Maybe tough times are encouraging us to reach for timeless values, because nostalgia is all the rage in Paris at the moment. Especially, it seems, when it comes to male icons. By now you may have already heard the buzz that Dior has selected a 1966 picture of living legend Alain Delon to advertise Eau Sauvage.
The choice makes perfect sense: the fragrance was launched that same year, and Delon has a feline grace that goes perfectly with the brand. I also have a theory that men find it hard to look up to actors of their own age. They suspect that it somehow undermines their masculinity. But to admire the Delon of the 60s (or the Bogart of the 40s, or the McQueen of the 70s) shows an appreciation of the virtues of an earlier time. It's an expression of good taste, like enjoying single malt whisky or Sinatra in his Capitol period. We're also subtly acknowledging that we find today's men slightly weak-chinned and ineffectual: give us instead the heroes of the past. I was musing on all this when, from the metro today, I spied an image of Marcello Mastroianni, another model of masculine elegance. His photograph is being used by the department store Le Bon Marché to promote an exhibition called Diva Italia, about Italian movie stars. But who cares about the exhibition? What is really being sold here is style. Dark suit, narrow tie, world-weary expression: perfect.
By the way, the heroes of the past don't always fit in to the antiseptic present. If you look closely, you may notice a slight modification of the Delon photograph (shot by Jean-Marie Périer) in the Dior ad when compared to the original (left).
Working on the theory that Clive Owen can never really be bad in anything, I ignored the lukewarm reviews and went to see The International anyway. It turned out to be a sub-Bourne conspiracy thriller whose titular villainous organization is, in happy concurrence with the headlines, a bank. But the movie has a major saving grace: at its core is a truly spectacular shootout at the Guggenheim Museum.
I am something of a connoisseur of shootouts. The rest of the time I'm a peaceful type who has rarely been near a gun (although I did fire a .303 rifle during a short-lived stint as an Air Cadet at school). But cinematic shootouts are cartoons for adults. They are cathartic and pulse-quickening: visual caffeine.
The natural home of the shootout is, of course, the western. The entire point of most westerns is the climactic shootout: the title Gunfight At the OK Corral tells you all you need to know. The script of a western chips away at your morality until, when it's time for the big finish, you can't wait for the villains to end their days in a hail of lead. My favourite remains Rio Bravo (1959), with John Wayne as the sheriff and a magnificent Dean Martin as an alcoholic gunfighter. Barely able to hold his whisky glass for most of the movie, Dino sobers up at the end for some fun with guns.
War movies are another obvious source of material - but something about the uniforms and the predictability of it all leaves me numb. One notable exception is Where Eagles Dare (1968), in which Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton mount a daring raid on a Gothic mountain fortress. The presence of Clint and Burton (who had appeared in The Spy Who Came in From The Cold) give away this film's secret: it's not a war movie at all, but a blend of western and spy thriller.
Generally, straightforward thrillers rely more on chases than fusillades. What I'm looking for is not a sporadic exchange of gunfire, but a scene in which the hero survives the destruction of an entire building. Die Hard (1988), for example, gets it right: Bruce Willis smashing through a window on the end of a rope while firing an Uzi as a helicopter explodes overhead is altogether my cup of tea.
The 1990s was something of a vintage era for shootouts. In Luc Besson's Léon (1994), you get not only Jean Reno and a Lolita-esque Natalie Portman, but a crazed Gary Oldman and a band of killers who clearly answered a job ad requiring "cannon fodder". The final battle pits Reno against an entire SWAT team. Creative destruction ensues, with red laser sights crisscrossing in the gunsmoke like an off-kilter Mondrian.
And the very next year brought us Heat, with DeNiro, Pacino and a deafening downtown face-off between LA police and a gang of thieves for whom the expression "heavily armed" could have been coined.
Talking of Face-Off (1997), the arrival of director John Woo on the scene began a new trend of balletic gunfights. These were inevitably filmed in slow-motion and often featured pouring rain, flapping doves, the petals of shredded flowers and ideally a combination of all of three. The style culminated in The Matrix (1999), in which Keanu Reeves, responding to an inquiry from his dispatcher, requests: "Guns - lots of guns."
After the grand guignol of Woo and the frères Wachowski, the action genre has reverted to a more realist vein. I must say, this is more to my taste. After all, what made the shootout in Heat so exciting was that it was a moment of breathtaking violence at the centre of an otherwise measured movie. The International plays it the same way. In the midst of this chilly, rather talky film, the Guggenheim scene is brutally unexpected. The script, like Owen, barely makes it out of the building alive.
