We are at the Venice Film Festival. All kinds of personalities are travelling to the Lido in those cool wooden speedboats. Cate Blanchett, Colin Farrell, Timothée Chalamet? It’s as if movie stars still mattered. You could, however, reasonably argue that the biggest name on the red carpet is a fellow who has barely acted before. You can see a few minutes of Harry Styles in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. You can catch a few seconds of the former One Direction frontman at the end of Eternals. That is pretty much it. Yet he is suddenly a force in awards season.
A week or so after Styles was confirmed as the headliner for next year’s Slane Castle gig, he will be seen here opposite Florence Pugh as the male lead in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. A few days after that, Michael Grandage’s My Policeman, in which he plays a gay copper in 1950s Brighton, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. No reviews have yet emerged of either film. But Styles is everywhere in film discourse. That is nice for cinema. Nice for him too. It is still worth asking, however, why pop stars keep doing this. It is, apparently, not enough to sell a billion records and command the fantasies of a billion adoring music fans. They must also become actors. They must have their name up in different coloured lights.
To be fair, the success rate is greater than logic can easily explain. Rare is the sportsman who performs at comparable ability in two professional games. In contrast, pop stars have been making the shift to films with reasonable success since recorded sound began creating millionaires. The first true forerunners of Mr Styles emerged with mass-market 45-rpm singles in the late 1940s. The arrival of television pressed home the phenomenon. The origins of pop run from Bing Crosby to Frank Sinatra and on to Elvis Presley.
Crosby and Sinatra
You can see where this argument is going. Crosby and Sinatra didn’t just become successful actors, they became damn good actors. Both won Oscars: Crosby for his twinkly Irish priest in Going My Way, Sinatra for the volatile Italian-American GI in From Here to Eternity. Crosby finessed his onstage patter into lucrative comedies with Bob Hope. Sinatra used the other medium to revitalise a sagging musical career. Fred Zinnemann, director of From Here to Eternity, always denied that the horse’s head scene from The Godfather – in which a vulgar producer is bullied into casting a fading singer – derived from incidents in the preparation of his own film, but, like Johnny Fontane in the gangster flick, Frank Sinatra profited greatly from his acting success.
Presley’s story is a less happy one. He could be serviceable in the right role. There is nothing wrong with his performances in Love Me Tender or in King Creole. But, as Baz Luhrmann’s recent Elvis plausibly argues, Col Tom Parker, the King’s manager, was less interested in securing his charge an Oscar than in using the increasingly feeble movies as empty promotional tools. The films did more than anything else to transform Elvis’s image from that of a raw roots performer to a cosy mainstream entertainer. Indeed, nearly 70 years after Elvis first appeared on film, his cinematic oeuvre is still partly responsible for the sceptical raised eyebrows that greet any move from pop music to film.
Overlapping talent
So, why do they do it? It is only partly to do with money. Long associated with youth culture, pop music was originally a less “respectable” activity than acting – particularly for an older star. David Bowie, who had an up-and-down movie career, planned the shift almost from the beginning. The credibility gap is not so stark in 2022, but an Oscar is still more desirable than a Grammy. And the talents required do overlap. Cher, Lady Gaga, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson and a dozen others have proved the point. So rooted is Will Smith’s acting career that we have to remind ourselves he began as a rapper.
Harry Styles is, thus, following in a great tradition. His presence in big films at Venice and Toronto has already generated yards of press coverage. We would need another column to explain all the controversy surrounding Wilde’s mysterious 1950s drama. There are rumours of tension between the director and Pugh. Styles’s romantic relationship with Wilde has angered his more possessive fans. Elsewhere, he raised eyes with peculiar comments regarding My Policeman in an interview with Rolling Stone. “So much of gay sex in film is two guys going at it, and it kind of removes the tenderness from it,” he said. Which mainstream gay films has he been watching, one wonders.
At any rate, cinema should feel grateful that the likes of Styles still maintain an interest. For all the chatter of a fading medium, it seems pop stars are still as keen on becoming the next James Dean as the next Elvis Presley. Good luck to them.
