Bemoaning that there are no "real men" in movies any longer

There are no real men in movies any more

With manly actors like Robert Mitchum replaced by wet, chinless representations of masculinity, how am I supposed to cast my new noir film?

By Richard Jobson

May 14, 2007 5:00 PM

I'm looking to cast a movie with men, but can't help wondering: whatever happened to the new Robert Mitchum? Where is he? Has anyone seen a modern day version of James Coburn, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin or William Holden on the big screen in recent years? No, you haven't and you're not about to.

Forget it, they don't exist. They're extinct, beaten into submission by the wet, limp, chinless world of modern cinema. Mitchum, a hobo during the Great Depression, a circus boxer, beach bum and ex-con, walked on to the screen and brought with it a fresh injection of masculinity. He was shamelessly a man - cool, slippery, physical and sexual. He walked and talked like the world was his enemy and his next cigarette was his last act before he did something bad, something very bad. This was a real man who could start a fight in an empty room and suck the vapour from the bottom of a whisky glass. He could look an audience in the eye and melt them into submission - sex for women, power for men. This was a male icon who floated on to the screen with his bent nose, greased hair and blue-collar irreverence, raised an eyebrow, pulled a gun, slipped a knife and told you that trouble had just arrived in town. Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear capped a restless, itinerant career that was never short of controversy. He was a punk who spat in the face of Hollywood's establishment and paid the price, but at least he never faked it. He was a man.

In my new movie project, The New Town Killers, two private bankers hunt kids from Edinburgh housing estates at night for kicks. This is nihilistic noir dealing with something important to me - social invisibility, a world society has consciously turned its back on. The bankers are men, they like being men, they like the ingredients of power, the religion of money, their reputation and physical beauty. They're vain, confident, successful and, scariest of all, intelligent. I'm looking to cast two men in those roles: I want Coburn and Kris Kristofferson. I want Mitchum and Marvin. What I don't want is wimpy, feline British actors who have spent too much time reading the wrong books, working in the theatre, listening to Radio 4 and treating the Guardian as a daily life lesson. "Where are the men?" I ask my casting person and the phone goes quiet as she thinks it through. The names eventually come at me: dumb, mockney dimwits who haven't got a clue. No thanks. My men will not pout. This is a non-pouting movie.

I feel I am doomed. "This is a project that lies somewhere between Rope and American Psycho with a smattering of Funny Games," I tell an actor as we sit and drink mint fucking tea. "Those films were violent," he says. "Violence is bad." Of course violence is bad, that's the point. This is a dark double act and a desperate attempt to make something visceral and masculine in a culture that doesn't understand or want to understand what that means.

"The greatest enemy of man is man," said Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Profound, true and never more accurate than now. It depresses me that the death of the male man has come about in cinematic terms because of a proliferation of muscle movies in the 1980s and early 1990s. They were silly, brute, male films that were perfect reflections of the cheap narcissism of that period. Our response has been to study men on film through a derisory set of rules. British films essentially bypass action and look for drama through language. This is no place for a man: have you forgotten men don't talk? Men react and project, men are a complex layer of confusion and conflict, they're constantly at war, their soundtrack is a stormy feedback loop from morning to night. I lament the passing of my mythic man and look at my script and the various options left open to me and think maybe I'll change the setting and shoot it in the far east, maybe Hong Kong or Tokyo, where cinematic men have yet to be