The stars (1962)

image they have been successfully presenting over the years. It is not the person you find when you see them in private life. And in most cases, that is quite fortunate." Says Richard Widmark: "Movie audiences fasten on to one aspect of the actor; they hold on to a piece of the personality for dear life, and then they decide what they want -you to be. They think you're playing yourself. The truth is that the only person who can ever really play himself is a baby. ... In each succeeding movie, you're virtually starting all over. The actor is tested again each time. If you're successful, you've been there, they've seen you, and they're measuring you against the time before." Which brings us to the point of defining the modern movie star. The successful movie star continues to have certain magical abilities that are, to be sure, godlike. Through strength, agility and wit, he triumphs in situations where the ordinary mortal would fail or be defeated. But it is essential that through his manner — and mannerisms — he appear to be, at least up to the moment of his greatest trial, a recognizable human being. When he swings into his climactic action it must require no great effort for us to suspend disbelief as we watch him triumph over incredible odds. The identifying mannerisms — Bogart's lisping snarl, Cagney's rapid-fire diction, the sleepy roll of Brando's eye — all help us to identify with him in this moment, for all of us have such human attributes. It is obviously for this reason that the most durable stars have been people who are not perfectly beautiful in appearance. Pretty boys and girls disappear quickly from the screen. Mere beauty is the simplest thing for Hollywood to find, and the ingenues and juveniles have always been the most easily interchangeable parts in the production machinery. The problem, in the usual Hollywood career, is to use those fleeting years of grace to develop some rough edges that will catch in the minds of audiences, thereby allowing the actor to develop a mature career. "Your personality," says Widmark, "is what the movie medium draws out and uses." The implication is that there must be something there for the camera to draw upon. This means, of course, that it is irrelevant to apply the ordinary standards of acting to the movie performance. It is essential that the movie star appear to be, at least in the broad outlines of his performance, always the same. Personality always dominates the film and it is that which makes movies so soothing to jangled nerves — and, perhaps, prevents them from becoming high art. However hopeless things appear to be, we know this personality, and we know, too, that in crisis it will react in an all-too-familiar way, but a way unknown to those who, in the screenplay, are plaguing it. Suspense is generated as we wait for the inevitable, that predictable explosion of personality which will carry all before it; the difference between a good film and a bad one lies in the amount of ingenuity used to work out the details leading up to this explosion. There are, of course, dozens of other ways to make movies. It happens that this is the American way, the classic convention of a dramatic form that is peculiarly our own. To prefer other conventions is the privilege of the onlooker. But that is a matter of taste, hardly the occasion for a sermonette on the inadequacies of the convention as it has grown up here. What this means for the actor, very simply, ?s that he is engaged in a highly stylized form of art. This stylization imposes severe limitations on his work. His role is as predetermined, by the image he has created, more or less naturally out of the materials of his personality, as is the nature of man in Calvinist theology. He cannot escape this self which he has created on the screen. In the classic drama of Greece the course of the tragedy is predetermined by the interaction of the laws of the gods and the single, tragic flaw of the hero. On the American screen the course of the action is predetermined by the limitations of the personalities involved. There is no formal body of law (unless you count the rules of the M.P.P.A. moral code) which the personality transgresses at his peril, but the rules for his behavior are nevertheless rigidly defined by a kind of common law based on past performance. Penalties for violators occur not during the course of the action on screen but outside of it, in the court of public opinion. The form of punishment for major violations is brutally primitive; it is ostracism from the community. Thus does the audience participate in a dim and ill-defined way in the dramatic lives of its screen heroes and heroines. Movies are probably the only theatrical form in the cultural history of man in which the work itself (the individual film) is not an entity in itself but is only an incident in a larger drama — the total career of its stars. The form of the work is conditioned by works which have preceded it, and the current film will determine the nature of the one which will follow it. Thus, the life of the screen star is a tangle of reality and fantasy. The roles he accepts will affect the nature of his private life, his reputation as a private individual will affect the nature of the roles he is offered. Some movie stars, if they are swashbucklers on the screen, may swashbuckle their way through life without fear of punishment. Errol Flynn, for instance, was a well-known ladies' man (sometimes under-age 15