Holden, William (1918-1982)

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Holden, William (1918-1982)

From his discovery in the late 1930s actor William Holden rose to be one of the most dependable and most likeable leading men of 1950s Hollywood, appearing to personify the mild-mannered charm of the Eisenhower era while, at his best, suggesting that the period's integrity and feeling went deeper than its relatively bland, conformist tendencies sometimes suggested. During more than forty years Holden had seventy roles where, for the most part, he met his fate with varying mixtures of wryness, cynicism, and good humor that was always believable and often attractive, but particularly successful in the mid-1950s.

Holden revealed a homely and good-natured appeal in a number of features including Golden Boy (1939) and Our Town (1940) before joining the wartime air force. On his return, following a number of forgettable Westerns, he got an important break in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) as a late replacement for Montgomery Clift. Here, Holden showed a seedier version of where his good looks might lead him playing a failed Hollywood scriptwriter turned gigolo. Though the film was not a popular success, roles in Born Yesterday (1950) and his Oscar-winning performance in the prison camp comedy Stalag 17 (1953) brought a much higher profile. The lovable rogue of Stalag 17 is archetypal of Holden's best roles: relatively mild-mannered but opportunistic, brave if necessary, but preferring to avoid confrontation. A series of roles as cads, lovers, and occasional reluctant heroes followed—The Moon Is Blue (1953), Sabrina (1954), The Country Girl (1954), The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (1955), Picnic (1955), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)—most of which were highly successful. One of the top ten box-office stars from 1954 to 1956, Holden was able to arrange a deal for Bridge on the River Kwai bringing him 10 percent of the film's gross. However, as his looks began to fade and as audiences sought younger, more overt rebels, Holden was no longer a box office certainty (in 1968 he made Variety's list of overpaid stars). As an increasingly grizzled figure, marked by the alcoholism that would kill him in his 1960s, he was still capable of outstanding performances: most notably in The Wild Bunch (1969) as a sadistic and psychopathic cowboy, and as the fading anchorman in Network (1976), clinging wearily, grimly, to job and wife.

Holden was a reliable and consistent, rather than dazzling, performer whose films could be depended on to succeed in an uncertain period in Hollywood for many actors. Like John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, Holden appeared most successful where he did not need to "act," but merely characterize a certain form of masculinity which appeared particularly attractive to 1950s audiences. Not as attached to the uncompromising code of the Wild West as Wayne or as superhumanly laid back as Mitchum, his masculinity had a broad appeal. Holden's good nature is tempered by a skepticism and suspicion that gives an edginess to his heroism and sees his moral choices made with his self-preservation very much in mind. In a sense, he reflected the experiences of a generation of men who had been at war and knew the dangers of moral absolutes and strict codes of behavior that do not allow for circumstances (essentially the subject of Bridge on the River Kwai). Also, the stability and the prosperity of the 1950s carried fears of both failure and the banality of conformity. Holden offered a believable, but attractive, male lead with choices to do good or bad who swung convincingly between the two before making the right decision (allowing Bogart to get Hepburn in Sabrina, not taking Grace Kelly from Bing Crosby in The Country Girl.

Holden flourished in the space between the bad guy heroes of the 1930s and 1940s gangster movies and the increasingly youth-oriented anti-heroes of the 1960s. He was an understated representation of male hopes and fears in the 1950s, of the anxiety that individualism is impossible in an increasingly rationalized world and any attempt to be different might bring failure down on the precariously placed wage slave. Holden is a hero of this period exactly because in so many of his roles his actions are in spite of his skepticism of heroics, in spite of his quite palpable sense of self-preservation.

—Kyle Smith