Men in Black and White

Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Tyrone Power

As a young man, my father would occasionally skip school, a Catholic school run by fearsomely strict priests of the Salesian order, to go to the movies. They had double feature matinees back then, so he’d spend a good four hours enthralled by the actors of his time. He was fortunate that his youth and young adulthood came during the golden age of Hollywood, the forties and early fifties, which would produce some of the greatest actors, male and female, the movies have ever seen.  He collected a small, cloth-bound notebook filled with pieces of film; tokens from the guy who ran the movie projector. Little slides he took much care of, labeled and kept with his movie magazine collections. Our treasures now.

My father was said to resemble the actor Tyrone Power when he was young. I’ve seen the pictures and can tell this is so. I can imagine what an ego boost that must have been. As he introduced me to many of his favorite actors and films, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been for the men of his generation to grow up facing the larger than life screen personas of the male actors of his time. Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Ray Milland, Paul Newman, Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart, James Dean, Peter Lore, Monty Clift, Burt Lancaster, and more were the men on the screen that young men of his time tried to emulate. Talk about setting the bar high for male role models!



Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and Duel in the Sun

When these actors played good men, they were perfection. Who wouldn’t love to have a father like Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? Gary Cooper was the epitome of the moral, intelligent and brave man in most of his films, the kind who would face the Miller gang alone when all the townspeople he had protected turned their backs on him in High Noon. Clark Gable, my father’s favorite, was also the fearless, honorable gentleman, with just enough malice about him to make him even more attractive; insuperable as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.  

But when these actors played troubled men, they were even more amazing. Gregory Peck himself was wonderfully ruthless as Lewt McCaines in King Vidor’s great cowboy romance Duel in the Sun (the duel is not between two men). Fifty years before Nicolas Cage played an alcoholic writer in Leaving Las Vegas, Ray Milland had already brought such despair and drama to the part of the alcoholic writer living a hellish three days in in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, a role that won him an Oscar and the movie a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay award. Yet even the young rebels of those times, like James Dean, Marlon Brando or Paul Newman, with films like Rebel without a Cause, On the Waterfront, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, always had an undertone of goodness, a moral code of justice and equilibrium.

 

Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean

Back then, on the screen, life was after all a world of black and white, good and evil; a Manichean world, holding all the complexities of life at bay. It’s not hard to envision how everyone living with those complexities, the grey in between, were like a tidal wave pushing against the dam.  These actors themselves, when they were off screen, were just men, working their way through life, like my father. Their acting all the more marvelous because of how different many of them were to their screen personas.

 

Eventually the dike broke, the dam yielded; color, complexity and reality filled the screen, which is all good. Oddly, I still occasionally want to turn  to these marvelous films to find those men of black and white which I, too, ultimately grew to admire.