“Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love…true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.”
Hub McCann, Secondhand Lions
When they were younger, and even today when they get together, my sons often quoted lines from movies back and forth. They had memorized entire dialogues from films they’d watched together. Sometimes they’d put on the accent of Sean Connery or Will Farrell imitating Harry Caray Often, too, they talked about their favorite scenes from films as varied as Gladiator and Shanghai Knights.
Hub McCann, Secondhand Lions
When they were younger, and even today when they get together, my sons often quoted lines from movies back and forth. They had memorized entire dialogues from films they’d watched together. Sometimes they’d put on the accent of Sean Connery or Will Farrell imitating Harry Caray Often, too, they talked about their favorite scenes from films as varied as Gladiator and Shanghai Knights.
In my classroom, the same scenario holds true. The male students will talk about the latest films or pull out their smart phones to show friends a favorite scene. They reference movies in their personal essays and frequently ask me my opinion on some flick they’ve seen over the weekend.
We are so media-drenched that we sometimes forget what makes a good film and why it in turn may be good for us. The movies we watch help shape us, perhaps more than we realize. They can inspire us to be better than we are, they can serve as models for courage and grit, they can show us the value of work, faith, and love.
Over my years of teaching and parenting, I have witnessed first-hand the struggles and tribulations of young men striving to find their place in the world. Young men between the ages of sixteen and thirty can make babies, go to war, and even earn large incomes, but many of them remain arrested adolescents. They lack a code to live by, a model for manhood in their quest. Some come from broken homes, and some from a broken culture.
My forthcoming book, Movies Make The Man: The Hollywood Guide to Life, Love, and Faith for Young Men, is aimed at these young men.
This book takes dozens of popular films and looks at the lessons taught in them, lessons for young men. How to persevere in the face of adversity. How to take a stand for justice. How to treat a woman. How to be a father. How to be a leader.
Movies Make The Man should be available to readers by May. I have included an excerpt of it below and will post several more over the coming weeks.
Here is a chapter from the part of the book titled "Men and Women."
Treat Her Like A Lady
Sigmund Freud’s famous question—“What do women want?”—crosses the lips of most men at one time or another. Goaded by desire, love, frustration, or failure, we open our investigation, searching for clues to the conundrums of womanhood, some fingerprint, some bit of DNA, that will unveil the mysteries of the female heart and mind. Often, however, our sleuthing leads only to greater confusion. Like Churchill’s Russia, the female of the species remains for us “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
One difficulty with Freud’s question, of course, lies with the question itself. Its imprecision guarantees confusion; its breadth makes reckoning the origins of the universe a simple task by comparison. Women are individuals, and men attempting to reduce their nature to a universal formula run into trouble.
If we refine the question, however, we find the possibility of an answer. Lately, for instance, I have fashioned this related question: What do most women want in men in the initial stages of a relationship? Is it possible to isolate one element that first attracts women to men? How, for instance, would a single man like myself—I’m a widower, sixty some years old, stocky in build, with one child still in college and a minimum of savings—win the affections of a female?
Having squandered a good amount of time pondering this question, having dated several different women with varying success, and having read female comments on various online dating services, I believe I possess the answer:
Women want a gentleman.
It’s true that in polls and on internet dating services women say they are looking for other qualities in a man. Many women claim to desire in men what society once deemed feminine merits: sensitivity, the ability to listen, empathy. Others cite power and money, and surprisingly, humor, as desirable traits in men. Fewer seem to require handsome men, though most women doubtless prefer a partner who can chew pizza with his mouth closed and who weighs less than a grand piano.
From what I have observed and experienced, however, what a woman wants most from a first date is a gentleman. She wants a man with manners and a sense of civility, a man who respects her, who puts her on a bit of a pedestal—not too grand a pedestal, but a pedestal nonetheless. (To use an example from Gone With The Wind, women want Ashley Wilkes for his manners and ideals, but enjoy a little of “Bad Boy” Rhett Butler thrown into the equation as well.) A woman wants a man who can write a love letter or sit comfortably through the opening night of Sex and the City, but who can also change a flat tire, work the yard, and defend her against assailants.
She wants, in short, a man who is both gentle and manly.
We should not be surprised that women prefer gentlemen. It was, after all, a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a fiery feminist for her day, who long ago helped devise the idea of a gentleman-knight and the values of courtly love. Singing ballads and composing poems about knights, damsels in distress, and rescued maidens, troubadours planted Eleanor’s vision of noble warriors and virtuous ladies all over Europe during the High Middles Ages. This music and literature grew in influence, and seizing hold of the medieval imagination, caused an upheaval in the way men treated women. Women became more than just property, bearers of heirs, managers of households; they were, in the eyes of men, fellow creatures worthy of noble deeds, passion, and love. This code of chivalry and manners in regard to women endured some thirty-five generations, becoming ever more refined in response to changing times. Even the pioneers of our own raw frontier practiced this code, as may be seen in the chronicles of our Wild West, where a woman who played the lady could cross the continent unharmed and esteemed among rough, violent men.
In the second half of the twentieth century, this code of etiquette came under attack. Radical assaults on the foundations of Western Civilization shook the pillars of sexual civility and decorum. In the consequent wreckage, men found themselves lost without maps, survivors of an earthquake who could no longer recognize a landscape once their own. In certain circles, to call a woman a lady was forbidden, to open a door for a woman was to risk verbal abuse, to offer a seat on a public conveyance to a woman was to invite the label of misogynist. Stare at a woman at work, or offer some offhand comment about her appearance, and you could find yourself standing in an unemployment line. Many college campuses set up sexual conduct codes, reducing the calculus of love and romance to a sort of joyless elementary school arithmetic.
The first decade of the new millennium has seen the emergence of a wistful longing for the old code of manners. Many commentators honored the manly courage of the firefighters, police, and soldiers who died in the 9/11 attacks. Some areas of the country have seen a renewed interest in etiquette classes for adolescents, and the media reports that even native New Yorkers have softened their rough edges in the last few years. A good number of young women still dream, surreptitiously and discretely, of the knight on the white horse, only now they want him modernized. They want men who will treat them like ladies, but without condescension. They desire decorum and courtesy, but with full recognition of their talents and their rights to equality in education and employment.
Unfortunately, the passage of courteous conduct from one generation to the next requires teachers or exemplars, and the assaults of the last fifty years have thinned the ranks of both ladies and gentlemen. With mentors in short supply, chivalry and its mistress, romance, sometimes seem moribund. We sneer at the Victorians for burying sex beneath crinoline and bowdlerized language, yet what would they make of us, with our crass appetites, our lack of refinement, our taste for violence and crude perversions? Sexual innuendo permeates our advertising. Pornography, formerly confined to adult bookstores in large cities, is now as available online as the weather or the daily news. Among some teenagers “hooking up” has taken the place of dating, grind-dancing the place of their parents’ disco. Some parents dress their adolescent girls like whores, then profess shock when some men see them that way. Though many people yearn for a set of rules in the game of love and courtship—a recent book on this subject popular among women was titled The Rules—these aspirants to romance lack the living guides who by lesson and example once taught the arts of civility to young women and men.
Despite this deficit of mentors, there is one resource, often overlooked, which does teach men how to behave like gentleman and why this appeals to the ladies. Although much maligned for its contributions to violence and vacuous sex in our society, this low-priced teaching tool nevertheless affords the world’s best classroom for the aspiring gentleman.
I am speaking, of course, of Hollywood.
Factory of dreams, fabricator of customs and style, Hollywood has frequently served up portraits of gentlemen and why they attract women. Every man who takes an inventory of his favorite films will surely find one or two in which a knight-errant, modern or medieval, is at the heart of the story. The reviews in this chapter of Movies Make The Man provide only a brief introduction to the Hollywood school of manners, class, and conduct.
First up on our short list is Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Here we see the powerful impact of love on the heart and behavior of a man. When we meet Rick, the former idealist has become a hardened cynic who mistreats women and who blithely declares: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Yet when Ilsa, the love of his life, arrives at Rick’s cafe, Rick’s cynicism gradually gives way to his former idealism. He helps a young Hungarian couple find the money to buy their way to America. He allows the club band to play the “Marseilles,” fully aware that the German soldiers drinking and singing in his club may punish him. Finally, he lies to Ilsa’s husband Victor Laszlo about his affection for Ilsa, knowing that with his lie he will lose the woman he loves most in the world. Each of these actions reveals the emerging gentleman within Rick Blaine, the “gentle man” who puts the weak and defenseless ahead of his own desires.
Unlike Rick Blaine, Braveheart’s William Wallace (Mel Gibson) never gives way to cynicism in the face of hardship, but remains instead an idealist who always acts as a gentleman toward the ladies. Wallace meets his future wife when both are still children. At the funeral for Wallace’s father and brother, who have died defending Scotland from the English, a little girl, Murron, gives the orphaned Wallace a stalk of heather. His uncle then takes Wallace away from his home and educates him. He travels to distant places like Rome, learns to speak and read Latin and French, practices the social graces, and becomes acquainted with the arts of war.
But he never forgets his father’s farm or Murron. He returns to Scotland to restore the house in which he grew up and to seek out Murron. In one of Hollywood’s most romantic scenes, Wallace returns to Murron the heather he has preserved all these years. He courts her, and they are soon married.
Much later, after the murder of his wife, Wallace makes love to the future queen of England. Though this event is fiction, the glaring contrast between Wallace and the weak-chinned, cowardly Edward II reflects the difference between a gentleman and a medieval version of today’s metrosexual. The princess desires Wallace not only because he is a fierce warrior with a natural sense of his own masculinity, but also because he treats her like a lady rather than an object.
Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco is an underrated film offering a much more subtle portrait of a modern gentleman. Though nearly all of the characters, male and female, are shallow and immature, more interested in themselves and their own welfare than in others, two characters do pay homage to a chivalric code greater than themselves. Alice (Chloe Sevigny), a young editorial assistant, undergoes a moral transformation largely through suffering the betrayals and lies of her friends. Alice eventually falls in love with an attorney, Josh Neff (Matt Keeslar). Having suffered an emotional breakdown in college, followed by a religious conversion, Josh acts responsibly toward his position in the district attorney’s office (he resigns his coveted post, citing a conflict of interest), toward his friends (he warns them of the coming drug bust at the disco), and toward Alice (whom he clearly loves). Only Josh and Alice show consideration for anyone other than themselves, which is, of course, one of the quintessential marks of etiquette.
Perhaps Hollywood’s best study of a gentleman is found in James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold, a romantic comedy which most women adore, but which few men of my acquaintance have seen. Here Meg Ryan plays Kate, a modern woman looking for corporate success whose personal relationships are failures. Her opposite is Hugh Jackman’s Leopold, an English aristocrat from the year 1876, who has inadvertently traveled through time to present-day Manhattan.
When Kate’s brother Charlie (Breckin Meyer), an unemployed actor and comedian, befriends and then invites Leopold to supper at Kate’s apartment, we receive our first of several lessons contrasting the manners of the nineteenth century with those of modern America. Leopold arrives for supper formally dressed and sits erect while eating; Kate wears scruffy sweats and slouches over her food like a bored teenager. Leopold stands whenever Kate goes to the kitchen— “I am accustomed to rise whenever a lady leaves the table”—a gesture which startles Kate and amuses Charlie. The supper served up by Kate—an overcooked piece of unidentifiable meat, tater tots, and a mediocre salad—Leopold finds inedible, declaring his own society believes that “without the culinary arts, the crudeness of reality would be unbearable.”
Though we see Leopold make an impression on Kate in several subsequent scenes—Leopold, for example, gallantly recovers Kate’s briefcase from a mugger—his gentlemanly conduct and its effect on women may best be seen on the night Kate goes to supper with her boss, J.J. (Bradley Whitford). At the same time, Charlie takes Leopold to a club to meet Patrice (Charlotte Ayanna), a young woman to whom Charlie is attracted. After Leopold becomes the center of attention when he mentions having explored the basement of the Louvre—Patrice was an art major at Vassar—Charlie takes him to task for dominating Patrice’s affections:
Charlie: Patrice—she thought you were cute. Probably gay and cute. And cute, Leo, is the kiss of death.
Leopold: Perhaps. But I believe this is her number (He hands Charlie a napkin with the telephone number written on it). As I see it, Patrice has not an inkling of your affections. And it’s no wonder. You, Charles, are a Merry Andrew.
Charlie: A what?
Leopold: Everything plays a farce for you. Women respond to sincerity. This requires pulling one’s tongue from one’s cheek. No one wants to be romanced by a buffoon (nods at the napkin). Now that number rings her.
Charlie: Yeah?
Leopold: So ring her tomorrow.
Charlie: I can’t. She gave the number to you.
Leopold: Only because I told her of your affections.
Charlie (stopping suddenly): Wh—what did you say?
Leopold: Merely that you admired her but that you were hesitant to make an overture since you’d been told she was courting another.
Charlie: Shit—that’s good. What did she say?
Leopold: She handed me the napkin.
In the next scene, director Mangold offers us another glaring contrast, this time between Leopold and J.J., a man of pretension and false sophistication. On the way home from their evening with Patrice, Charlie and Leopold swing by the restaurant where J.J. and Kate are dining. When J.J. claims to speak French, to own an old English manor house, and to love opera, Leopold exposes him as a poseur, and then tells J.J., who is clearly pursuing Kate, that “some feel that to court a woman in one’s employ is nothing more than a serpentine effort to transform a lady into a whore.”
Other scenes confirm Leopold’s status as a quintessential gentleman. He writes what Kate’s secretary calls the “best apology letter in the history of mankind.” He scripts the telephone call Charlie makes to Patrice, helping Charlie to secure his long-standing desire to date her. He behaves impeccably in treating Kate like a lady.
We can’t all be Hugh Jackman, who is, quite literally, “tall, dark, and handsome.” Nor can we revert to the formal language and manners of the nineteenth century. With some help from Hollywood, however, we can learn something about being gentlemen. In the practice of etiquette, most of us need a few repairs rather than a major renovation, and the cinema gives us hints on making these changes. What is required from us is thought and interest. After all, learning how to attract the women we wish to pursue is really not that difficult.
In the words of Leopold to Charlie, “Think of pleasing her, not vexing her.”
We are so media-drenched that we sometimes forget what makes a good film and why it in turn may be good for us. The movies we watch help shape us, perhaps more than we realize. They can inspire us to be better than we are, they can serve as models for courage and grit, they can show us the value of work, faith, and love.
Over my years of teaching and parenting, I have witnessed first-hand the struggles and tribulations of young men striving to find their place in the world. Young men between the ages of sixteen and thirty can make babies, go to war, and even earn large incomes, but many of them remain arrested adolescents. They lack a code to live by, a model for manhood in their quest. Some come from broken homes, and some from a broken culture.
My forthcoming book, Movies Make The Man: The Hollywood Guide to Life, Love, and Faith for Young Men, is aimed at these young men.
This book takes dozens of popular films and looks at the lessons taught in them, lessons for young men. How to persevere in the face of adversity. How to take a stand for justice. How to treat a woman. How to be a father. How to be a leader.
Movies Make The Man should be available to readers by May. I have included an excerpt of it below and will post several more over the coming weeks.
Here is a chapter from the part of the book titled "Men and Women."
Treat Her Like A Lady
Sigmund Freud’s famous question—“What do women want?”—crosses the lips of most men at one time or another. Goaded by desire, love, frustration, or failure, we open our investigation, searching for clues to the conundrums of womanhood, some fingerprint, some bit of DNA, that will unveil the mysteries of the female heart and mind. Often, however, our sleuthing leads only to greater confusion. Like Churchill’s Russia, the female of the species remains for us “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
One difficulty with Freud’s question, of course, lies with the question itself. Its imprecision guarantees confusion; its breadth makes reckoning the origins of the universe a simple task by comparison. Women are individuals, and men attempting to reduce their nature to a universal formula run into trouble.
If we refine the question, however, we find the possibility of an answer. Lately, for instance, I have fashioned this related question: What do most women want in men in the initial stages of a relationship? Is it possible to isolate one element that first attracts women to men? How, for instance, would a single man like myself—I’m a widower, sixty some years old, stocky in build, with one child still in college and a minimum of savings—win the affections of a female?
Having squandered a good amount of time pondering this question, having dated several different women with varying success, and having read female comments on various online dating services, I believe I possess the answer:
Women want a gentleman.
It’s true that in polls and on internet dating services women say they are looking for other qualities in a man. Many women claim to desire in men what society once deemed feminine merits: sensitivity, the ability to listen, empathy. Others cite power and money, and surprisingly, humor, as desirable traits in men. Fewer seem to require handsome men, though most women doubtless prefer a partner who can chew pizza with his mouth closed and who weighs less than a grand piano.
From what I have observed and experienced, however, what a woman wants most from a first date is a gentleman. She wants a man with manners and a sense of civility, a man who respects her, who puts her on a bit of a pedestal—not too grand a pedestal, but a pedestal nonetheless. (To use an example from Gone With The Wind, women want Ashley Wilkes for his manners and ideals, but enjoy a little of “Bad Boy” Rhett Butler thrown into the equation as well.) A woman wants a man who can write a love letter or sit comfortably through the opening night of Sex and the City, but who can also change a flat tire, work the yard, and defend her against assailants.
She wants, in short, a man who is both gentle and manly.
We should not be surprised that women prefer gentlemen. It was, after all, a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a fiery feminist for her day, who long ago helped devise the idea of a gentleman-knight and the values of courtly love. Singing ballads and composing poems about knights, damsels in distress, and rescued maidens, troubadours planted Eleanor’s vision of noble warriors and virtuous ladies all over Europe during the High Middles Ages. This music and literature grew in influence, and seizing hold of the medieval imagination, caused an upheaval in the way men treated women. Women became more than just property, bearers of heirs, managers of households; they were, in the eyes of men, fellow creatures worthy of noble deeds, passion, and love. This code of chivalry and manners in regard to women endured some thirty-five generations, becoming ever more refined in response to changing times. Even the pioneers of our own raw frontier practiced this code, as may be seen in the chronicles of our Wild West, where a woman who played the lady could cross the continent unharmed and esteemed among rough, violent men.
In the second half of the twentieth century, this code of etiquette came under attack. Radical assaults on the foundations of Western Civilization shook the pillars of sexual civility and decorum. In the consequent wreckage, men found themselves lost without maps, survivors of an earthquake who could no longer recognize a landscape once their own. In certain circles, to call a woman a lady was forbidden, to open a door for a woman was to risk verbal abuse, to offer a seat on a public conveyance to a woman was to invite the label of misogynist. Stare at a woman at work, or offer some offhand comment about her appearance, and you could find yourself standing in an unemployment line. Many college campuses set up sexual conduct codes, reducing the calculus of love and romance to a sort of joyless elementary school arithmetic.
The first decade of the new millennium has seen the emergence of a wistful longing for the old code of manners. Many commentators honored the manly courage of the firefighters, police, and soldiers who died in the 9/11 attacks. Some areas of the country have seen a renewed interest in etiquette classes for adolescents, and the media reports that even native New Yorkers have softened their rough edges in the last few years. A good number of young women still dream, surreptitiously and discretely, of the knight on the white horse, only now they want him modernized. They want men who will treat them like ladies, but without condescension. They desire decorum and courtesy, but with full recognition of their talents and their rights to equality in education and employment.
Unfortunately, the passage of courteous conduct from one generation to the next requires teachers or exemplars, and the assaults of the last fifty years have thinned the ranks of both ladies and gentlemen. With mentors in short supply, chivalry and its mistress, romance, sometimes seem moribund. We sneer at the Victorians for burying sex beneath crinoline and bowdlerized language, yet what would they make of us, with our crass appetites, our lack of refinement, our taste for violence and crude perversions? Sexual innuendo permeates our advertising. Pornography, formerly confined to adult bookstores in large cities, is now as available online as the weather or the daily news. Among some teenagers “hooking up” has taken the place of dating, grind-dancing the place of their parents’ disco. Some parents dress their adolescent girls like whores, then profess shock when some men see them that way. Though many people yearn for a set of rules in the game of love and courtship—a recent book on this subject popular among women was titled The Rules—these aspirants to romance lack the living guides who by lesson and example once taught the arts of civility to young women and men.
Despite this deficit of mentors, there is one resource, often overlooked, which does teach men how to behave like gentleman and why this appeals to the ladies. Although much maligned for its contributions to violence and vacuous sex in our society, this low-priced teaching tool nevertheless affords the world’s best classroom for the aspiring gentleman.
I am speaking, of course, of Hollywood.
Factory of dreams, fabricator of customs and style, Hollywood has frequently served up portraits of gentlemen and why they attract women. Every man who takes an inventory of his favorite films will surely find one or two in which a knight-errant, modern or medieval, is at the heart of the story. The reviews in this chapter of Movies Make The Man provide only a brief introduction to the Hollywood school of manners, class, and conduct.
First up on our short list is Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Here we see the powerful impact of love on the heart and behavior of a man. When we meet Rick, the former idealist has become a hardened cynic who mistreats women and who blithely declares: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Yet when Ilsa, the love of his life, arrives at Rick’s cafe, Rick’s cynicism gradually gives way to his former idealism. He helps a young Hungarian couple find the money to buy their way to America. He allows the club band to play the “Marseilles,” fully aware that the German soldiers drinking and singing in his club may punish him. Finally, he lies to Ilsa’s husband Victor Laszlo about his affection for Ilsa, knowing that with his lie he will lose the woman he loves most in the world. Each of these actions reveals the emerging gentleman within Rick Blaine, the “gentle man” who puts the weak and defenseless ahead of his own desires.
Unlike Rick Blaine, Braveheart’s William Wallace (Mel Gibson) never gives way to cynicism in the face of hardship, but remains instead an idealist who always acts as a gentleman toward the ladies. Wallace meets his future wife when both are still children. At the funeral for Wallace’s father and brother, who have died defending Scotland from the English, a little girl, Murron, gives the orphaned Wallace a stalk of heather. His uncle then takes Wallace away from his home and educates him. He travels to distant places like Rome, learns to speak and read Latin and French, practices the social graces, and becomes acquainted with the arts of war.
But he never forgets his father’s farm or Murron. He returns to Scotland to restore the house in which he grew up and to seek out Murron. In one of Hollywood’s most romantic scenes, Wallace returns to Murron the heather he has preserved all these years. He courts her, and they are soon married.
Much later, after the murder of his wife, Wallace makes love to the future queen of England. Though this event is fiction, the glaring contrast between Wallace and the weak-chinned, cowardly Edward II reflects the difference between a gentleman and a medieval version of today’s metrosexual. The princess desires Wallace not only because he is a fierce warrior with a natural sense of his own masculinity, but also because he treats her like a lady rather than an object.
Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco is an underrated film offering a much more subtle portrait of a modern gentleman. Though nearly all of the characters, male and female, are shallow and immature, more interested in themselves and their own welfare than in others, two characters do pay homage to a chivalric code greater than themselves. Alice (Chloe Sevigny), a young editorial assistant, undergoes a moral transformation largely through suffering the betrayals and lies of her friends. Alice eventually falls in love with an attorney, Josh Neff (Matt Keeslar). Having suffered an emotional breakdown in college, followed by a religious conversion, Josh acts responsibly toward his position in the district attorney’s office (he resigns his coveted post, citing a conflict of interest), toward his friends (he warns them of the coming drug bust at the disco), and toward Alice (whom he clearly loves). Only Josh and Alice show consideration for anyone other than themselves, which is, of course, one of the quintessential marks of etiquette.
Perhaps Hollywood’s best study of a gentleman is found in James Mangold’s Kate and Leopold, a romantic comedy which most women adore, but which few men of my acquaintance have seen. Here Meg Ryan plays Kate, a modern woman looking for corporate success whose personal relationships are failures. Her opposite is Hugh Jackman’s Leopold, an English aristocrat from the year 1876, who has inadvertently traveled through time to present-day Manhattan.
When Kate’s brother Charlie (Breckin Meyer), an unemployed actor and comedian, befriends and then invites Leopold to supper at Kate’s apartment, we receive our first of several lessons contrasting the manners of the nineteenth century with those of modern America. Leopold arrives for supper formally dressed and sits erect while eating; Kate wears scruffy sweats and slouches over her food like a bored teenager. Leopold stands whenever Kate goes to the kitchen— “I am accustomed to rise whenever a lady leaves the table”—a gesture which startles Kate and amuses Charlie. The supper served up by Kate—an overcooked piece of unidentifiable meat, tater tots, and a mediocre salad—Leopold finds inedible, declaring his own society believes that “without the culinary arts, the crudeness of reality would be unbearable.”
Though we see Leopold make an impression on Kate in several subsequent scenes—Leopold, for example, gallantly recovers Kate’s briefcase from a mugger—his gentlemanly conduct and its effect on women may best be seen on the night Kate goes to supper with her boss, J.J. (Bradley Whitford). At the same time, Charlie takes Leopold to a club to meet Patrice (Charlotte Ayanna), a young woman to whom Charlie is attracted. After Leopold becomes the center of attention when he mentions having explored the basement of the Louvre—Patrice was an art major at Vassar—Charlie takes him to task for dominating Patrice’s affections:
Charlie: Patrice—she thought you were cute. Probably gay and cute. And cute, Leo, is the kiss of death.
Leopold: Perhaps. But I believe this is her number (He hands Charlie a napkin with the telephone number written on it). As I see it, Patrice has not an inkling of your affections. And it’s no wonder. You, Charles, are a Merry Andrew.
Charlie: A what?
Leopold: Everything plays a farce for you. Women respond to sincerity. This requires pulling one’s tongue from one’s cheek. No one wants to be romanced by a buffoon (nods at the napkin). Now that number rings her.
Charlie: Yeah?
Leopold: So ring her tomorrow.
Charlie: I can’t. She gave the number to you.
Leopold: Only because I told her of your affections.
Charlie (stopping suddenly): Wh—what did you say?
Leopold: Merely that you admired her but that you were hesitant to make an overture since you’d been told she was courting another.
Charlie: Shit—that’s good. What did she say?
Leopold: She handed me the napkin.
In the next scene, director Mangold offers us another glaring contrast, this time between Leopold and J.J., a man of pretension and false sophistication. On the way home from their evening with Patrice, Charlie and Leopold swing by the restaurant where J.J. and Kate are dining. When J.J. claims to speak French, to own an old English manor house, and to love opera, Leopold exposes him as a poseur, and then tells J.J., who is clearly pursuing Kate, that “some feel that to court a woman in one’s employ is nothing more than a serpentine effort to transform a lady into a whore.”
Other scenes confirm Leopold’s status as a quintessential gentleman. He writes what Kate’s secretary calls the “best apology letter in the history of mankind.” He scripts the telephone call Charlie makes to Patrice, helping Charlie to secure his long-standing desire to date her. He behaves impeccably in treating Kate like a lady.
We can’t all be Hugh Jackman, who is, quite literally, “tall, dark, and handsome.” Nor can we revert to the formal language and manners of the nineteenth century. With some help from Hollywood, however, we can learn something about being gentlemen. In the practice of etiquette, most of us need a few repairs rather than a major renovation, and the cinema gives us hints on making these changes. What is required from us is thought and interest. After all, learning how to attract the women we wish to pursue is really not that difficult.
In the words of Leopold to Charlie, “Think of pleasing her, not vexing her.”