Hollywood Still Loves the Brits, Doesn’t It?

The British as bad guys? Amen to that. Let’s raise our hands and second that headline on David Gritten’s commentary (“Need a Villain? Any Brit Will Do,” July 12).

After all, when it comes to villains, the Russians, Germans, Asians, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners and Southerners shouldn’t get all the best roles just because they sound different.

People like the Eskimos who have stuck to their own hunting grounds and committed no discernible treachery do not deserve to play the nasty type, but throughout history my forebears, the British, have thrown a net over a wider world and made themselves eligible for all the roles that typecasting allows.

I’m no historian, but I do go to the movies, and the British have had their share of roles as lovers and heroes. I have seen one self-effacing Englishman after another get the girl after almost letting her slip away. From Cary Grant to Hugh Grant, Leslie Howard, Ronald Colman, Ray Milland, David Niven, James Mason, Rex Harrison and Laurence Olivier. As for today’s stars, have you seen what Ralph Fiennes is up to lately? In “The End of the Affair” and the current “Sunshine,” he’s still suffering along, but at least he’s taking the girl to bed, or she him. For Ralph, and his brother Joseph, the infatuated bard in “Shakespeare in Love,” that’s progress.

But back to villainy. Plenty of British actors have thrived as the bad guy. How can you make “Mutiny on the Bounty” without an Englishman as the obsessed disciplinarian Capt. Bligh? Charles Laughton personified the too-tough skipper in 1935, and for all of us who can’t remember that, there was Trevor Howard’s Bligh in 1962, and, in yet another update, “The Bounty” (1984), Anthony Hopkins took a crack at the role.

Hopkins’ Bligh was played opposite the Fletcher Christian of Mel Gibson. That would be the Mel Gibson who sinks a sharp blade into a very nasty Englishman in “The Patriot,” the Mel Gibson who put his broadsword in too, too many Englishmen in “Braveheart” (1995), playing the Scottish patriot William Wallace right up to the hilt. Wallace was trying to unite the highlanders against England’s King Edward I and it was the 13th century, so maybe he should be forgiven and apologies proffered for his execution. Perhaps Gibson himself deserves a little tolerance if he seems too inclined to make movies in which he is the good guy and the English the not very good at all. It could be that the reluctant mutineer of “The Bounty” started grinding the ax three years earlier. In 1981, Gibson, born in the U.S. but raised in Australia, made “Gallipoli.” That film is about Churchill’s ill-planned Dardanelles campaign in Turkey in World War I, and the losses suffered by the Australian and New Zealand troops in that disaster were horrendous.

Did I mention Anthony Hopkins? In that case, let’s call up a real terror, Hannibal Lecter. Hopkins’ portrayal of the serial killer in “The Silence of the Lambs” rocket-boosted the Welshman’s career, and the coming sequel is cause for us all to order a bottle of Chianti. Hopkins wasn’t the only Brit to portray Lecter. Brian Cox can also make a living playing monsters, and he inhabited Lecter chillingly in Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” (1986). Cox tackled Hermann Goering in TNT’s two-part “Nuremberg” that began Sunday night.

*

Gritten found fault with James Cameron’s “Titanic.” That movie upset me too. But not because the Irish were shown singing and dancing in steerage while incompetent, upper-class English officers were steering the liner to disaster. That obviously was close enough to the case. I was upset because the late Kenneth More wasn’t on deck. As the second officer, he was the hero of “A Night to Remember,” the 1958 British-made account of the disaster, and was the model for how we might all wish to behave.

An extension of that code of conduct would be to adopt an air of indifference to current portrayals on movie screens of one’s countrymen as bad guys or fools. Instead, we might heed Emma Thompson and Judi Dench, who were so gracious in their acceptances at the Academy Awards. When it comes to Brit-bashing, Hollywood doesn’t have the heart. Over the years, the studios have been kind to Britain and its stock of actors, and the actors all know it. Particularly the Americans who have lost so many jobs to the British. How many English actors did you count in “Gladiator”? The current trend--if there is one--will pass, and the job of heaping disdain on the English will be left once more to the experts: the French. The exchange of ridicule between the two nations has echoed reassuringly across the Channel for centuries and has become a nourishment that few Frenchmen and Englishmen would want to live long without.

Alan Dirkin is daily Calendar senior news editor. He is a U.S. citizen with a British passport that has not lost its value for being long out of date.

*

Counterpunch is a weekly feature designed to let readers respond to reviews or stories about entertainment and the arts. Please send proposals to: Counterpunch, Calendar, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles CA 90053. Or fax: (213) 237-7630. Or e-mail: Counterpunch@latimes.com. Important: Include full name, address and phone number. Please do not exceed 600 words. We appreciate all proposals and regret that we cannot respond to each.