I have been watching a lot of 40s movies lately. Being radically anti-celebrity, I was taken aback by how easily mesmerized I was by the movie stars of that period.
After all, why wouldn’t any man (straight or gay) imitate Cary Grant’s walk up the stairs to save Ingrid Bergman at the end of Hitchcock’s “Notorious?”
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And why wouldn’t any honest woman try to talk and look like Barbara Stanwyck?
I was at a pool party in the Hollywood Hills once where agressive supermodels were trying to seduce fake producers. That entire pack of semi-nude nymphs had less seductive power than the play of the anklet on Barbara Stanwyck left leg in Wilders’ “Double Indemnity.”
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Watching these 40s movies has made me realize the real power of movie stars and their supercharged sexual energy. Those men and women really capitalized on consenting sadomasochistic aspect of the artist-audience relationship. And they did it without being perverse or even showing sex at all, but instead with class, elegance, and silence.
The stars of the 40s seduce you, and you like it, because they make you feel comfortable. You believe they know what they are doing.
Does this mean they were better lovers in real life? Was, for instance, Clark Gable a better lover than Matt Damon? Was Barbara Stanwyck better in bed than, let’s say, Jessica Alba?
Absolutely.
(Unless, of course, Jessica Alba wants to prove me wrong.)
I know it is far-fetched and improvable, but I am convinced that they were better lovers than most of the celebrities today.
The 40’s stars knew how to make love. They also knew how to fight, and this I can prove.
Watch Laurence Olivier as King Henry V, calling his men to arms. Forget his forceful posture and piercing look; just close your eyes and listen to his voice. He sounds like thousands of exuberant angelic trumpets unleashing their powerful sound from the heights of heaven onto the depths of hell. His voice moves you from within; it makes you want to join the war. It makes you believe that one man can rally multitudes to their death just by intensity of character expressed through vibration of voice. Is it not mere acting, even great acting. There is something frighteningly real in Olivier’s voice.
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Now, could Laurence Olivier rally troops in real life? Could he rally troops better than, let’s say, Brad Pitt or Colin Farrell? Yes, he could. He actually did.
After William Wyler turned down directing “Henry V,” Laurence Olivier, who was serving in the Fleet Air Army, was released to star in and direct this war propaganda movie. Olivier was actually fighting in the real war as he was portraying a warrior in the movie. His force was real. This is why his call to arms was not merely good acting. It was a real call to arms, and it seriously moved me before I even knew about Olivier’s real-life service.
The excuse that the introduction of color stripped movie stars of their charisma is also irrelevant in this case. “Henry V” is a color movie. In fact, it is made in the exquisite colors of medieval miniature paintings. It borrows colors and naïve perspectives from the medieval “Book of Seasons.” (A similar rendition of period paintings onto screen was later used by Stanley Kubrick in “Barry Lyndon.”)
Color also did not diminish Nikolai Cherkasov’s intensity as Ivan the Terrible in Eisenstein’s two-part masterpiece. Black and white through most of the film, Eisenstein suddenly inserts a colored scene, which demonstrates the ferocity of the ruthless Russian Czar with more oomph and in a more “colorful” way. On the contrary, George Clooney is as believable in the overly crisp black and white “Good German” as Obama’s dethroned “green czar” Van Jones was in denying that he’s a 9/11 truther.
Misuse of colors can wreck any movie, but it cannot take away what is truly there or add something that is not. What makes Olivier’s Henry V believable is the same dynamic that makes Jimmy Stewart’s moral courage so believable in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Jimmy Stewart was a distinguished war hero serving as a bomber pilot in WWII.
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It is the same connection to reality that makes one believe that Clark Gable could carry Scarlet O’Hara through the fire of Atlanta (filmed in Technicolor) because when his real wife Carol Lombard died in a plane crash on a USO tour, a devastated Clark Gable took up arms and joined the war in Europe.
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Brad Pitt may kill many Nazis in Tarantino’s movie and its inevitable sequels and prequels. He can conquer Troy on a tax-friendly location in Romania or some other, currently, more capitalistically inclined state than that of California. But he could never convince me as a warrior. It is not even because he is not courageous by nature. I don’t know. He may be. But he was never tested in such ways and that shows on screen.
Can he still play a convincing warrior without fighting in any real war? Maybe.
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Will he be able to move us like Laurence Olivier? No way.
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Needless to say, acting is a craft and great actors can embody qualities without having the real-life experiences of what is being portrayed. Otherwise, how is one going to play an alien (unless, of course, one is Tom Cruise)?
Good actors can play real-life characters more expressively than the characters depicted are in real life. And yet, there are certain qualities that one cannot embody unless one possesses them off-screen. These are qualities that can be imitated only poorly unless experienced fully.
Those qualities are real courage, real intelligence, and the greatest of all, love (or its secular equivalent, sexiness). These are qualities that most of our stars lack today and the great actors of the 40s had in abundance.