Articles/Interviews

AND A GAMBLER CALLED OLIVER REED

With the coming of moving pictures the 20th century produced an exciting new art form: cinema. And this weeks programme in the schools' series The Captured Years (it's called Putting It Across) looks at this art-form-industry from a variety of angles - so, too, does TVTimes, through the critical eyes of actor Oliver Reed, perhaps the biggest name rising in British films today. At 33, Reed has to his credit compelling performances in the films Women In Love, The Devils, and his latest release, The Hunting Party. He also has crisp, progressive ideas about film-making and where the industry's heading

ALTHOUGH - or maybe because - he says he has "the look of a Bedford truck and the promise of a V8 engine," Oliver Reed is just about the only British-raised international movie star of his generation. At 33, with more than a decade of 30 films behind him, he's about to move into a mansion with 56 bedrooms at Dorking, Surry - and that's more sleeping space than even Clark Gable commanded. He purrs about in a Rolls, disburses a prime-minister's salary to maintain his retainers, and rates all the top girls as girls co-stars - Glenda Jackson, Candice Bergen, and now, for his latest film Sitting Target, Jill St. John.

But Reed has other qualifications for inside information on his chosen trade.

His uncle is Sir Carol Reed, director of such classics as Odd Man Out and The Third Man. Indeed, his step-cousin is actress Tracy Reed. And this former film extra intends to turn producer next year. "I live and breathe films," he says. "I take in five a week when I'm not working. It's my medium, and I believe it should show all aspects of life. It should tell us how to make love, how to fight, how to die: a complete prospectus on living - with nothing barred."

His first memories of the movies are of Hollywood's heyday: "Then, it was a time of escape. For a small boy, it was a time of adventure and fantasy. I can remember loving a spectacular like Cecil B. de Mille's Unconquered, with Paulette Goddard, because it showed larger-than-life people up against tremendous odds in splendid landscapes. But my first hero was Disney's Dumbo. One of the thrills the cinema has lost is the opening-up of new vistas for kids, and I regret that."

"But the impression that chiefly remains from those early visits to the pictures was of absolute riches. You know, stars like Cary Grant and Joan Crawford always used to inhabit such sumptuous houses, furnished to kill. They never bothered about paying bills or raising mortgages. They didn't go shopping for groceries. It was a sort of opulent wonderland, and, of course, this was a time of rationing in Britain, of queues for sweets and silk stockings. The movies whisked you right away from all that. It was its magic."

"I'm too young to have seen the films of the Thirties when they came out, but I know they had the same ingredient. You see, films began to talk in 1927. Very soon there came the world depression, with millions unemployed, followed by the threat of war. But everyone had the few pence, or cents, to go to the cinema and escape the gloom outside. Some people think that was immoral, an evasion of reality - but I don't. Audiences fel, in their private lives, trapped in a situation they could do nothing about. Those great stars - Gable, Garbo, Bette Davis, Jean Harlow - were their safety valve. I think those who sneer at them can't have known what it's like to be without hope." He himself became very star-struck: "When I was 18 I was called up for National Service. And by my barrack-room bed I had pictures of Brigitte Bardot."

"She was, I suppose, five or six years older than me, but she had that quality of aspiration, of the unattainable, that every star should have. Oddly enough, I've met her since. But I didn't tell her she'd be my pin-up."

What, then, happen ed to the mesmerising star clusters of our youth? Some, of course, have survived - John Wayne, David Niven, Henry Fonda - but only a handful. So where did their successors go?

"The war made a six-year gap," says Reed, "and many of the youngsters who might have been snapped up and groomed by the big studios were blasting off Tommy-guns. And then, a few years after the war, TV began to take the public away from the cinemas. The studios cut production, and their contract lists. And we tend to forget that for every star that made it, there were a hundred hopefuls who tried but failed. Under the old system, there was a necessary wastage. In order to be a star, you have to be exposed to the public. And that's what Hollywood did in the Thirties. Bogart, Cagney, Spencer Tracy - they'd be making three or four movies a year. So did others, now forgotten. And they all had the backing of a costly publicity machine."

"But, in the final resort, it is the public that chooses a star. It's their response that dictates the size of the billing. And no amount of persuasion can force them to support someone without the magic. Yes, I know I've used that word before. But magic, still, is what this business is all about."

Oliver Reed is phenomenal in Britain in becoming a star when the movie industry had had a crises like the rest of us have had insurance stamps, when TV has been poaching its audiences at the rate of about 50 million a year since 1955, and when film successes (like Easy Rider, The Graduate or Bonnie and Clyde) have made fortunes without benefit of previously-known actors. And he knows the value of TV in his own career. It as an appearance as Richard III in a children's serial - The Golden Spur - that gave him a leg-up to small shop-window parts in the movies. And it was his smouldering impact of Ken Russell's TV portraits of Debussy and Rossetti that led to films like Women In Love and The Devils, both directed by Russell.

"My uncle, Sir Carol Reed, had no direct influence on my career," he says. "As he was in the family, I asked his advice when acting came into my head, and he suggested rep. or the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But I didn't want that formal training, so I made my own way as a film extra, getting thin in an income of less than �8 a week. I've never regretted it. If luck had anything to do with my success, it was that I came up with conventional, prettily heroic good looks were going out of fashion."

With a face that has reminded one critic of a neglected part of Stonehenge, with a deep scar as a souvenir of a bar brawl, Reed looks tough and talks smooth. That dangerous combination has brought him adoring worship from females, who had switched their allegiance to pop groups in the early Sixties.

"The old formulas were no longer good enough, and stars and directors were no longer indulged if they had a string of flops. In any case, the control of the major Hollywood studios changed. Now one is a branch of a mortician, another is owned by an oil company - and while these new bosses may not have known much about movies, they knew a lot about balance sheets. So budgets have become tighter, and that's a good thing. You know, only 4.8 per cent of the worlds film income comes from Britain. So we have to make films for world markets, or starve to death."

Reed himself gambles with his own talent, like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen, by sometimes taking a low fee for the sake of a percentage of later profits. He is what he calls a "banking star", which means his names alone can often get a project off the ground because he's a box-office asset.

"Judgement has become much important," says Reed. " star can ruin himself by taking a succession of parts in failures. But I still believe that the public wants personalities. Maybe they must be more versatile than 20 or 30 years ago, when a star played approximately himself all the time. There's always this pressure to repeat yourself. Since I wrestled nude in Women In Love, I've hardly been offered a script that didn't involve my stripping. But I won't do it again. I want to move around from a priest, as in The Devils, to a cowboy, as in The Hunting Party. For that's the crucial difference with a star today. He must keep up with the public mood, and hope to anticipate it. People are more intelligent, more discriminating, and they'll no longer pay good money for repeat performances."

Steel-eyed Reed has a 10-year-old son, Mark, who has seen him on the screen only as Bill Sikes in Oliver! All his other recent films have been strictly "adults only". But he has firm ideas about giving Mark the run of experiences provided by the cinema and TV. "Yes, I'd take him to see The Devils if I could, and explain the what-and-why of the theme. I'm utterly opposed to censoring things for the benefit of children, because they will be so shielded they will discover sex and violence as a shock to the system. But the parents should be present, to answer questions, to put events into context."

"It's the same with TV, which should be selected. And I'm sure there's no damage if a child learns the whole range of life, so long as things that might cause him alarm or distress can be discussed with him. It's letting a child watch TV on his own, just to get him from under your feet, that is a failure in the responsibility of parents."

And the cinema's future?

"No. It will not die. There will be fewer, smaller cinemas, with bars and perhaps live shows to accompany the big movie. But people will also be able to go to their local bookshops and hire cassettes and play them through their TV sets. There will be a lending library for movies, just as there is for LPs and books. It's not films that will die - just the way they are exhibited and distributed."

And will Oliver Reed, star, survive into the Eighties, on cassette?

"I find life, and the parts I play, get more interesting as I get older. I think I'll age well. I have the sort of face that matures rather than fades. So if there's a demand for glamorous grandfathers, I'll be there."