Onscreen Multitask

Do you remember The Man From Uncle TV show? Actually, that should read The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But it doesn't really matter because you don't remember the show, do you? Very few people do. And I doubt if Guy Ritchie, who has made a big-screen version of the old TV series, does. Because if he did, he would not have strayed so far from the show's distinctive characteristic.
But Ritchie's violation of the U.N.C.L.E. legend can wait. My immediate concern is this: why were the two heroes, Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn in the original, and Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum on TV, played by Superman and Lone Ranger in the movie?
Confused? You bet! I certainly am.
Well, the way it worked in the old days was that actors did not like playing the same character too often for fear that they would become typecast. Sean Connery gave up playing James Bond because he thought that once the Bond series ran out of steam in a few years' time (ha! little did he know...), he would be unable to get any work because he would always be associated with James Bond in people's minds. Even his immediate successor in the role, George Lazenby, who had been a male model with no real movie experience before he got the part, refused to act in a second Bond movie, claiming that he did not want to be stereotyped as James Bond.
To some extent, these fears were not unjustified. David Suchet is a Shakespearean actor with a vast range but, in the minds of most people, he will always be Hercule Poirot. Basil Rathbone made many movies. But he is only remembered as Sherlock Holmes. Adam West only played Batman on TV for a few seasons in the mid-Sixties but he is still the Batman of most baby-boomers' imaginations. One theory about the suicide of George Reeves, who played Superman on TV, is that he was upset that nobody would sign him for any other role after the Superman TV show ended.
The rule used to be: one actor-one character.
Some actors (like Connery) struggled to fight typecasting. Some embraced it: Clayton Moore who played the Lone Ranger on TV went on to open a chain of Lone Ranger restaurants and never appeared in public without his mask, even when he was a very old man.
Only a few actors beat the typecasting. Roger Moore started out playing Ivanhoe and Maverick. Then, he found global fame on TV as Simon Templar, the Saint (played most memorably by George Sanders in the movies). After a five-year break from The Saint, he turned up on the big screen as James Bond, the role he is best remembered for. (He still owns the rights to The Saint for TV and has tried unsuccessfully to create a new Saint TV show.) But Moore played his characters one by one and with long gaps. And even then, he faced criticism. Many reviews of Live and Let Die, his first Bond movie made the point that he was too smooth and Simon Templar-like to be a convincing Bond and lacked Connery's overwhelming masculinity.
But now it doesn't matter. Henry Cavill who plays Napoleon Solo (very woodenly) in The Man From U.N.C.L.E. movie was Superman in Man of Steel. And in a few months, he will be back on our screens in Superman vs Batman. As a mark of the confusion, the cinema where I wasted my time watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E. showed us a trailer of Superman vs Batman right before the main feature began. Armie Hammer, who plays Illya Kuryakin in Guy Ritchie's assault on the U.N.C.L.E legend, was on our screens a couple of years ago playing Lone Ranger.
And the confusion continues. I have lost count of the franchises Ben Affleck, the new Batman, has been in. He was Daredevil, a Marvel superhero. He was Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy movie. And he has even played George Reeves playing Superman! Not that he is the first Batman to juggle franchises. Val Kilmer played the Saint in a disastrous American attempt to revive the franchise on the big screen (he was terrible) and also played Batman (which he was good at).
So, does nobody care? Am I the only guy who gets confused? I'm beginning to think that this might be the case. These days, actors don't even bother to change their styles to suit the characters they are playing. For instance, Robert Downey Jr plays Tony Stark (alias Iron Man) in almost exactly the same way that he plays Sherlock Holmes in the Guy Ritchie movies. It may just be that, as an actor, Downey lacks the range of, say, Benedict Cumberbatch, who can play Alan Turing in The Imitation Game and Sherlock in the British TV show and make the characters seem entirely different.
Perhaps there are just too many franchises and two few actors. Is it really necessary for the new Captain Kirk (in the Star Trek movies) and the new Jack Ryan (in the Tom Clancy series) to be played by the same guy? Could they really not find somebody else?
And what of Tom Cruise whose Mission Impossible franchise keeps raking in the millions? Does he really also need to own the Jack Reacher franchise?
Beats me. But do yourself a favour. Don't see The Man From U.N.C.L.E. One day, I'll write about the real thing and how they destroyed it.