Older man... Peter O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker in Venus
I've just written a piece on directors doing good work at or past the age of 70. It started me thinking that this might be an opportune moment to address the treatment of older, or old, or elderly people in the movies. (And surely we have to find some better words to label them - elderly is so mealy-mouthed; old is so final; and mature begs the question.)
Now, I fear that readers over 70 may smile a little sadly at the concept - for, truth to tell, we have got out of the habit of making motion pictures in which old people are treated adequately. The film business has acted on its own research - that only young people go to the movies much nowadays - and so they have dropped older people from their stories. What this means, among many other things, is that our film stories are depriving themselves of people as they become most experienced, most sympathetic and most amusing. Indeed, since time began at the movies, there has been a tendency to suggest that "old-timers" are bitter, grumpy, cantankerous and narrow, instead of the most interesting people in the world to talk to.
So I have a list of decent, valuable portraits of the elderly in pictures. I don't mean it to be the ten best, so much as a list to start you making up your own.
1. The old man, the village chief, in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
He's seen it all. He's been an abused farmer all his life. But he's shrewd, tough and vengeful - not someone to mess with.
2. The old man, the pensioner, in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D, played by Carlo Battisti
Not a pleasant or ingratiating man, lonely and therefore alienated, but still capable of being reached.
3. Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude
The character was 79, but she was as seductive, alert and intelligent as anyone in pictures in the 70s - and rather more dangerous than most.
4. Jo Van Fleet as the old woman in Elia Kazan's Wild River
The character has to be carried off her property in Tennessee so that the government can build a dam. Van Fleet was actually only 41 at the time of the film, but she seemed twice that age.
5. John Gielgud in Alain Resnais' Providence
He 's dying, in great pain, but he keeps on writing his novel in which all the people from his family and his life are characters. Of course, Gielgud started doing old a long time ago, but this is his great performance.
6. Walter Brennan as Stumpy in Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo
The old man with a limp who looks after the jailhouse and is scared that he's going to let Wayne and the others down. Brennan was an outstanding character actor, and Stumpy is his triumph.
7. Margaret Wycherly as Ma in White Heat
She's a wicked witch, but she'll do anything to look after her disturbed child, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), and at one point she lets him cuddle in her lap. Astonishing emotional insight going way beyond the set conventions of a crime picture.
8. Walter Huston as the old-timer in his son's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
A bright-eyed fatalist who has spent his life trying to get a big break and find gold, but who laughs his head off as the wind blows it away. Old people have less and less reason for keeping things.
9. Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II
The worst gangster of them all, taking it easy, sitting in a shaded room watching football on television, but still plotting the fate of the world. And taking his scenes with Al Pacino like the man who had been Pacino's teacher and inspiration.
10. Katharine Hepburn in Long Day's Journey into Night. She was still in her 50s and playing older as Mary Tyrone. But what she got was the anguish that youth had escaped and she had let it go.
11. (a bonus). In a film to be released very soon, Peter O'Toole in Venus
O'Toole plays an old actor who is fading away, but who keeps himself interested by flirting with a 20-year-old. Hot tip: O'Toole gets the Oscar.
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