Where Have the Men Gone?

To the right we have a photograph from the old movie The Wild Bunch. The actors are, from left to right, Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, William Holden and Ernest Borgnine. The film, was, in the opinion of your faithful correspondent, one of the last films that portrayed men and was acted in by men.

We now have films about superheroes played by emotional boys. Consider Tom Cruise in the Mission Impossible films. His character survives incidents that would kill any mortal and he does things that a team could not do. Or Matt Damon in the Bourne films. Bourne seems to be able to outsmart a CIA that is more God-like than governmental i.e., lazy time servers. Cruise and Damon, among others of their acting generation, separate themselves from the great unwashed masses and restrict their appearances before the public to movie premieres and film festivals when not pushing silly religions or silly pseudo-scientific causes like man made global warming.

In the past the male actors such as those in the photo proved themselves willing to show themselves as men who believed in something other than pet projects. Borgnine spent two different enlistments in the Navy, one before and one during World War 2, and finished his enlistment as a Chief Gunner's Mate. Holden put his own money into the conversation of African wildlife and didn't stand on the local church steeple shouting "Save the antelope." Johnson lived the life of a decent man asking no recognition, but showing what decency was. Oates, well, was Oates. He lived a rough life but never involved himself in scandal. He was, probably more than we'd like to admit, like most of us.

And we can add others. Glenn Ford preferred to hang out with the workers of his local service station than the Hollywood crowd. Clark Gable knew cars and worked on cars (not hiring someone else to do it like say, Jay Leno) and would even set the timing of a newspaperman's car when the newspaperman had come to interview him. Eddie Albert planted and maintained a large vegetable garden on his Beverly Hills spread and didn't expect a hireling to farm it and he didn't boast about it like, say, Ed Begley Jr.

So what can we learn from this? Simply that there was a time when men who had the good fortune to make a good living as actors never lost their sense that, whatever their degree of talent, they were lucky or fortunate and that they were not special. They never considered themselves among the elite. And they never forgot that they were men more than they were actors. They knew that to be a man was to travel an often difficult road doing things that were not easy, but were right. Like the gang in the Wild Bunch at the end of the movie.