A few days before the attempted shooting of Donald Trump, I arrived on the set of BBC2’s Newsnight determined to defend Joe Biden. But as I watched his stumbling press conference with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, live on set, I knew that it was time for Joe to go.
That was also when I started thinking about vintage films in which the lead character realises that it’s time to give it up. And who to hand over to.
The first that comes to mind is All About Eve (1950), that Hollywood fantasy of Broadway, in which the great Bette Davis portrays the almost 50-year-old star Margo Channing. These days turning 50 is hardly any big deal but, at the beginning of the 1950s, it was considered old… for a woman.
My favourite scene is what I call an example of “The Davis Gesture”. This time she sweeps into the theatre, dressed in a full-length fur coat, swirling it in such a way that it covers the face of the producer as she storms past. It is a magnificent gesture.
Later comes the “time’s up” scene. In a car on the way to a performance, she, an actor who never misses a performance, realises that she will miss her next one: the one she is on the way to. She sits slumped in her fur coat in the car, between two friends, and pretty much says that her reign is over. And that she’s ready to move on.
That unforgettable moment, when she says to her friends, in effect, that she knows she’s too old to play the part. She admits it.
And makes way for Eve – the younger person.
It is an incredible moment and you can imagine how Bette Davis, the actor, must have felt. She knew that she was ending her career as a leading lady. In fact, a few years later, she sent out an ad in which she asked for work. It was tongue-in-cheek. But actually, it wasn’t.
The next example in vintage movies of a lead character realising that it’s time to give up happens in the greatest western ever made: The Searchers (1956) directed by the titan that was John Ford. If you have just arrived from Mars and want to know what stream runs beneath that experiment called the United States of America, this is the movie to tell you.
I’m not a big fan of westerns, but if you need to see one, this is it. There is not enough room in this column to talk about the utter brilliance of this film, under the auteur eye of its director.
John Wayne’s Ethan Evans searches for Natalie Wood’s Debbie, kidnapped years earlier by the Comanches.
When he finally finds her, dressed in indigenous garb, fully part of The People, he grabs her and you think that he might kill her for betraying her white womanhood. Instead, he puts her down and tells her that it is time to go home.
It is time, too, for him to stop. Now. We know that he is leaving the field. For ever.
It is a great virtue, and a great gift as well, to know when to stop. Especially when you’re at the top.
It takes enormous courage, too. And “moxie”: guts.
Last week’s quiz: The actor who played in two assassination films and hated acting was John Derek, later the husband of Bo.
This week’s quiz: Jeffrey Hunter, sidekick of John Wayne in The Searchers, later played a part sometimes considered by actors to be bad luck, because you never really come back from it. What part did he play, and in what film?
