All the pretty boys

David Thomson ponders the hazards of being a midtwentysomething male actor in Hollywood these days. New it-boy Jake Gyllenhaal has to compete with Orlando Bloom, Jude Law, Hayden Christensen, James Franco, Joaquin Phoenix, and his Brokeback Mountain tent mate Heath Ledger in the same way that, say, Anne Sheridan, Joanne Dru, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, Jeanne Crain, and a half-dozen lesser lights of post-World War II Hollywood cinema fought to get noticed.

Following George Clooney's example is one way out, Thomson suggests. Or Viggo Mortenson's. Or, better, Tom Cruise:

In other words, these young men are under terrible pressure to make the right choices - which means, be in the right films. The recent history of Hollywood is littered with movies that introduced a whole team of very young talent. Remember Francis Coppola's The Outsiders, from 1983, with this cast list - C Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. It's not quite that everyone else has faded away, but 23 years ago I don't think Cruise would have been the automatic favourite to survive. That he did win out has something to do with his screen presence and his grin, but rather more with his instincts as a businessman and a career-maker.

There's something to the old studio system. Gary Cooper, Barbra Stanwyck, and Humphrey Bogart, to pick three random but telling examples, were not permitted to take "challenging" roles: they were cast in Gary Cooper and Barbra Stanwyck roles. This meant that, in Bogart's case, most of his 70+ movies were undistinguished, or worse. Which is no matter. Film, more than music or literature, requires only one or two great performances; and when you consider the aesthetic -- not to mention iconographic -- value of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and In a Lonely Place -- this is quite enough.

Now that we know what Gyllenhaal can do, why shouldn't he indenture himself to playing Jake Gyllenhaal roles: an embittered romantic who entertains himself by being a cocktease to both sexes? I can think of a few worse fates.