Posted on 08/07/2003 5:13:14 AM PDT by jjbrouwer
Every time Tony Blair shows up in Washington to exult in his role as top sprig in the Figleaf of the Willing and to enjoy confabs and photo-ops with Gee Dubya, I have to wonder once again what we, the Brits, actually get out of this long-treasured, murkily defined "special relationship" between former imperial oppressor and former colonial upstart. As Tony lurks at Furious George's right hand, calamitously clad in his usual vacationing geography teacher's nerd ensemble, one has to presume he's there simply to make George look good, or just to share the heat. What Blair gains, if anything, is impossible to quantify.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood and London, the movie version of the special relationship has long played itself out in like manner. Our cut-price actors come over and do their dirty work, as villains and baddies and psychopaths, even American ones, while the cream of their prohibitively expensive acting talent Concordes it over the pond to steal the lion's share of our heroic roles. Either way, we lose. Pirates of the Caribbean manages to embody this phenomenon from both sides at once. The ghostly pirates of the Black Pearl, commanded by Geoffrey Rush (an Aussie, but never mind, Americans think he's a Brit), all talk with the absurd Jolly Jack Tar accents that one associates with press gangs, poop decks and Plymouth Hoe. The snooty island governor and his worthless son are played by Jonathan Pryce and Jack Davenport, their Englishness a shorthand for all manner of class-based unseemliness and degeneracy. The hero, Jack Swallow, is also a Brit, but he's played by the American Johnny Depp, hidden behind an accent apparently purloined from a comatose Keef Richards. Depp was also the English policeman hero in From Hell, in which he found himself neck-deep in creepy posh Brits and at daggers drawn with Jack the Ripper, who, you'll not be surprised to learn, was not played by an American.
Likewise Tomb Raider 2, in which Angelina Jolie stars as English rose Lara Croft, with an accent that sounds like Princess Margaret throwing up, while Ciaran Hinds, the luckless Brit, gets to play a psychopathic bioterrorist. In both movies the true Brits take it in the neck while the fake Brits take it to the bank.
So what do they really think of us? What qualifies us to play their baddies? Firstly, there's that all- important umbilical connection between Britain and America, the cord they cut when it suddenly looked as though the 13 colonies might end up as part of a British empire in which slavery was illegal (abolition didn't happen until 1833, but it was certainly a galvanising factor in 1776). In the American folk memory, we are the original oppressors, the imperial bullies who had the nerve to ask a bunch of rich white men to pay their taxes. All those guns that present-day rednecks keep under the bed? They're for when General Cornwallis and his boys come calling at four in the morning. Paul Revere's famous cry, "The British are coming!", retained its folkloric potency long after we had kissed and made up, suggesting that Americans are still predisposed by national myth to regard us as an enemy. This was proved by The Patriot three years ago, in which Jason Isaacs played an English colonel as a variation on Adolf Eichmann, merrily burning women and children to death in a church (though no such atrocity - or any remotely like it - ever took place in the revolutionary war). The outlines of that original conflict - starchy, uptight roast-beef John Bulls in easy-to-aim-at red coats, versus plucky little camouflaged guerilla-fighter farmers - can easily be displaced into other scenarios, like the Roman empire, the second world war, and even the contemporary political scene.
This early relationship has since become barnacled with more contemporary American cliches about the British. We are effete and overly educated. We're snobs. We like to be tied up and whipped. We all went to boarding school, even our footie hooligans. We think we still run the world or, to borrow Macmillan's phrase, that "we must be Greece to their Rome", ameliorating the caveman excesses of an upstart superpower. And we think we're better than the Americans in some mysterious, indefinable way. How dare we!
Whether or not any of these accusations has an iota of truth to it doesn't really matter in Hollywood. They certainly provide an excellent basis for a race of baddies: imperial arrogance, natural viciousness, sexual perviness and gay-boy accents. From there it's a simple matter of "Call Peter Ustinov/Larry Olivier/ Malcolm McDowell! We need a Nero/Crassus/Caligula!"
Jesus is usually an American in biblical epics. Judas, meanwhile, is just as likely to be a Brit. In The Greatest Story Ever Told, Jesus was a Swede (Max von Sydow), but the formula held good for David McCallum's blond betrayer. And if they're not playing Judas, then the Brits will be all over the Roman imperial power structure, raining vicious blows down on the heads of Je sus and his 12 Americans. Heston's Judah Ben-Hur faced off against Ulsterman Stephen Boyd as the gimlet-eyed Marsalla. Kirk Douglas's live-free-or-die-tryin' Spartacus gave Lawrence Olivier what for as the fascistic Crassus, and there was just no reasoning with David Bowie's Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ. Even in Gladiator the formula was intact, despite the presence of an Australian hero and an American villain. Joaquin Phoenix may be as American as apple pie, but in order to pull off his villainous role he had to be fitted with a lisping English accent to underline his irremediable moral degeneracy.
On the sidelines were all the usual Roman-Limey weirdos, the foremost being David Hemmings with a Lucille Ball wig and eyebrows like water diviners. Must be a pervert.
From all this it's a short step to Hitler the Englishman. Was there not a single American actor prepared to play young Adolf in the recent NBC mini-series based on Ian Kershaw's biography? Of course not, so they called on Robert Carlyle, a grown-up who fancied a challenge. And for Max, a film about Hitler the art student? Noah Taylor got the job. Heydrich in HBO's Conspiracy, about the Wannsee conference? Kenneth Branagh. You were expecting Alec Baldwin?
And even when it comes to such quintessentially American bad guys as Richard Nixon, they call on us again. Anthony Hopkins will never be topped in the role, but was there really no American actor interested in such a challenging job? Likewise Michael Gambon as LBJ in John Frankenheimer's excellent The Path to War, or even Emma Thompson as an ersatz Hillary Clinton in Primary Colors. Kennedy is always played by an American, just like Jesus, but Lee Harvey Oswald? Call Gary Oldman.
It leaves one wondering who's left who looms large in the American demonology, and must therefore be played by an Englishman. Ho Chi Minh? Mao? Saddam? Osama? Imelda Marcos? Call Ben Kingsley!
The countervailing tendency is the number of Americans who show up here to star in quintessentially English roles. First there was Kevin Costner as Robin Hood, prince of surfers, and in the years since we've had Jolie as Croft, Zellweger as Bridget Jones, Gwyneth Paltrow as half the index of FR Leavis's The Great Tradition, Reese Witherspoon in The Importance of Being Earnest and Vanity Fair, and countless others. With one hand they accept from us; with the other they take from us: in movies, as in geopolitics, the only special relationship America has is with America.
Yes, I was. But that would have been typecasting.
They certainly provide an excellent basis for a race of baddies: imperial arrogance, natural viciousness, sexual perviness and gay-boy accents.
Connery is one of the exceptions to this guy's rule though. He almost always plays a good guy.
Hmmmm, now where would we get such wild ideas? Hmmmmm.....
From all this it's a short step to Hitler the Englishman. Was there not a single American actor prepared to play young Adolf in the recent NBC mini-series based on Ian Kershaw's biography? Of course not, so they called on Robert Carlyle, a grown-up who fancied a challenge. And for Max, a film about Hitler the art student? Noah Taylor got the job. Heydrich in HBO's Conspiracy, about the Wannsee conference? Kenneth Branagh. You were expecting Alec Baldwin?
Comparing Kenneth Branagh to Alec Baldwin is like comparing Olivier to Pauly Shore or Barney the Dinosaur. Surely talent had nothing to do with the decision. Jeez.
This guy needs to take his meds before venturing an opinion.
Who could ask for anything more?
As opposed to the Guardian news pages, in which Americans ALWAYS play the villains.
Have you also noticed how the Irish are usually the good guys in Hollywood movies...? From Brosnan in James Bond to all the brave little people on the bottom deck in Titanic?
Plus, you have all those Irish tv presenters like Bill O'Reilly, Conan O'Brien etc.
Can't Sinead O'Connor make a few movies to redress the balance?
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