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In this more humanistic order of cinema a more human sort of actor has found his place. For two long generations, American moviegoers had been staring at actors attached to profiles that looked as if Phidias had chiseled them out of vanilla ice cream and at actresses shaped like animated advertisements for the California Fruit Growers Association. In those days, movies were "vehicles" for stars whose on-screen images were doctored by diffusing lenses and light screens and with makeup that was laid on by fellows who should have belonged to the plasterers' union. Now, says Director Reisz, audiences "no longer want to look up to something different. They want stars with whom they can identify."
Country Calves. These stars, with few exceptions, are Europeans: Michael Caine, Jeanne Moreau, Julie Christie, Maggie Smith, Richard Burton, Oskar Werner, Marcello Mastroianni, Omar Sharif, Anouk Aimee, David Hemmings, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Rita Tushingham, Melina Mercouri, Ingrid Thulin, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Susannah York, Samantha Eggar, Sarah Miles, Terence Stamp, David Warner, Alan Bates—and the Beatles. Hollywood's contribution to the constellation is insignificant: James Coburn, Walter Matthau, Lee Marvin are big boys at the box office now, but for some curious reason, Hollywood has yet to bring on a new and better class of girls.
Though none of these actors and actresses look as if they were made in the Max Factory, they manage to seem definitely male and distinctly female. Belmondo, for instance, has a wrinkly-crinkly, all-squeezed-together-in-the-middle sort of face that appears to have just been released from a duck press. Caine has a soft little mouth that seems to be slowly crawling away and a hollow in his chest that a girl could sip champagne from. And Oskar Werner —well, actually he's as straight as they come, but at first glance people some times wonder if he isn't Julie Andrews in drag.
The new European actresses, for the most part, are a flat negation of everything Hollywood thinks a girl should have. Rita Tushingham, though her eyes are a glowing glory, has a porridgy complexion and a walloping set of country calves. Julie Christie has a face straight out of Terry and the Pirates and the sort of figure that looks better to a camera than it does to a man. And Jeanne Moreau has the bitsy body and petulant face (except when she smiles) of a very small child sent to bed without her supper.
What the customers seem to like about all these performers is that they are all as different as chalk and cheese. They cannot be typed; they are individuals. They don't look like actors; they look like themselves. They look like vital, intelligent, stimulating men and women, and they act the way they look. They act, in fact, like the very thing most big Hollywood stars were not: thoroughly trained professionals.