Charming

Half way through a massage from my reflexologist, Kate, the other evening, I stopped her nimble fingers in their tracks just by mentioning that Clint Eastwood was 79 this weekend. Fifty-something Kate found this hard to digest. How could someone as young as Clint be so old? I said he is about the same age as my father. She said he is about the same age as the father of Greg Hicks, the favourite Shakespearean actor currently headlining in A Winter’s Tale and Julius Caesar at Stratford. For some, Clint will always be Dirty Harry, or the bloke with the chimp in Every Which Way But Loose. For me, he’ll always be the man with no name in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Then, I was at pains to explain to Kate that, althouth I abhor violence in films, I adore Clint’s spaghetti westerns. Yet, I cannot stand the modern, gangster-loving trash of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, and certainly not the latest two James Bond films starring Daniel Craig. And then it hit me. I knew why the Clint Eastwood brand was better than the Daniel Craig brand. I’d answered the question that had been hanging over me these last two years about why I didn’t like these new Bond films, when everyone else did. Clint’s movies have something important in common with most of the Bond movies before Craig. Charm. Whereas the two Craig films have been dark, graceless essays in violence and abuse, no better and no worse than anything else of their ilk, the staple Hollywood fare. Quite clearly, in any brand, that much pursued and hard-to-define charm is worth its weight in gold.

Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk