The stars (1962)

PART FIVE HEROES It is a regrettable fact of life in that we in America have produced few heroes. One searches in vain for a man who has attained true heroic stature since 1945. One reason for this seems fairly obvious: the complexity of our institutions tends to limit the role of the individual — he may contribute, but it is impossible for him to dominate. Robert W. White, the psychologist, has suggested that the inability of the individual "to make things happen" is one of the sources of neurosis in modern society. This being true, it is not surprising to find that no truly heroic new personalities have appeared on the screen in the postwar years, and that we have clung, through those years, to a handful of aging superstars who established their screen characters in the thirties. There are, of course, purely technical reasons for the longevity of these stars. With the decline of the studio system in Hollywood it became increasingly difficult to build a youthful personality by carefully placing him in roles which would reinforce a predetermined image. For the most part, the screen actor today free-lances from studio to studio, taking whatever roles are remunerative and within his range. In addition, the B picture, traditional training ground for young stars, has virtually disappeared, and there is no inexpensive way to determine which roles a young man may play best and which aspects of his character can be used as the basis for the creation of a strong screen personality. Then, too, the old idea that whatever acting a star does should take place within the boundaries of a strong, previously well-defined personality is now held in considerable contempt. Finally, it is almost impossible, in our cynical times, to undertake the kind of publicity build-up that would give an embryo star a suitably romantic and larger-than-life off-screen prsonality. Everyone today wants to know what he is "really" like, and so the would-be star submits to public psychoanalysis, even seems to enjoy the process. To adapt an old saw, "No man is a hero to his analyst." The five stars dealt with in the following sections created strong and appealing public personalities during the thirties. They had the opportunity to play, over and over again, roles similar to one another, thereby creating strong images of themselves — images which lingered in the minds of a large pool of fans who, despite television and other distractions, were willing to seek out these now aging creations in new films. They achieved, as a result, their greatest financial successes in the forties and fifties. Careful professionals who knew how to guard their images, they remained enigmatic, preferring to allow the audience to gather, from the hints they carefully supplied, its own ideas about who and what they were. In so doing they tapped the collective American unconscious and became repositories and symbols of our longing for heroism in its various forms and settings. The thirties may well pass into our history as the last age in which it still seemed possible for the individual to become, through his own efforts, a moral and physical hero. The fact that in the forties and fifties all of these stars — Cooper, Bogart, Gable, Tracy, Stewart — became the objects of almost cultish, surely nostalgic, hero worship indicates our knowledge that something is missing from our age. 183