In The American: A Magazine of Ideas, reviewer James Bowman says that Hollywood no longer makes films about heroes.

American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the past 30 years and who can be classified as one of three types: the whistle-blower hero, the victim hero, and the cartoon or superhero. The heroes of most of last year’s flopperoos belonged to one of the first two types, although, according to Scott, the only one that made any money, “The Kingdom,” starred “a team of superheroes” on the loose in Saudi Arabia. What kind of box office might have been done by a movie that offered up a real hero?…There’s no way of telling, because there haven’t been any real movie heroes for a generation.

To which I say, what a load of bull! How could a man who claims to have reviewed movies for twenty years say something so utterly out of touch with reality? For the sake of argument I will concede his starting point and exclude superheroes and whistleblower heroes and victim heroes, not that I see any good reason for it (actually, given the historical record on how whistleblowers are treated even after they have been fully vindicated, I think they fully deserve to be called heroes and to have films made celebrating their achievements).

But let’s look at what Bowman considers to be the sort of hero Hollywood no longer cares for: the man (and he only likes male heroes) who is motivated by civic duty rather than personal gain as exemplified by Sergeant York and Dan Evans in the original 3:10 to Yuma and Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Or he can be the man who forges a community as exemplified by Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.

Then, by some strange miracle, the Second World War changed everything. Suddenly heroes become isolated, conflicted, sometimes in opposition to the very people they are supposed to be protecting. Bowman refers to Marshall Will Kane in High Noon, and bizarrely to Tom Dunson in Red River. I say bizarrely because the whole point of Red River is to show a ruthless hardbitten cattle man coming to terms with his son’s independence; and even more pointedly, Bowman fails to mention a film made by the same director (Howard Hawks) and the same star (John Wayne) eleven years later called Rio Bravo, which was created as a rebuttal to the moral of High Noon.

Here are just some of the male, non-superhero, non-victim, non-whistleblower heroes in the post-war years who stand for honour, civic duty, and community values: there’s James J. Braddock from Cinderella Man (about as classic a masculine role model as you’ll ever see in cinema from any era), Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, the astronauts and the NASA engineers in Apollo 13, the eponymous Spartacus, Paul Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda, Hawkeye in Last of the Mohicans, Elliot Ness in The Untouchables, Mr Davis in Twelve Angry Men, Virgil Tibbs and (in his way) Chief Bill Gillespie from In the Heat of the Night, Terry Malloy from On the Waterfront, and of course, Shane. In fact, the career of current star Russell Crowe is full of heroic characters and one of his best films, Master and Commander, offers two heroic role models, Crowe’s Captain Jack Aubrey, a charismatic man of action, and Paul Bettany’s Stephen Maturin, a thoughtful surgeon and scientist.

If we take out Bowman’s arbitrary victim-hero and whistleblower exclusion principles, we get to keep Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption, Jeffrey Wigand from The Insider, Maximus Decimus Meridius from Gladiator, John Book in Witness, and many, many more.

So how on Earth could an experienced movie critic be unaware of the dozens (indeed hundreds) of classic male heroes in cinema? And we’re hardly talking about obscure movies here. That list includes major blockbusters, Academy Award winners, and regular critical touchstone movies. There is only one explanation, and that is James Bowman’s paleoconservative “the world used to be better” mental blinkers. Well, Mr Bowman, the world was not a better place before World War Two. Hollywood has not forgotten about heroic male role models. Anti-heroes are not new (in literature they include Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights and Jean Valjean from Les Miserables; in film they include the monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein and some of the earliest narrative movies ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang from 1906 and Robbery Under Arms from 1920). And you, sir, are full of it.

Tags: film, heroes, hollywood, james bowman, the american