Monday, May 12, 2008
Where are the gorgeous, leading-man lugs with beefy chests who were the epitome of unforced cool?
Oct 24, 2000 | I'm in love with a bigamist.
"The Bigamist," that is, in which film-noir doughboy Edmond O'Brien plays Henry/Harrison Graham, who courts, impregnates and marries Phyllis Martin (Ida Lupino) while still married to Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine).
After seeing the film 10 times, I began to understand my fetish. I long, and even lust, for something that is nearly unattainable these days: the lug with a barrel chest.
Now by "lug" I don't mean a thick-necked dumbbell like Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) in Raymond Chandler's "Murder, My Sweet," or the mouth-breathing defensive tackle who can't count to nine, or the thick, sick atrocity exhibitions of Tom Leykus or Tom Arnold. I mean the leading-man, barrel-chested lug as objet d'amour.
The very thought fills me with the intoxicating eroticism of pie crust, beef and a sweaty Burt Lancaster in a white short-sleeved T-shirt. Examples of the lug? Robert Mitchum, William Holden (especially in "Picnic," where more attention was paid to his chest than to Kim Novak's), Dana Andrews, Cornel Wilde, Sterling Hayden, Aldo Ray and thick Brit Oliver Reed, who made all those nuns go batty in "The Devils."
And of course O'Brien, whose Frank Bigelow in the 1950 film "D.O.A." was blasted by his secretary: "You're just like any other man, only a little more so." He was more. More steak, more potatoes and less working out.
Unhealthy? Who cares? O'Brien, like all the other barrel chests, was a lusty, warm, passionate beast. They were men who'd let you sit on their laps and bury your face in their rumpled ties without making you feel like you had some pathetic daddy complex -- even if you did. They had meat on their bones, and you could practically knead it through their shirts. They were bigger, so you seemed smaller. They ate, so you ate. Gwyneth Paltrow? Mitchum would tell her to swallow a few doughnuts. These guys were tough and steely on the inside (though they had their moments -- think of Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity" getting misty over Barbara Stanwyck's anklet) and softer on the outside, literally.
These men existed -- I know. My dad was one of them. A cop who drove the squad car "Charly 5" with his similarly barrel-chested partner, my dad looked like a bigger version of James Dean and Captain Kirk (remember his chest?). Eleven years my mother's senior, he was the late 1950s, early 1960s Real Man. An ex-boxer, Woodstock eluded him. He enjoyed busting "hippie freaks," loved Elvis, Sinatra and Hemingway and knew how to dance. Following generation-gap difficulties (fighting over the Beatles and wheat germ, I'm assuming), my mother left him for a college professor and moved our hard-boiled butts to a high-minded liberal community. Major anger and confusion for me ensued and became the nascent fetish waiting to gestate.
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