean Acting Arts or some such, and here is the incredible exception to the rule. But he’s not like the Brooklyn boys Martin Scorsese exploits because they can do no other thing than be rudely Brooklyn in another Scorsese mob flick. No. Caine could have faked an entire career with a toff accent he obviously knew how to affect:
John Wayne. He could be awful. He could be great. Depended on who was directing. With John Ford he was moving and admirable. But it was also John Ford who sold him out. For money. John Wayne wanted to fight in World War II. John Ford promised he was working on it. He wasn’t. He had the Number One box,office star in the world, and he wasn’t going to lose that paycheck. One moment we have of the real John Wayne. Jimmy Stewart lost a son in Vietnam. Some protester at some event tore down the American flag in front of Jimmy Stewart. John Wayne went all John Wayne on the protester. But how do you pitch the right John Wayne moments for a YouTube reference? Guess you have to limit yourself to two. The beginning and the ending…
Jimmy Stewart.
Honorable Mentions. Bruce Willis, Yul Brunner, Clark Gable, Rex Harrison, Tyrone Power, Cary Grant, Alan Ladd, Richard Widmark, and, uh, Errol Flynn.
Comments
Post a Comment