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Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
He started off as the Leonardo DiCaprio of his day -- and became art film's leading Gentleman Pervert.
Aug 8, 2002 | One moment in the film life of Dirk Bogarde is particularly clear proof of his superiority over other leading men of the time: Bogarde and Ryan O'Neal, during one of the last scenes of "A Bridge Too Far," are both staring out at the scene of their lost battle. Bogarde's eyes clearly convey his great shame, his processing of a great human loss and vast failure. Through O'Neal's eyes, one can see his brain trying to look worried.
It's a damning lesson in the difference between good acting and bad acting; a good actor makes the entire audience psychic; the glimpse of a naked emotion can be hair-raising. Bad actors make you aware of their laborious acting process: They yank you from the moment and drag you into a slide show of their personal inhibitions. "Come on, Ryan, a-a-a-act," one is compelled to yell at the screen in a tortured thespian voice. (Not that O'Neal, the Matt Damon of the '70s, is my personal whipping-celebrity. He is, however, like many other leading pretty boys, exemplary of Hollywood's failure to fully grasp the idea that real acting requires subtle emotional gifts.)
After a stint as an officer in the British army's Air Photographic Intelligence during World War II, Bogarde, who was born Derek Van den Bogaerde in London in 1921 (his father, an editor at the Times of London, was Flemish), joined a theater group. He was noticed quickly and given small parts in several mystery films, then broke through as a celebrity in the worthless medical comedy "A Doctor in the House," wherein he played a nervous medical student. While comedy isn't Bogarde's strong suit -- he has no ironic distance from his work and is hence incapable of buffoonery -- the "Doctor" films, of which he did three, were nonetheless a demonstration of the way he could single-handedly dignify a film by bringing his own unflappable truth to it. By the 1950s, Bogarde had been singled out by British cinema bosses as a star. He became a matinee heartthrob; one critic has aptly described him as the "Leonardo DiCaprio of his day."
"I simply hated being a Film Star," Bogarde wrote in one of his autobiographies, "A Particular Friendship." "For about 10 years I was never able to be free ... I had my flies ripped so often that eventually, in public, I had to have a side zip ... can you imagine anything more humiliating than that? Anyway, apart from all that, I have an absolute horror of being 'looked at.' An eye phobia or something. So I'm in quite the wrong profession obviously."
Today, it is likely that anybody in the U.S. who is familiar with Bogarde thinks of him as the quintessential Gentleman's Pervert. This role is extinct now; intelligent perversion is totally missing from today's cinema. If there is perversion, there is no subtlety. Bogarde, in his key roles, represented an intellectual decadence that nobody making films today is smart or bold enough to touch. In today's corporate entertainment climate, there have been no book burnings, per se, but the self-censorship that most media venues impose on themselves in the pursuit of mainstream money nearly produces the same cultural effect that the Nazis would have if they had won the war and succeeded in getting rid of all the "decadent" art.
Whereas American actors have a penchant for scenery-chewing obviousness and two-dimensional fangs when they play a morally remiss character, Bogarde always brought a human face to corruption; he sympathized strongly with characters whose questionable actions were the result of their enslavement to power, sex or, most maddeningly, bureaucracy.
By the '60s, Bogarde had had enough of being screamed at by adoring girls, and he began exercising a strong discrimination about the roles he took -- at his point, Bogarde seems to have selected films on the basis that they actually said something. He flouted taboos by making "Victim" in 1961, in which he played a public figure being blackmailed for homosexuality.
(Bogarde himself was gay but denied it during most of his career; though he wrote of his early sexual relationships with women and his passionate love for Judy Garland, he never wrote about the love of his life, his manager and partner Anthony Forwood, whom he was with for more than 50 years.)
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