COWARDY CUSTARDS IN THE HOME OF THE BRAVE

The phrase 'business as usual' seems to have no resonance on the other

side of the Atlantic, says Simon Heifer: for all the swagger of Hollywood,

some Americans get absurdly jumpy in the face of terrorism

THE obituaries appeared last weekend of one of the most remarkable actors ever to appear on film: Harold Russell. Only a few will remember his name, though many more will remember his performance. He was one of the three returning second world war veterans around whom William Wyler's epic 1946 film, The Best Years of Our Lives, was based. Fredric March and Dana Andrews, straight from central casting, played a soldier and an airman respectively. Russell played a sailor who had lost both hands in combat and who was returning home to two great uncertainties: would he fit into a postwar world with his disability, and would his girl still love him? No special effects were needed; Russell really had lost both hands in Normandy in 1944. He remains the only actor to win two Oscars for the same role. He deserved a hundred. Wyler's film remains one of the greatest ever made for the American cinema, not least because of its dual virtues of deep humanity and massive understatement, and the absolutely genuine nature of the heroism of one of its stars.

I wonder what Russell, who retired from acting at that Oscar ceremony, made not just of the modern American cinema, but of modern Americans. He could have been forgiven, like the rest of us, for thinking that at this juncture in its history, during the war against terrorism, it is a strangely schizophrenic culture. Quite rightly stricken by the vile assault on their nation, people and way of life on 11 September, the American people urge on their government and armed forces in the fight against those who would destroy them. They couldn't care less about the whingeing of European liberals about the conditions in Camp XRay, which remain a damned sight better than those in the rubble of Ground Zero. Their only concern is the preservation of their way of life, and the prosecution of justice — by fire and the sword if necessary — for those who threaten it.

Today, Hollywood is not about the sort of restraint and discretion that made Wyler's film such a masterpiece. In the immediate aftermath of the second world war, as, indeed, after Vietnam, too many in the audience had been through the same experiences as were being portrayed. Too much artistic licence would have been disastrous. Now, however, when Hollywood portrays action and heroism, it is a vicarious experience for almost all the audience. Violence and derring-do can be glamorised because few watching such films have had the painful experience of realising just how unpleasantly unglamorous such antics really are. The contemporary portrayal of 'action' is about special effects, insane and very overstated acts of courage, gung-ho, kick-ass heroics that ought to leave the world trembling at the spectacle. Suspension of disbelief, such as would have been hard for someone who had fought all the way from Utah Beach to Liineburg Heath, is now to be taken for granted; and the results are commensurately absurd.

We have all seen the historical fraudulence that stems from this approach, which Steven Spielberg perpetrates serially, with Saving Private Ryan conveying the impression that the Normandy landings were an entirely American enterprise, and his latest film showing GIs wresting Greece from the Nazis a year before they actually arrived there. The idea of America that the world gets from its cinema seat or armchair is that this is one verytough country indeed; and thank God for that. Sometimes, though, it goes too far: it will have been lost on those Americans suffering from the national trait of underdeveloped irony that Pearl Harbor, last year's blockbuster that they took deeply seriously, was regarded as high comedy by many British audiences. An earlier blockbuster, Air Force One, showed President Harrison Ford (coincidentally a Vietnam veteran and qualified pilot) taking on international terrorists almost singlehandedly, and defeating them in a bravura display of heroism. Compare and contrast with the way George Bush was spirited off to the middle of nowhere on 11 September.

The Americans we see on celluloid, relentlessly and routinely engaging in supreme heroics, are also those who, since the twin towers were destroyed, have almost literally pulled up the drawbridge on their country and their lives. Last Monday Rod Eddington, the chief executive of British Airways, explained away the worst three-month losses for his airline — £160 million in the last quarter of last year — by pointing out that Americans had stopped flying across the Atlantic since the attacks. His company's traffic overall is down by 20 per cent, a substantial proportion of it on the transatlantic routes. Hardly a long-haul airline on the planet has not been hit by the knock-on effect of Americans fearing to travel. Tourist industries all over Europe are reeling. Anyone in London who wants to stay at a top hotel is best advised to ignore the tariff and simply ring up and negotiate. The Americans have all but vanished. They were not a very geographically or intellectually adventurous people to start with; only 18 per cent of them have a passport. What seems to have happened since 11 September is that even that minority of those willing to accept the idea of foreign travel in principle no longer, in large numbers, wishes to accept it in practice.

This is not the first time that this has happened. When an American was killed by the Harrods bomb in 1983, it depressed American tourist trade in the capital for months. Although the British had put up with random acts of slaughter on the mainland by the Provos for more than a decade, the Americans suddenly feared that to set foot in London was to risk certain death at the hands of terrorists. No sooner had that scare subsided than the bombing of Libya in April 1986 prompted another retreat into the stockade. The legendary Rambo tough guy, Sylvester Stallone, cancelled his visit to Cannes on the grounds that there might be terrorist reprisals. After Lockerbie in December 1988, Americans were once more notoriously reluctant to fly. During the Gulf War in 1991 London was denuded of American tourists. The phrase 'business as usual', which we make a show of trotting out whenever we suffer a terrorist attack here, seems to have no resonance on the other side of the Atlantic.

Hollywood began its paradoxical behaviour before the dust had even settled on Ground Zero. Various actors, including Die Hard's Bruce Willis, said that they wouldn't be flying anywhere. A rash of senior producers spoke to the media about the practical problems in their trade caused by 11 September. Marc Abraham, who before the attacks had just finished making a Robert Redford film in Morocco, told the Los Angeles Times in their aftermath, 'I don't know that you would want to take movie stars there now: Offering a compelling insight into the Hollywood — and perhaps into the American — psyche, he added, We don't know what's dangerous, we just know what's user-friendly.' That fear of the unknown, that determination to cling to the familiar, would come to characterise his industry's response.

John Calley, who runs Sony Pictures, reinforced this view. 'It's not about feeling safe in a place,' he said. 'It's the travel that's scary. And just because you make some of Hollywood's legendary tough-guy all-action films doesn't make you immune to the trepidation. Barry Josephson, who directed Men in Black (Saving the Earth from the scum of the Universe"), observed, 'The days when people jumped on and off planes are over. No more.' Steve Reuther, who has produced the next Arnie Schwarzenegger blockbuster — its release has been delayed until this spring because of 11 September — also commented on the new limitations of his work: 'I have a movie that has to shoot in Africa. I don't think I have a chance of putting it together now. I wouldn't be able to get an actor to go.'

The reality has always been at odds with the art where Hollywood is concerned. Even when Wyler was making The Best Years of Our Lives, with its absolute, heartbreaking realism, Errol Flynn was beating the Japs singlehandedly in Burma and provoking utter fury among the British soldiers who had actually done that job for him. Today, though, the gap is wider than ever. Perhaps it is to do with modern weapons' technology: America can now obliterate a small rogue nation without disturbing many of its population from their armchairs. This creates an impression — admittedly quite an accurate one — of supreme ease in conquest. It is left to a minority of professionals to fight the nation's battles for it. The leap between the armchair and the front line is never made. And the average American's patriotic identification with the heroics of the American military stops well short of engaging in any mildly heroic act, such as getting on an aeroplane or visiting a foreign country.

Even staying at home, however, now appears to have its risks for our nervous American cousins. It was reported this week that the Empire State Building and other Manhattan landmarks have reported soaring vacancies since the attacks. Empty space in the Empire State has trebled since 11 September, and many tenants are seeking to sublet. A New York realtor was quoted as saying, 'Tenants there really fear something else will happen, and they will be next: It seems that as America's president ups the octane of his rhetoric, talking about the 'axis of evil' that his country might now be seeking to destroy in Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the sound of his words is almost drowned by the noise of the battening-down of hatches.

There is, of course, no question but that the response of that country to the attack on its people and our civilisation has been resolute, unhesitating and unflinching. It is hard to believe that any other country in the developed world would have had the determination and conviction to respond in such a way, even if it had had the military resources to do so. Mr Blair might have done it, though it would have had to have been without the support of many in his own party. Judging by their footling response to 11 September, big European countries such as France or Germany would probably have reacted by plunging into chaos and self-doubt.

Admittedly, America took on a country with only primitive defences, where it had air superiority from day one. So far the campaign has involved the deployment of relatively few US ground troops — and British special forces are privately patronising about the expertise of their American counterparts when they have met them operationally. Also, the response of New Yorkers to the attacks last September was one of admirable and enviable sangfroid, given their country's isolation from terrorism. When one recalls the insane hysteria that disfigured millions of people in this country in 1997, when one woman was killed in a car crash in Paris, it requires a triumph of hope to believe that we would have been so level-headed as the New Yorkers, had something similar to the twin towers happened in London.

All this reinforces the view that America has the moral right — never mind the sole capability — to take a lead in the world. However, because of their determination to remain physically isolated, the American people need to be conscious of the figure they cut among their closest allies. The superhuman heroics of the screen tough guys were never meant to be taken seriously, but they look absurd now, not least in the context of the cowardy custards who portray some of them. Hollywood said that 11 September would inevitably change the sort of films it makes, but that is an assertion whose truth we must wait to evaluate. What we do know is that Black Hawk Down — a film about American military heroism during the bungled Somalian intervention of 1993 — was released early to cash in on the superpatriotic mood following 11 September. It also happens to chime perfectly with Bush's 'axis of evil' rhetoric.

The Vietnam experience prompted several magnificent films about the anguish and tragedy of a war America lost. America has no intention of losing this new, very different, war, and once a decent interval has passed we must expect Hollywood to reflect that, for reasons of both patriotism and commerce. The films that emerge will not, unless the mould is broken, be true to history. Tora Bora will be reconstructed in the suburbs of Los Angeles. There is unlikely to be a latter-day Harold Russell stunning audiences with his personal sacrifice and sheer guts. But it will provide homebound Americans with the vicarious experience of having been very, very brave indeed.

Simon Heifer writes for the Daily Mail.