It was Henry Higgins who pounded the floor of his study and wondered, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”
More to the point, Rex Harrison: why can’t a )manbe more like a man?
The question arose while I was recently watching ‘The Third Man” (1949) at the Film Forum. There is Orson Welles in a suit and a hat and an overcoat. I bet his socks even match.
At 34, Welles was an adult. His sinisterly charming Harry Lime had a past, even though it was strewn with corpses, but at least he wasn’t bunking at Mom’s house and surfing the Internet.
By his 30s, Welles had lived. He’d even read ‘Othello” in a version other than Cliff Notes.
What I miss are real men, not macho men. I don’t need saddle-sore John Wayne’s ‘Well, hello, little lady” attitude. I’m just tired of leading men who look and behave like boys.
Consider Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Ewan McGregor. Boyish, boyish, boyish.
And while Sean Penn, Keanu Reeves and Nicolas Cage are 38, 34 and 35 years old, respectively, not one of them has the worldliness Welles had at 34.
This year, Hollywood embraced the teen idol. Freddie Prinze Jr. and James Van Der Beek interest me about as much as Luke Perry does (Read: not). They’re a contact high, evaporating the moment they’re off screen.
The past few years have also seen the rise of the comic pipsqueak as romantic lead. So now we must suffer David Spade romancing Sophie Marceau in ‘Lost and Found,” and Adam Sandler wooing Drew Barrymore in ‘The Wedding Singer.” At least there’s been a moratorium on Pauly Shore comedies.
Mainstream movies have lost touch with the pleasures of maturity, and our newly dewy matinee idols reflect that. We loved Bogie because he’d been around the block a few times. Like the tough guys he played, the cars he drove, he had dings and dents.
Bogart’s Philip Marlowe lived in cheap apartments scrubbed of memories and mementos. But his actions reflected years of experience.
Marlowe had a reason to be wary of the easy buck, the sure thing – he lived hard and had the scars to prove it. He had the musky, seductive scent of real life and we found that irresistible.
It wasn’t just that men were men in the old movies. Like Jessica Rabbit, they were drawn that way. Behind every Marlowe was a Raymond Chandler. Behind Welles and his co-star Joseph Cotten was the great novelist Graham Greene.
Thanks to Greene, Harry Lime and Cotten’s Holly Martins had pasts bigger than the screen could contain. Although their characters were creatures of the cinema, Greene gave them novelistic complexity. The things they left unsaid, the unspoken memories, cast large shadows, adding depth and mystery to everything they did.
The world hasn’t gotten any less complex, but our heroes have. There should be more to the enigmas of life these days than how Brad Pitt gets all those shades of blond in his hair.