Time to go?

Q: What do Steve Martin and Dr Jonathan Hemlock have in common?

A: Both fund their expensive collections of modern art with their nefarious work, Hemlock, the leading character in the Trevanian novels (one of them, The Eiger Sanction, filmed with Clint Eastwood in the lead role) as a hitman, Martin through starring in the likes of The Father of the Bride and The Pink Panther.



Alec Baldwin, the star of It's Complicated released in the UK last Friday, provoked a minor flurry of publicity by announcing that he is going to retire and has given us plenty of warning because he's not giving up until his contract with the hit TV show 30 Rock runs out in 2012. He has apparently lost his passion for the job of acting and is following in a long tradition of macho screen stars - from Robert Mitchum to Sean Penn, via Steve McQueen, Mickey Rourke and many others - by publicly admitting that play-acting is no way for a real man to make a living. But when is the best time to go? And how should a screen tough guy bow out? Talking of tough guys bowing out, Golden Boy, the biography of William Holden, opens in the aftermath of Holden's strange death with comments from a bunch of his friends, colleagues and co-stars all of them reflecting on how they'd always half-expected him to die early but perhaps from being mauled by a tiger, impaled on an elephant's tusk or shot by a jealous lover or cuckolded husband rather than, as he did, after drunkenly stumbling in his living room and hitting his head on the corner of a coffee table. A more conventional, dignified - and not so decisively final - retirement from the screen is an option for movie stars of course, but a notably rare one. Gene Hackman has done it recently - four years ago - and with little or no fanfare, but he is 20 years Baldwin's senior and he has 40 years of distinguished work to look back on as he kicks back to write his novels and paint. The problem with Baldwin is that he has, as he acknowledges himself, not quite fulfilled his promise as a film actor/star. He's always good and occasionally, or at least once in his cameo in Glengarry Glenn Ross, great, but he could have been a major star and looked set to become one in the aftermath of The Hunt for Red October, and he never seems to have quite recovered from the possibly self-inflicted wound that was his failure to sign up forthe follow-ups, allowing the stubbornly unretiring Harrison Ford to become an even bigger star and bed ever younger female co-stars. At least Baldwin's latest film sees him romancing a woman nearly 10 years older than he is, Meryl Streep as busy and brilliant as ever at retirement age. Many, sadly, have early retirement forced on them by fate and the fickleness of public affection, while the disappearance of those whose careers peter out gradually and then come to a stop is barely discernible and doesn't really count. But there are precious few who actually choose to retire at or close to their peak, and there are others but Garbo, Cary Crant, Grace Kelly and Jimmy Cagney (he was eventually and only temporarily coaxed out of retirement after 20 years to appear in Ragtime) leap to mind and the two men in that short list were close to retirement age anyway. So perhaps Baldwin will stick to his promise, but it's noticeable that for all the threats Sean Penn hasn't actually retired from screen acting as yet and there are two full years for Baldwin to be talked out of it, either by his accountant or someone persuading him that if he doesn't carry on paying the bills with his actomg he may in time have to follow in the path of his younger brother and humble himself on reality TV. And how different, how much greater would be the reputation today (and how much smaller the bank balance and art collection) of Steve Martin, Baldwin's co-star in It's Complicated, if he'd retired 20 years ago?

Answer to the question at the end of the last posting: all of the people mentioned had worked on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!, based on the Ian Fleming children's book and at least one of the Bond films: Albert Broccoli co-produced more than a dozen 007 movies; Ken Hughes directed the first Casino Royale; Roald Dahl wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice while Richard Maibaum scripted 13 of the films; Ken Adam provided designs for several Bonds, notably Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me; while Gert Frobe played the eponymous villain in Goldfinger and Desmond Llewelyn became famous as the long-suffering Q.


What connects the movie quotes "Judy, Judy, Judy" and "You dirty rat"?