Someone was talking to me the other day about nuclear fall-out shelters. I can't remember who it was offhand but the point being made was that sometime during the Cold War people started thinking about nuclear shelters because politicians and journalists and other people were talking about the possibility that Soviet Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.

I remember the Cold War and Suez and John F. Kennedy and that whole period very well. (Elsewhere on this Blog I've written a bit about the Suez Crisis.)

But anyway, I began to think that the whole idea of nuclear shelters probably owed quite a bit to the experience of the British during the war and during the Blitz. After all, it's not very likely that a shelter would protect people from a nuclear bomb. It sounds like an idea based on the triumph of hope over common sense to me...

What I think happened in the Cold War perhaps was that people had this idea of the British taking shelter from German bombs. During the Blitz, of course, people used to scramble to get down into the London Underground when the air raid sirens sounded. I don't suppose my grandchildren would even know what I meant if I used the words "air raid siren" now but during the war we all knew what it meant when that siren went off. Londoners would hurry down to the underground station platforms and sleep there if necessary to avoid nazi bombs. It might have been reassuring to be safe underground during a bombing raid but you wouldn't necessarily know of course if your friends and family were safe and you wouldn't know till the all clear sounded and you came up above ground again if your house was still standing.

I lived in Lancashire during the war and was a child. (I was born in 1929.) We didn't have underground stations there, naturally, so people improvised. Most people just went under their dining table when we heard the bombers fly over. Fat lot of good that would do, but you felt you had to take some sort of shelter. After the war began though our next door neighbours devised a bomb shelter.

They had labradors - big dogs - and had built a huge kennel in their back yard. It wasn't tall enough to stand in but it was long and wide. Once the man of the household - Mr Stuttard - realised we were likely to be bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), he reinforced the kennel's sides and roof and put sandbags all round it. He and his wife had no children so they had room to let my mother, my father and me shelter in the kennel with them and their dogs when bombers flew over. I remember crouching in that kennel during bombing when the nazis were dropping incendiary bombs and hoping to high heaven that the reinforced kennel roof would stop a bomb from killing us all. 

Looking back, a bomb dropped from a plane and exploding on the Stuttards' kennel would more than likely have killed the lot of us instantly. But it felt good to feel we had some kind of shelter, a place to run when we heard the bombers. My father removed part of the fence separating our garden from the yard next door so we could nip through in a hurry when we needed to. Still, I don't suppose the kennel-air-raid-shelter would have been terribly effective. Its main function was probably just to make us feel a bit safer - it was more a psychological help than anything else I imagine. And I suspect the same applies to the idea of the nuclear fallout shelter.

Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law - Boyish Film Stars Replaced the Rugged Stars of the 40s and 50s

I'm knocking on a bit - 82 in September - and I don't like much contemporary music or some work that passes for art now, but do I like to see new films. The other week I went to see The King's Speech and thought it was excellent. Helena Bonham-Carter always gives interesting performances and Colin Firth was very good.

But it did get me thinking - again - that today's male film stars are quite different from those I grew up seeing in the cinema. I was chatting to my daughters about this a while ago and they agreed. The thing I notice is that the male film stars today seem far more boyish than the stars of the 40s and 50s. I wondered if that's because I'm so much older now, but Idon't think so.

Think of the old film stars and then the new ones. Actors like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne.

Whether you liked their performances or not, or thought they were great actors or not, you'd have to agree that they were all men - fully grown, adult, mature men. None of them were boys or boyish when they were up there on the cinema screens. Even the less rugged stars like Fred Astaire, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde and Frank Sinatra were undeniably men.

And some of the male actors who came along a bit later on, like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton, were men rather than boys too.

I remember seeing The African Queen when it came out in 1952. I was newly married, living in Washington and was in my early 20s. Bogart's performance as Charlie Allnut seemed quite familiar to me because he was like many of the men I seemed to know, including the man I'd married - men who'd recently fought in a war and won and had somehow retained all their humanity despite being toughened up by danger and fighting.

The male stars we saw in the films in those days were pretty much all like that - whether they played dependable men or dangerous men or even suave, rather pampered men they were all men, not boys.

I suppose that reflected the world that had shaped them - specifically, the second world war.

And I guess that's why today's male stars are different. To me, they seem much more boyish. More hair oil than engine oil, if that makes sense. Think of Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ryan Phillippe, the two in Brokeback Mountain, Ewan McGregor, Leonardo diCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp. They're all boys compared to Bogart, Mitchum, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster!

Can you imagine a remake of Spartacus with Orlando Bloom or Jude Law rising and saying "I'm Spartacus"? I can't. They're too delicate, too pretty.

Brad Pitt was quite manly in Fight Club but I can't really think of any other young - or youngish - current male stars who could recreate the roles played by the classic film stars. Harvey Keitel is one of the few rugged male actors we've seen in recent years. (Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman were wonderful in their heyday but they've become aging pussycats sending themselves up, which is amusing I suppose, but to me they don't match the legendary stars.)

Now, all this may be partly because I'm so much older - perhaps that's why the newer stars look like boys to me. But I don't think so. I think there's just a fashion for rather soft-looking, sensitive-looking  male actors whereas in my day the fashion was for tougher male film stars.

The reason I think it's a real change and not just the way I see actors is that I don't see a huge difference in the female stars getting cast in films now. True, I did prefer the style and the beauty of the older stars - Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren. I did think they were very beautiful women. But there are plenty of beautiful actresses now too and they don't seem less womanly than the screen legends. They don't seem like 'girls.' Actresses like Sigourney Weaver, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Rene Zellweger, Penelope Cruz, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron and Helena Bonham-Carter don't seem less mature than their counterparts in earlier decades. (They do tend to go out in public, some of them, looking less than their film-star best which is a shame. As Joan Collins once said, the public don't need actresses to look like the girl next door - the girl next door fills that role already.)

Still, that's how this elderly film fan sees the young male film stars today. Much more boy than man, most of them.

I particularly noticed this in the film Titanic. Leonardo diCaprio was famously cast opposite Kate Winslet as the leading man and love interest. I don't much like Kate Winslet as an actress. She seems very smug and there's just something about her face and expressions that I don't usually find terribly watchable. But what struck me was that, when I looked at her with DiCaprio, she seemed like she could be his mum! Here was this rather robust, mumsy looking woman cast opposite this pretty young boy who seemed far too young for her. You could never have felt that if she'd she been playing opposite an actor like a young Humphrey Bogart or Kirk Douglas! For my money you only have to glance at the male stars of the 40s and 50s and their counterparts today to sort the men from the boys...