On Film: Doing Their Bit

Reading about the undercover wartime adventures of 1930s British leading man Leslie Howard, as they have been depicted in a new book by the Spanish writer José Rey-Xímena, I was enthralled to learn that a mere actor - O despised breed! - might have been responsible for keeping Francoist Spain out of the second world war. And the Mata Hari details lend the tale the kind of spice you just don't get from a War On Terror. One of Howard's prewar co-stars and ex-lovers, the marvelously named Spanish actress Conchita Montenegro, is claimed to have helped Howard (who was supposedly acting on Winston Churchill's behalf) contact Franco through her husband, the foreign relations adviser to the pro-Fascist Falangist party. Churchill's ambitions achieved, Howard was shot down, along with 14 other civilians and children, on the way home. His death was a public relations coup for Goebbels, and Luftwaffe pilots even photographed the floating wreckage for German newsreels.

Howard had given up a lucrative film career in Hollywood, where his most enduring achievement was his mentorship of Humphrey Bogart, his co-star in The Petrified Forest. Back in England, Howard threw himself into quasi-propaganda activities, first in Powell and Pressburger's 49th Parallel (whose aim was to get America into the fight) and then as director-star of The First of the Few. By the time he died, you could certainly say he'd done his bit.

This set me thinking about other actors who did their bit, but in particular about 50s Hollywood tough guy Sterling Hayden, whose wartime activities were spotlighted recently when the CIA released documents concerning the activities of its second world war forerunner, the OSS. Hayden's war just makes your hair stand on end. An accomplished sailor who ran away to sea aged 17, he'd sailed the world and captained his first ship by 21. Recruited by Hollywood literally from his yacht-slip, he was cast in Virginia (1941) opposite Madeleine Carroll, whom he married before joining the OSS. He'd made two films when war broke out, causing a six-year gap in his acting career. But Hayden managed to fill the intervening time: his war was like The Guns of Navarone cubed and squared. He ran guns to Tito's partisans; he parachuted into Croatia, then brutally run by Ante Pavelić's fascist Ustase, whose bloodcurdling death-camps nauseated even the SS. It was not the ideal place for a spy to be taken alive.

One after another, it seems to me, the really impressive heroes and heavies of postwar Hollywood had wartime experiences that indelibly burnished their screen presence. Lee Marvin survived the death of his whole platoon on Saipan. Charles Durning was first off his landing craft on D-Day, was wounded nine days later, and fit for duty by December, just in time for the Battle of the Bulge, where he was seriously wounded again. Actor Neville Brand (he killed Elvis in Love Me Tender) and tough-guy director Sam Fuller both won the highly prized Combat Infantryman Badge, the working-class, cannon-fodder medal for guys accustomed to bayoneting enemies in the chest then shooting them in the face, inch by inch across the battlefield, day after agonizing day.

It also astonished me to learn that four British actors who all became Hollywood stars in the 1930s all served together on the western front in the London Scottish Regiment in the first world war: Claude Rains (who was gassed and nearly blinded), Herbert Marshall (who lost a leg and still became a romantic lead!), Ronald Coleman (seriously wounded) and Basil Rathbone (not a scratch).

I don't think for a moment that immersion in a nasty, vicious war is the best way produce a new generation of convincing movie tough guys, but when I see Vin Diesel, with his bouncer moves, his cro-magnon, no-cred and his vacuous growly utterances, I do yearn a little for the bloodsoaked macho men of yesteryear. I wouldn't run from Robert De Niro in a dark alley, but Sterling Hayden? Whole different story.