More action and less steam, please
ON ONE of the darkest, dreariest, most depressing days last week, a group of us sat around clutching hot coffees trying desperately to list some good things about this season of endless damp. Cinema, we nodded in unison, a haven of refuge and comfort where some of the year’s best films are released these weeks to qualify for possible Oscar glory. There’s Steven Spielberg’s ‘The Post’, with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks playing ‘Washington Post’ legends Kay Graham and Ben Bradlee, followed by Gary Oldman as Churchill in ‘Darkest Hour’ – serious, solid stuff. Action always works a treat over Christmas, for kids and adults alike, and the arrival of ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’ is surely set to give Dingle’s Skellig Michael one of the biggest cinema advertisements of all time. “What about ‘Fifty Shades Freed’?” piped up the lady with the Triple Venti Soy No Foam Latte. “I can’t wait for the final instalment.”
Yep, just when we thought it was safe to re-enter the Red Room, along come Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson for a final flight of riotous rumpy-pumpy with the devil only knows what kind of accessories thrown into the mix.
And yet, for all the obvious success of novelist EL James’ ‘Grey’ trilogy, research does indicate that cinema audiences are becoming increasingly turned off by scenes of a steamy nature.
The 1997 Oscar-winner ‘Titanic’ was probably the last occasion when major stars of the calibre of Kate Winslet and Leo Di Caprio fogged up the windows of a Model T Ford, providing further proof that the modern cinemagoer no longer wants a 10-minute interlude of hankypanky as part of a night’s entertainment. With Hollywood studios now concentrating on making films more family friendly and jam-packed with computergenerated special effects, the era of tangled sheets and twanging bed springs seems finally at an end.
In fact, if it’s heat you’re after, better reach for your TV remote where a wicked world of illicit wonder awaits in the comfort, and privacy, of your own living room.
But regardless of your age, chances are you’ll well remember your first ‘bit of how’s your father’ cinema scene – and what a good or bad experience it might have been. For some, it all began with ‘Last Tango In Paris’, and Marlon Brando doing a ‘I can’t believe it’s not butter’ impersonation. Or perhaps it was a dimpled Tom Cruise wooing hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold Rebecca De Mornay in ‘Risky Business’.
And how many couples will still share a private smile when reminded of the 1990 classic ‘Ghost’, where Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore’s antics at the kiln sent membership of pottery classes through the roof.
For quality steam, though, you can’t beat the classics – specifically 1944’s ‘To Have And To Have Not’, where Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (below left) fairly melted the screen with a chemistry that overflowed into real life. She stands in the doorway, fixes him with a look hot enough to melt tungsten, and purrs: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together, and blow.” Despite the 25-year age gap, they married soon after the film. When Bogie died in 1957, Bacall placed one solitary item in his coffin – a silver whistle. And that, folks, is another example why they just don’t make ‘em like that anymore…