In Tough without a Gun, a biography of Bogart, Stefan Kanfer is concerned that they don’t make screen idols like 'Bogy' any more. He doesn’t attribute this to the fact that their characters’ romantic socialism has suffered a death blow but wonders rather whether ‘the feminisation of America’ is
is one reason we now have Tom Cruise in place of Bogart.
A columnist for Variety describes present-day actors as ‘fey’, ‘goofy’ and ‘boy-men’,
Harvey C. Mansfield, ‘a conservative professor of government at Harvard’, whose book Manliness claims that American society has adopted ‘a practice of equality between the sexes that has never been known before in all human history’, so putting ‘the entire social structure … up for grabs’, as Kanfer summarises. According to Mansfield, manliness ‘restores order at moments when routine is not enough, when the plan fails, when the whole idea of rational control by modern science develops leaks’. And that’s why we’ve got Johnny Depp prancing around wearing earrings.
If you want the more crumpled look then you have to go to Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, both of whom still make eh... movies.
Source the London Review of Books
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