You Can Leave Your Shirt On

While I do not want to make too much of Brosnan's senza camicia predilections, I think it is fair to say that no one takes off his shirt with more regularity and alacrity than our suave Irish cousin. Indefatigably bare-chested throughout his burgeoning Bond oeuvre, Brosnan also puts on a daunting upper-body floor show in both The Tailor of Panama and Richard Attenborough's Grey Owl. Somewhat paunchier than usual in the latter film, a hideously dull paean to a middle-class Englishman who briefly passed himself off as an Ontario-based Apache back in the 1930s, Brosnan unwisely appears shirtless in a series of ludicrous tribal dance routines, creating the impression that he is engaged in a Depression-era tryout for an all-middle-aged Anglo-Canadian Village People tribute band.

Sure, it would be nice to believe that all this pectoral preening is merely an accident. It is not. In many cases, it is clear from the cinematic context that the actors' female costars are literally driven wild by the sight of all this grizzled flesh. From Anne Heche checking out Ford's primordial pecs in the early moments of Six Days, Seven Nights to Michelle Pfeiffer being riveted by the sight of Ford's chest in What Lies Beneath (Pfeiffer is also smitten by Jack Nicholson's carbon-datable torso in Wolf), it is clear that whatever these guys are selling, these women are buying. Forget about what lies beneath. It's what lies above that counts.

Consider what transpires in The Jackal, Michael Caton-Jones's underrated 1997 thriller. Halfway through the film, FBI honcho Sidney Poitier forces affable Irish terrorist Richard Gere to open his shirt to see if he is concealing a dangerous weapon. Gere complies. When Diane Venora, playing a KGB officer with a hideous facial deformity, wakes up, she is stunned by the sight of his chest. To her, his chest is a dangerous weapon. Immediately, she develops a crush on him, envisioning a relationship that can almost certainly not be consummated because of the divergent career paths they have chosen. Well, that and the scar. Significantly, The Jackal also features a shot of the remorseless terrorist Bruce Willis spray-painting his van without a shirt, perhaps Willis's way of reminding Gere: "Anything you can do, I can do better."

A bare-chested standoff also appears in The Tailor of Panama, in which Geoffrey Rush, totally without rhyme or reason, unveils his abs and pecs. Why? I can only theorize that Rush, himself no spring chicken, felt that Brosnan's serial shirtlessness was a bit of a dare, that he had no choice either qua man or qua actor but to respond to that taunt by taking off his shirt. (Though, since he also took off his shirt in both Shine and Quills, this theory is probably completely indefensible.)

Dueling chests also play a pivotal element in Six Days, Seven Nights, Ivan Reitman's 1998 Polynesian-based comedy. Harrison Ford takes off his coveralls in front of Anne Heche and her wan fiancé David Schwimmer as soon as he meets them. To my way of thinking, this is a cross-generational taunt: I got the abs, I get the girl. Later, when Heche visits Ford (who is getting a massage from a tropical heterosexual cutie), you can see her eyes dropping to his chest to check him out. Interestingly, Schwimmer is also briefly seen topless and actually looks pretty darned good. Which is why you have to give Ford a lot of credit; when he decides to get it on, he doesn't back down from the competition.

By this point, the reader may well be fuming: "What's your problem? Who cares if a bunch of middle-aged actors suddenly, simultaneously decide to show off their abs and pecs?" This is a classic case of the general public's undervaluing the work of the film critic. Like the Capitoline geese who honked when invading Gauls approached the sacred precincts of ancient Rome, it is the sworn mission of the film critic to warn the public about dangerous trends before they have a chance to overwhelm the Republic. So, I'll tell you what the big deal is. The ab-flab phenomenon is spreading. Not only is the pretty much in-shape, over-40 crowd doing it, but the over-50, over-60, and, sometimes, over-70 sets are taking off their Ts as well.

Consider Anthony Hopkins. Yes, a case can be made that in playing the most famous painter of the 20th century, a man frequently photographed in the bare-chested mode, it was perfectly appropriate for Hopkins to repeatedly take off his shirt in Surviving Picasso. Still, it was a sight I could have done without, especially since it would have been even more appropriate for Julianne Moore, cast as one of Picasso's disposable mistresses, to also appear topless. Which she most certainly did not.

A more infuriating example is Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys. In a pivotal scene in which the four geriatric astronauts report for their NASA physical, we see Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, Donald Sutherland and Eastwood naked from the rear. Not since the bare-assed Brian Dennehy pranced around the locker room in North Dallas Forty have I seen a more disturbing sight. Immediately thereafter, we see Jones, Garner and Sutherland from the front. Jones, the youngest and buffest of the crew, looks fine, as he does in a subsequent locker room scene with Marcia Gay Harden. Except for slight love handles, he still looks like the baddest motherfucker in the valley. Frankly, I would love to look that great when I am his age. On the other hand, Garner and Sutherland look terrible. Especially Garner. Here I take issue with director Eastwood. Call me old-fashioned, call me a curmudgeon, but I don't think forcing actors as post-studly as James Garner and Donald Sutherland to pose nude is appropriate. I'm not even sure it's legal. It's certainly not nice. Forcing a man as old as James Garner to pose in the altogether borders on senior abuse.

Curiously, Space Cowboys contains no shot in which Eastwood himself is fully seen without his shirt. Why? Because Eastwood had already made his definitive shirtless statement a few years earlier. Less gifted film critics than I generally believe that the senior shirtless phenomenon is a throwback to the days of Burt Lancaster, Anthony Quinn and Charlton Heston, all of whom continued to bare their chests on-screen long after it was considered appealing. A small minority of critics maintains that pre-geriatric chest-baring is homage to Sean Connery, who turned up shirtless and puffy in his 1983 Bond swan song, Never Say Never Again. Some cite Jack Nicholson's brief shirtless scene in Wolf as an invitation for other aging thespians to follow suit. If Joltin' Jack, already pushing 60, could still get away with this stuff, why not everybody else?

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