Guys Who Cry

Often when a man cries on-screen it's out of rage more than grief, or even just rage, as if the only way he'll reveal the sensitive side of himself is to back it up with a Mayday-type display of anger. Crime boss Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday sets the pace for lacing tears of grief with tears of rage when his cronies usher him into the place where his best friend has been murdered. "Me and Colin was really close ... I've known him since school," he laments over the gentle gurgle of a Jacuzzi (Colin was killed in a health club). Then, as his voice begins to break, his eyes rim with tears and his facial muscles uncontrollably dance that familiar cha-cha of sorrow. Fortunately, Hoskins quietly turns his radish-shaped head away. Nobody should see Bob Hoskins, an otherwise terrific actor, weep actual tears--it's like putting taffeta on a bulldog.

Both Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine cry more visible tears of grief and rage in the pre-Titanic ocean-liner disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure. When Stella Stevens, on vacation with her policeman husband Borgnine, dies in a fall, Borgnine whirls into a grief-stricken rage and blames tough preacher-man Hackman for leading them all astray. If ever a face were designed for the shedding of tears, it has to be Borgnine's, which expands outward from the rivet of his nose into four or five dimensions' worth of facial lines, bending the very light around him. "YOU! PREACHER!" he assails Hackman hoarsely. "My Linda! You killed her!" But Borgnine can't sustain the focus of his hatred and succumbs to the kind of heaving associated with salmonella, sobbing his jack-o'-lantern face off in front of not only Hackman, but Carol Lynley (in suede hot pants) and two children.

Hackman is not nearly as indiscreet. After Shelley Winters, seen earlier dog-paddling in an evening dress, saves him from drowning, then suffers a coronary and expires in his arms with the stingy, obstinate expression of someone refusing to let go of her last Kit Kat bar, Hackman centers his consciousness in his Adam's apple, pulls Shelley close, and with a hot, angry smile, weeps and rails to the Almighty: "Oh, God, not this woman! Not this woman." The moment is postscripted by a quantity of sea water dribbling out of his contorted mouth.

One big reason actors don't like to cry on-screen is what it does to your face. At full bore, you look like one of the villains in Dick Tracy or one of the victims in The X-Files, or God forbid, like Ernest Borgnine in The Poseidon Adventure. The strange thing about James Dean is that he looks good even when he's crying. Maybe that's what gave him the courage to take the great leap forward in cinematic male crying. To be fair, James Dean was probably responsible for every obnoxious, narcissistic, mea culpa guy who later allowed himself to be dragged off to sensitivity training, but he still deserves credit for taking crying out of the closet back in the '50s. As we've seen, actors cried in film before he unleashed his tears of teen rage in Rebel Without a Cause, but little Jimmy was one of the first to successfully convey it as a process, a way of getting through shit.

A half drunk, misunderstood outcast with a hawkeyed mother and a henpecked father pressing on him as he faces the music at the local police precinct, Dean smashes his fists into a desk until his ostensible reason for the tears spilling over his exquisite cheekbones is physical pain. He cries a second time during a big family quarrel when his father won't stand up to the psychological tyranny of Mom. Seething majestically in that signature watermelon-red jacket, Dean becomes a locomotive of rage and hurt, his pupils blazing as he implores Dad to back him up. A guy in tears has never looked so good.

Dean's reincarnation in the '90s, Brad Pitt, also looks terrific in tears and has an even greater willingness to shed them. He weeps more than any leading man working in movies today--and invariably comes across as deep while looking marvelous. His full-on, grief-stricken crying sequence at his brother's grave in Legends of the Fall has the gorgeous clarity of a Vermeer painting, and that's just one of five tear jags he goes on in that film. His neurasthenic beauty is one bloodless heartbeat from tears throughout Interview With the Vampire, but he cries actual tears twice, when he brings little Claudia to the place where he turned her into a vampire and when he tells the journalist played by Christian Slater about Claudia's demise. "So, a vampire can cry," says Slater, who could just as easily be talking about a movie star. "Once, maybe twice in an eternity," Pitt replies. In The Devil's Own, about which he must have cried some justifiable tears offscreen, Pitt sheds an inexcusable tear when, confronted by surrogate father NYPD cop Harrison Ford, he admits he's a terrorist and suggests that anybody with half a heart would be too, if they'd gone through his traumatic experience.

Scrutinized in the least forgiving light, most instances of men crying on-screen could probably be crammed together under the heading of self-pity. Sometimes, though, the tears are, like Pitt's in The Devil's Own, self-pity, plain and simple. That sad, heroic, defeated guy on the screen has rolled up a big fat spliff of woe and is inhaling deeply.

In 1941's Meet John Doe, Gary Cooper stands on the roof of a building, double-crossed and exposed in the ruse of claiming he'd commit suicide over the plight of the common man. Now contemplating suicide for real, Cooper slowly turns towards the crowd, his face darkened by the brim of his hat, his eyes filled with tears that sparkle like wet diamonds. At that moment his complete desperation makes him morally superior, no matter what he's done or how much self-pity he's put on it for icing. In other words, meet Frank Capra, who did for Kleenex what July does for Haagen Dazs. Meet John Doe is just one of the Capra films in which actors cried tears that were way ahead of their time. Jimmy Stewart did what is now sacred self-pity-laced weeping in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.

Eli Wallach's self-pity in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is far less endearing than anything in a Capra film, and much less likely to produce tears in the audience. After lying, cheating, double-crossing, robbing and killing for money, Wallach retreats to a monastery run by his priest brother, whom he hasn't seen for nine years. The sullen, aloof priest tells him that their father has been dead for years and that he's just returned from burying their mother. Greasy insouciance trickles out of Wallach as he slowly turns away from the camera.

"And you?" the priest asks. "Outside of evil, what else have you managed to do? It seems to me you once had a wife someplace--" At this Wallach pivots and sneers, "Not one! Lots of them!" His pudding-colored eyes are stormy with tears. Pinching off his runny nose with his dirty fingers, he bristles with anger--at himself for wallowing in what he knows is self-pity. But then he serves up a second helping of the same: "Where we came from, one became a priest or a bandit," he growls. "You chose your way, I chose mine." Now Wallach jerks a thumb at his chest. "Mine was harder!" You go, girl.

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