I HAD it from MY FATHER

Today is the centenary of my father’s birth. And next January it will be fifteen years since his death. These anniversaries are of little moment to anyone but his two living close relatives: me (his only child) and his younger sister Maisie.

Still and all, his working life in many ways embodies the movement of western capitalism through the twentieth century and so I think his story is of wider interest. The more personal memories and anecdotes resonate only insofar as such stuff has parallels for any family and for other parent-child relationships.

Like anyone, Stan Gilbert began life with a mixture of advantages and disadvantages. His family circumstances were comfortable. His father was a prosperous businessman and the first in the town to own a car, for the driving of which he hired a chauffeur. There were other servants too. The tale was often told of the kitchen maid so innocent that, when she accompanied the family on an excursion to the seaside, she was astounded to discover that the sea was not – as she believed from the evidence of a landscape painting that hung in the house – “in a field”.

But Dad – as I learned for the first time from Auntie Maisie at the weekend – was “a seven-month baby”, born very small and yet to grow finger- or toenails. He needed weeks of constant nursing and – this I have known all my life – he was a martyr to asthma for the greater part of his childhood. As a result he missed a lot of school. I have always believed that my grandmother doted on Dad and perhaps rather smothered him. Auntie Maisie says that it was in particular their maternal grandmother, Granny Wicks, for whom the first grandchild could do no wrong.

At any rate, Dad lacked the basics of primary schooling and when his father proposed to despatch him to the local public school, even as a day pupil, the boy’s fear of the challenge of it all and his mother’s tearful entreaties saw off the threat. Instead, my father ended his education at fourteen and went into the business to learn it from the bottom up.

Between Dad and Maisie – apart from two girls who did not survive – was another son, Douglas (whimsically named after the motorcycle that brought news of the birth to his father at work). Doug was an altogether more confident and assertive character than Stan and his happy enrolment at the public school only underlined the differences. After school, he spurned the family business and trained to be an auctioneer.

The family view was that Dad always bore “an inferiority complex” especially in relation to his brother. There may have been something in this but, as a young man, Doug went through an extended ordeal that fundamentally altered his extrovert demeanour. Having joined the RAF and trained as a pilot well before Britain declared war on Hitler’s Germany, Doug was shot down in the first month of hostilities and was held prisoner for the entire duration. It was a six-year incarceration that he would never talk about subsequently, at least not to his keenly curious nephew.

Dad had a much less harrowing war. As a boot manufacturer, he was in a reserve occupation, so he was not called up early as Doug had been. What’s more, he was that much older: 26 when war broke out. Later he was inducted into the army, drove a truck (though in truth he was ever a dreadful driver) and took part in the Normandy landings. He rose to the rank of Sergeant-Instructor and, on the same day, received his demob papers and a transfer to the Far East. Given the choice, he gratefully came home.

That Dad was ill-educated was one of the wedges that came between him and me. I have always described him as a man who never read a book and it is almost the literal truth: I was certainly never given any grounds for believing that he read any of my own books. While he was at work six days a week through my childhood, my maternal grandfather (who lived with us) inevitably became a surrogate father, not least because I adored him and because his own passion for books and for history fed my own.

By the time I was born, Dad was running the boot and shoe factory that he had inherited from his own father (who died during my mother’s pregnancy). He would bring home the local accent that was the universal argot of his place of work. My mother, who had a degree of social aspiration and whose background was professional rather than industrial, hated it.

Packed off to the public school that my Dad had feared, I disdained this slovenly talk too. My Dad didn’t have the imagination to see that decreeing that I should get the education that he now regretted having missed (“it gives you confidence, boy”) would make me a different kind of person from him, just as being determined that I would be the first (and, as it’s turned out, the last) of the Gilberts to go to university would drive us further apart.

On this day 55 or so years ago, I gave Dad a slim paperback as a birthday gift. I still have it in the reference section of my study, yet unread. It is called Better English. It was only when I saw the crushed, rueful expression cross his face that I understood how the gesture I had made was cruel rather than helpful. Learning ways to bridge the gulf between us was a slow process.

My father had other traits that alienated me. He nurtured a parsimonious outlook that was of a piece with a staidness, a stick-in-the-mud-ness that no doubt spoke to his timid and anxious childhood. He never wanted the bother of doing anything so that it always fell to my mother to initiate an excursion, a family holiday or any kind of social activity. While she set about the heavy lifting, he grumbled on the sidelines – going shopping with him (which my mother had to do for anything other than household staples because he held the purse-strings) was a grim business. He hated paying out money and mourned the cash when it was gone.

I remember vividly the shaming experience of watching him carefully dole out the housekeeping money into my mother’s hand – licking his thumb and checking that there were never two notes inadvertently counted as one – with absolutely no sense of the humiliation that this ritual forced on his wife, something that I could certainly sense from a very young age.

Stan absolutely embodied the old line about knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. His idea of a gift at birthdays and Christmas was a few notes folded and pushed into a brown envelope with my or Mum’s name scrawled on the front. He never gave to charity and denounced “scroungers” and “do-gooders”. Yet after the death of his uncle Wallace, he stormed around the house, furious that there was nothing for him in the will. In vain did my mother point out that the two men had never been close: indeed, I find it hard to recall an occasion when I ever met my great-uncle.

In revolt against my father’s anal attitude to money, I have always been notably careless with the stuff. I never know the price of anything, nor do I retain any notion of what anything cost me. I do not claim that my philosophy is in some way “healthier” than my father’s, but I have no doubt as to its origin.

In other ways, I have inherited variations of my father’s behaviour, usually to my great regret. In some eyes, Dad might well be accounted what his own generation would have called a “weak” character. He frequently used my grandfather’s age against him, particularly mocking his increasing deafness – “eh? eh?” he would bawl back in parody of Grandad’s plaintive but frequent response when addressed. He would scoff when the old man forgot to take his cap off in the house. These things seemed to me to be unkind, but I found myself cultivating my own strain of scorn to use against perceived weakness. I hope I have shed that.

Lacking dialectical skills, Dad would often resort to unforgivable tactics in family arguments, telling spectacular lies, making absurd claims and deploying naked emotional blackmail. He was adept at bringing my mother to tears of bitter frustration. Now and again, deep in some domestic tiff, I hear in my own lines of attack a weak but weird echo of my father’s outlandish gambits. I like to think that I immediately withdraw when that occurs.

In so many situations, my mother and I found ourselves allied against him and, though he and I both mellowed over the years, it was probably not until after my mother’s death in 1988 that I began to appreciate him more. But let me give him – or at least his genes – some credit for something that has filled my life with pleasure. Though neither of my parents was much given to listening to it (which their son does daily), they both related strongly to music.

My grandfather – the one who lived with us until his death at 87 when I was 14 – was a village schoolmaster and, for 40 years, ran a children’s choir. On a famous occasion, his meagre group reached the regional finals of a school choral competition and, trooping onto the stage in the wake of choirs that were dozens strong, were laughingly given no chance. In true Hollywood style, Grandpa’s choir won the trophy. That was long before I was born, but I vividly recall an occasion when, for my six or seven year-old benefit, this little old man stood in the corner of the dining room and sang for me with huge gusto some deathless Victorian ballad. I was moved to my core and wept buckets.

Also for 40 years, my Dad’s father was master of the silver band that did regular stints on the town’s bandstands. My parents met in the local amateur operatic society: she was in the dancing chorus, he took some roles. Though no actor, he had a decent light tenor voice and seemed not to suffer from his customary nerves when all he had to do was sing. You may imagine how often the story was told of how Dad came on for his solo at a concert party evening and my toddler voice piped up from the stalls: “It’s Daddy!”

Before my time, Dad scored a great success as Detlef, the fellow who leads the rousing ‘Drinking Song’, in Romberg’s The Student Prince. But he soon abandoned his amateur stage career. When the operatic society started to work through the canon of Rodgers & Hammerstein, Dad was invited to take the role of Mr Snow in Carousel. I was thrilled – ‘When the Children Are Asleep’ is a beautiful number and very grateful to the voice – but Dad declined, pleading pressure of work. Mum and I were utterly crestfallen.

Years later, Dad was persuaded to join the chorus for a neighbouring town’s revival of The Student Prince. Though he no longer led the chorus (and certainly didn’t pass for a student), he did an epic drunken reel across the stage in the middle of ‘The Drinking Song’ and I wondered if perhaps he was an actor after all. I was proud as Punch of him.

His other musical accomplishment was as a natural ballroom dancer, as smooth as silk on the floor and feather-light on his toes. All the ladies wanted to be his partner. I can picture the last time I saw him and Mum dancing – at a wedding, I think – and my eyes prickled then as they fill now. Perhaps that is why the movies of Fred Astaire still give me such joy.

As so often, it was adversity that brought the family more closely together and so I come to my Dad’s exemplary role in the unfolding of capitalism. Though my grandfather was wealthy, my great-grandfather was not, or at least not at the outset of his career. The chief activity of the town was the boot and shoe industry and, in my great-grandfather's day, it was very much a cottage industry. He and his wife set up a modest contribution to the shoe-making process in their own home. It was probably a clicking room: such kitchen-table operations were not unheard of when I was a boy.

But don't ask me what "clicking" was. The shoe trade, like any other, was bursting with a rich, arcane language all its own. As kids we used to enjoy the occasional sign outside shoe factories: "Skyvers wanted".

Footwear is a trade that does well out of war: army boots are in steady demand when there’s a call-up. Consequently, the Boer War, the Crimean War and the First World War successively saw boot manufacturing thrive. By the time that my grandfather and his brothers inherited my great-grandfather's business, it was highly successful.

At some point (I have never known when), the Gilbert family interest was bought out by a man named AJ Bignell. Certainly, although I always knew my father to be the managing director of the firm, I only knew the firm to be known as Bignell’s. Whether Dad was intended as MD I don’t know. But AJ Bignell’s only son died in the war-time bombing of the Café de Paris in London that famously also accounted for the cabaret performer Snake-hips Johnson: the event is lightly fictionalised in one of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels.

By my father’s account, Bignell stepped away from the business after his loss and became a recluse. Otherwise, Bignell’s did as well out of World War II as from the previous conflicts. And Dad steered it safely through most of the 1950s. But at some point, in what was seen as a move of some stealth, a controlling share in the company was acquired by a city speculator called Harry Jasper. Jasper & Co specialised in surreptitiously hoovering up modest but profitable concerns of all kinds. The change of ownership might never even have come to light had not a huge financial scandal broken when Jasper’s associate, Friedrich Grünwald, suddenly absconded to Israel with £3millions’ worth of the company assets.

The story raged for weeks on the finance pages of the newspapers and eventually Harry Jasper went to jail. Some of his companies were sold off but most, including Bignell’s, were closed down. In any case, the native boot and shoe industry was (to coin a phrase) on its uppers by this time, undermined by cheap Italian imports and soon to be destroyed by the switch from traditional leather shoes to trainers and other synthetic products. To Dad fell the melancholy task of making all his employees redundant, clearing and closing up the factory for the last time and, for one week only, drawing the dole. He was 50.

The second week after the closure of Bignell’s, with some crucial assistance from generous friends and from drawing on 35 years’ worth of trade contacts, Dad opened a little shop: Stan Gilbert (Footwear) Ltd.

It was hard going. Footwear being the county trade, everyone for miles around had a family member who could get hold of free or at least cut-price shoes. My mother and I (then a teenager) worked long hours to help without pay or indeed thanks (Dad didn’t do gratitude). But by degrees and shrewd use of his contacts, Dad made it pay and survive for twenty years. It helped a lot that, though a narrow, unimaginative and prosaic man, he was transformed into a poet with a well-made shoe in his hands. The first pair that I owned as a child was wholly fashioned by him, by hand, from scratch. I still have the lasts on which he made them.

You couldn’t contemplate starting such an enterprise now. Retail has no spare capacity for the little man and customers no longer comprehend a shop that does one thing and does it well. It wouldn’t occur to many to go to a shoe shop (where there would be a choice) for (say) shoelaces when you can no doubt pick up a standard pair at the supermarket.

Like most of us, Dad was utterly a creature of his time. A mass of prejudices (especially against the Welsh and the Jews), he was utterly uncomprehending of what women might want. I think he had been something of a hound in his youth. Once at a social gathering, he and my mother spoke to a couple whom they seemed to know a little and, watching carefully, I gradually saw that there was history between Dad and the blowsy woman in the couple. Dad said enough afterwards to allow me to surmise that he and she had had a premarital fling long ago.

One Christmas, back in the days when I and my partner each still went to stay with our respective parents for the season, I opened a thoughtful gift from a woman friend. It was Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s book The Joy of Gay Sex. Happily, I was “out” to my parents by then and so was able to carry off the moment. Later, I came across my Dad curiously leafing through the book. He reacted squeamishly to a line illustration that turned out to be of an act of fellatio. “Did no one ever do that to you?” I asked carefully. Dad pondered. “Yes” he said. “A woman in Italy during the war. But I couldn’t do it”. This calm confession of faithlessness – my parents married in 1940 – quite astonished me.

My mother’s death knocked my father for a loop. His plan had always been to leave her comfortably off. Being widowed had never entered his mind. He cared for her gallantly during her fading months, learning a few cookery skills from scratch. When he was alone he was miserable and, to no one’s surprise, married again within eighteen months. His new wife was very different from my mother but she made him ridiculously happy.

In January 1998, Dad was hurrying Peggy across a main road with a typical show of impatience. They were hit by a car. It was a risky place to cross but the car was certainly speeding. My father died instantly. Peggy was in hospital for a few weeks but recovered. In an absurd piece of poetry, the driver turned out to be the music master from my old school. Had my Dad actually enrolled there, the man’s distant predecessor might well have cultivated Dad’s musical bent and led him along a different path. Who knows? At any rate, for causing a fatality by speeding, he was fined £120.

Near the end of his life, his solicitor asked Dad what he was worth and he essayed a figure that would certainly have permitted the holiday that he refused to sanction during their eight years of marriage. In fact he left five times as much as he thought, founded on the shrewd investments of his father. This inheritance allowed Peggy to live without worry until Alzheimer’s kicked in two or three years ago and allowed my partner and I to buy the property we adore in the west country. In his fear of ever suffering financial embarrassment, Dad amassed a small but idle fortune. It seems hard on his two wives that they should have had to observe constant thrift. Lucky for me, though.

THREE STRIPES, YOU’RE OUT

I love dance and I love to watch it, from Fred and Ginger to Fonteyn and Nureyev, from Torvill and Dean to the Nicholas Brothers. So of course I have never seen Strictly Come Dancing, any more than an aficionado of song bothers with karaoke or a barbeque draws a gourmet. I gather from the extraordinarily extensive media coverage of recent days that Strictly Come Dancing is a pro-am ballroom tournament shown as BBC1’s riposte to the “talent” tourney, The X Factor, on ITV at peak on Saturday nights, in which capacity the BBC evidently loses out, in ratings if not in the extent of publicity.

As I say, I have not seen any part of any edition of this particular “entertainment”, some of the reason why I come late to the discussion. You might argue that, given this lack of homework, I should shut my trap and forbear the expression of a view. To which I respond: grow up. No commentator, pundit or columnist, pro or am, allows innocence of a detail to prevent airing the “wisdom” of experience in the larger matter. I have seen enough evidence of this exhibit on the television news and in the papers to form a view. As was once remarked by Clive James (my least favourite television critic but he was sound in this instance), it isn’t necessary to eat the whole apple to know that it is sour (or at any rate words to that effect, and he certainly wasn’t the first to remark it, the proverbial curate’s egg being a variant of the same observation).

The “am” in this mix are not merely amateurs but, in the modern requirement, “celebrities”. So, part of the premise of this programme is understood to be that contestants are being gallant or, in the phrase enshrined in a Saturday night title of a generation ago, “game for a laugh”. Gallant indeed has been the focus of the recent media interest, one-time BBC News political correspondent John Sergeant. Sergeant has been competing as one of the “celeb” dancers, despite the – one might hazard – distinct disadvantage of being possessed of the physical grace of a hippopotamus that has contrived to emerge from the water on its hind legs. The judges in the studio – dance professionals all, I believe, one of whom used to step out with a flat-mate of mine – evidently have noted this departure from traditional ballroom practice and accordingly marked down Sergeant’s performance. However – ay, there’s the rub – the viewers get a say in the matter too. And the viewers, most of whom of course could not tell Ann Miller from Darcy Bussell, have been taught by television itself to be more captivated by celebrity than by ability.

So here is the contradiction at the heart of this particular enterprise: the experts and the lay viewers have differing expectations, differing requirements, differing judgments. There is indeed nothing strictly about it. And television, by gradually but decisively ridding itself of all reliance on gravitas, knowledge, experience and wisdom in favour of the culture of celebrity, has exactly set up the conditions in which its chosen experts in any field, however doubtful, are not going to be given any credit by the viewers. In this face-off, John Sergeant is the hero, the man of the people, the victim, the popular choice and the celebrity, all rolled into one. He has gallantly done what the judges could not: he has removed himself. However they play it, the judges are bound to come across as ungracious, churlish, pedantic and not in the spirit of the thing (I am surmising wildly here but you will tell me if I miss it by much). Sergeant, the while (and no surmise needed) can write his ticket as a celeb for years to come, opening fêtes, switching on Christmas lights, making after-dinner speeches, advertising anything he wishes to (footwear, perhaps) and entertaining customers on cruise liners. But I don’t think I’d cast him in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes.

All this was perfectly well adumbrated in the most recent run of the various knockout series (BBC1 Saturday nights again) in which performers who aspire to a career in the stage musical undergo repeated auditions for a role in an actual production in the West End. I have watched and been caught up in these entertainments because I love musicals (and genuine musical talent is at a premium in these contests), because something is genuinely at stake and because the contestants are not celebrities. Nevertheless, in the casting of a Nancy for Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s latest revival of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, the final viewers’ vote did not favour the auditioner whom Sir Cameron and his ally Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted. The production, which opens early next year, is stuck with a Nancy whom Mackintosh would not have cast. You wonder whether Sir Cameron or Lord Lloyd Webber will agree to risk such an outcome again.

So there was an authentic talent contest going on in those series. Strictly Come Dancing would appear to be a whole other kettle of fish. It’s merely another celebrity survival contest. We live in a time in which any observation, sentiment, opinion, assessment, stance or philosophy – however vapid, commonplace, ignorant, malicious, oppressive or dangerous – is rendered somehow significant and valuable if uttered by someone who is deemed to be a celebrity. By the same token, any contribution made by an expert, someone with knowledge and experience, is dismissed out of hand if that expert has never appeared in a sitcom or soap, “competed” in some such farrago as I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! or had sex with somebody famous and then talked about it for money.

In a somewhat tenuous way, John Sergeant has been deemed a celebrity. His fame was sealed by a Moment that has become the stuff of telly-clip legend. This was the occasion when, as a political reporter, he was addressing the BBC news camera live on the prospects for Margaret Thatcher’s survival of a challenge against her by Michael Heseltine as party leader (and hence, at the time, prime minister) when the PM herself emerged from the building behind him and descended the steps with a gleam in her eye that betokened that she had something momentous to impart. Sergeant was obliged – you might think significantly – to execute a not particularly nifty sideways shuffle and utter some bromide along the lines of “here’s a microphone”, that he might play any further part in the scene. As a Great Telly Moment, it hardly bears much examination but it is thought – at least by BBC mandarins – to be up there with Michael Fish discounting the possibility of a hurricane.

You do fall to wondering who chose Sergeant for the dancing contest and why he was chosen. Was it perceived that his inability would indeed become a selling point, that he would prove an Eddie the Eagle of the Palais de Dance? Well, Sergeant now has his second claim to fame, his voluntary departure from the dancing fray so that he might avoid the absurdity of actually winning the thing. He could not resist, so the news clips revealed, a sly dig at the judges; former colleagues from the Westminster lobby have not been slow to account his demeanour in those days as less than collegiate and indeed inclined to the waspish. This is of no consequence to the celeb-loving viewers for whom Sergeant has become a Chaplinesque lightning rod, a little man against the world.

This is all very well but it is a further nail in the coffin of anything truly authoritative ever again being uttered on the broadcast media. If the BBC had wanted a programme wholly dependent on a popular vote, setting it in a world of accomplishment was bound to raise a brouhaha. Equally, there is little point in installing experts to give their opinions based upon long professional experience if the outcome does not require this input.

I appreciate that the matter of who governs us is determined by the lay vote but government and leadership are not solely about a particular skill and/or artistic presentation. Barack Obama appealed to a wide skein of responses, drawing support from many different constituencies and on the basis of many different expectations. Don’t rule out, however, the possibility that in the future prime ministers will be determined by a Saturday night knockout contest on television, featuring a panel of expert judges whose views may be discounted by the voting audience. I doubt somehow that John Sergeant will be invited to sit as a judge, though.

FILM of DUST

Movies are not as much fun as they used to be. When there was a studio system in Hollywood and movies were turned out as if in a factory, a lot of good stuff got made by default because studio heads were too busy to pay attention. The stars were on contract, typically for seven years, and so were the writers, directors and producers. They may have been obliged to work on projects that they didn’t care for or that reinforced an image or philosophy that they would have repudiated – all of which made for a pretty big downside. Among the pluses, though, was a degree of security in a fickle industry and all the advantages of a collegiate regime of predominantly talented (even brilliant) people working to excel and to make others do the same.

Nowadays, every movie, no matter how modestly conceived or relatively inexpensive to make, is like a life commitment for at least the writer, producer and director, sometimes for some of the actors too. The biggest effort goes not into the shoot itself or the writing or the editing or the casting or the often-protracted process of post-production. The biggest effort – involving the producers, stars, financiers, production companies, directors, marketing people, even writers (and, of course, all their managers, lawyers and consultants) goes into the initial deal. It usually takes longer to set up a production than to execute it, release it and promote it (though promotion too can be a marathon). No studio system hammocks anyone or takes care of below-the-line costs. Every production is like founding an uncharted industry from scratch.

No wonder so much is compromised. If it takes months, even years, to raise the budget and sign the participants and ‘develop’ the script, it is inevitable that so many first choices – technicians, actors, locations, weather conditions, release dates – fall out of the equation. Besides, cinema is an art, not a science. People work by their instincts rather than by things they can prove. They all have an opinion based on almost nothing. As William Goldman famously wrote in his memoir of ’70s Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade, NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING (his caps).

The nature of stars has changed. In the vintage years, there was a quality that seemed essential, particularly for male stars to possess. Think of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda, Jean Gabin, James Cagney, David Niven, Spencer Tracy, Jean-Louis Barrault, Fredric March, James Dean, Errol Flynn, Charles Boyer, William Holden, Robert Donat, Leslie Howard, Alastair Sim, William Powell, Vincent Price, Edward Everett Horton, Jacques Tati, Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard, Rudolph Valentino, Burt Lancaster, Orson Welles, Peter Sellers, Edmund Gwenn, Laurence Olivier, Joel McCrea, Melvyn Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Robert Montgomery, James Mason, Claude Rains, Marcello Mastroianni. Robert Mitchum, Franchot Tone, Laurel & Hardy, Anton Walbrook, Ralph Richardson, Bill Robinson, Roland Young, Rex Harrison, Walter Matthau, Charles Coburn, Walter Pidgeon, Peter Ustinov, Don Ameche, Ronald Colman, Yves Montand, Boris Karloff, Paul Henreid, Michael Hordern, Kenneth More, George Sanders, Dean Martin, Ray Milland, Douglas Fairbanks père et fils , SZ Sakall, Rock Hudson, Roger Livesey, Joseph Cotten, Marlon Brando, Nigel Bruce, even in his way John Wayne. All had it in spades: charm.

Women stars, even the greatest, needed it less. They were sexy, decorous, sweet, fearless or fearsome. But many charmed effortlessly: Katharine Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, Judy Garland, Jean Arthur, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Judy Holliday, Dolores Gray, Shelley Winters, Vivien Leigh, Elisabeth Bergner, Lillian Gish, Myrna Loy, Celia Johnson, Jessica Tandy, Irene Dunne, Louise Brooks, Ingrid Bergman, Edna May Oliver, Dorothy Lamour, Marjorie Main, Natalie Wood, Hattie McDaniel, Janet Leigh, Marie Dressler, Margaret Rutherford, Billie Burke, Irene Handl, Ida Lupino, Françoise Rosay, Anne Bancroft, Ruth Gordon, Margaret Sullavan, Giulietta Masina, Hermione Gingold, Joan Blondell, Phyllis Calvert, Joyce Grenfell, Kay Kendall, Ann Sothern, Helen Hayes, Ann Sheridan, Vera-Ellen, Beryl Reid, Ethel Barrymore, Joan Greenwood, Eleanor Powell, Esme Cannon, Rita Hayworth, Beatrice Lillie, Coral Browne, Mae West, Audrey Hepburn: note how many had comic gifts.

Among today’s stars, we all can list our charmers, being careful to leave out those whom we merely fancy. If your list is rigorously compiled – and, unintended omissions aside, the absences in mine are conspicuous, even a touch harsh – it will be clear how few living stars (those under 65, anyway) possess true charm. Men typically exude a different central quality but what is it? Maybe it is something like invincibility, a carapace patented by two undoubted charmers way past 65 who, in the long view, changed things: Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood.

The younger women have what was always demanded, plus a sense of exposed sexiness. Nobody advocates a kind of Hays Code, imposed in 1930 and operative for three-and-a-half decades, whereby restrictions governed what could be shown in a movie distributed in the States. Many of these strictures were notoriously silly, such as the stipulation that, where a man and a woman were seen (fully clothed, of course) on a bed, the man must keep a foot on the floor; and it was odd always to see married couples in separate beds. But the useful function served by the Hays Office was to oblige filmmakers to be inventive, artful, witty and blithely subversive in conveying sexuality.

Now that there are no restrictions, there is neither any mystery. Actresses – and increasingly actors too – are routinely expected to divest themselves of clothing and expose their parts to the public’s dispassionate, incurious gaze. This is hardly conducive to nuance ...

Remarkably many actresses allow themselves to be conned into believing that there is some mysterious “artistic” imperative that requires them to get their kit off in front of the camera. So they agree to do it, unmindful that the director is (by the by) relishing his power to demand to look at their tits. It doesn’t take very deep analysis of most movies to see that the necessity to bare the performers’ bodies is no necessity at all.

Some actors need little persuading to let it all hang out. Glenda Jackson did disrobe on a regular basis in her movies. The breasts of Helen Mirren were filmic fixtures through the 1970s. The hoax reporter Dennis Pennis asked Demi Moore (unkindly but not unjustly) if she would consider a role that required her to keep her clothes on. And you could expect the young Simon Callow to bare all on stage or screen as reliably as Katharine Hepburn would take to the water.

But for every gratuitous flash of nipple, testicle or pubic area, there is some telling shot that may have cost the performer something to do but yet enhances the movie. In Transamerica, Felicity Huffman plays a pre-op male-to-female transexual. To cast a woman is the movie’s best idea (the screenplay has no ideas remotely as good) because, having set up a roadside shot at night in which Huffman is seen peeing from a (prosthetic) penis, writer/director Duncan Tucker can then linger briefly on Huffman in the bath, post-op and ‘transformed’. A leading performance of sublime perception and exact judgment transcends the movie’s other shortcomings.

In an exquisitely turned episode of the Channel 4 drama serial Shameless, the 60-ish actor Paul Copley played a temporary suitor to Marjorie Yates’ Carol (the neighbour’s unreliable mother). That he would prove to be rather too sexually adventurous for her was signalled from the first morning of his stay, which he passed in the stance of a naturist. Copley’s willingness to appear in any situation naked fuelled the comic momentum that the story strand needed.
These are not instances of gratuitous nudity. You don’t shift gear from watching a character to ogling an actor. The actor stays in character and the performance is deepened by the moment. This is not what most screen (or stage) nudity is like. The trendy Nederlands Dans Theater once came to London with a ballet performed entirely naked. As one critic delicately remarked, the focus of one’s view alters dramatically when the dancers’ parts are visible. One certainly found oneself distracted from the niceties of the choreography.

An RSC revival of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus addressed the perennial problem of how you carry off the magical, silent appearance of a vision of Helen of Troy by having an actress stroll naked across the Stratford stage. It was striking of course but in no way magical. A production by the Oxford University Dramatic Society trumped it. Having secured OUDS graduate Richard Burton to play Faustus, director Frank Hauser persuaded his then wife Elizabeth Taylor to walk on as Helen. It was heart-stopping, even though my fellow theatre-goer Tony Coult and I had earlier had the potentially myth-destroying experience of following the Burtons up the front steps of the Randolph Hotel, upon which occasion the generous width of Mrs Burton’s seat was proclaimed by the electric yellow of her jeans ...

To read on, see my book, Common Sense: this segment comes from the chapter entitled 'Film of Dust'. You can download the book entirely free of charge, along with its index (itself a pleasant diversion), by clicking on the sidebar link above:

COMMON SENSE: THE BOOK