Typical Men

"This book is indispensable. It establishes the range of male types that Spicer has identified as prevailing at various periods in British cinema. He uses terms like “the action hero” – people like Laurence Olivier and Stewart Granger; “the common man” – David Niven, Eric Portman; “the boy next door”, “the Byronic male”, and so on. He sets up his theoretical framework with reference to Foucault’s concept of gender as “cultural performance”. When I read that, I thought this is going to be a heavily theoretical book, but it is done so deftly that no one need feel daunted by it. What emerges are the ways in which the changing patterns of male stars reflect or comment on society. For example, the pre-war gentleman-adventurer types were displaced by the emergence of an everyman hero after the war, in what was, I suppose, meant to be the egalitarian postwar period. Right up to the more recent phenomenon of male insecurities, as in The Full Monty. I always like the remark that “these men had nothing to lose but their underpants”. This book has an overall sense of films happening in an ever-changing social context. It’s written with precision and elegance and it’s the result of the most immaculate research and argument. I strongly recommend it."