Film Studies: All hail the has-been heroes

As the Academy announces an honorary Oscar this March for Peter O'Toole (an event promoted in this column last year), so the governing members of a small, rather more furtive society, HBWC (Has-Beens We Cherish), turn to another of our all-time favourites of the forlorn, fallen, flop-house geniuses – Nick Nolte.

How do we define our heroes? Well, there are two essential models: Jeff Bridges and Nick Nolte. Exceptional, natural actors, profoundly watchable, to be treasured and offered to the young as examples of ideal screen presence and fading male charm. In a way, Jeff Bridges is the more remarkable in that he continues to be cast in lead roles in substantial movies, no matter that he has hardly ever had a hit. Thus, in the last few years, Bridges has served his time patiently in White Squall, The Mirror Has Two Faces (with Barbra Streisand, this took more than patience), Arlington Road, The Muse, The Contender, and K-Pax. You may have seen few of those pictures, but you vaguely remember their moment.

With Nick Nolte, the condition is more extreme. Let's go back to 1997, when Nolte was nominated as best actor for his heart-rending work in Paul Schrader's Affliction. Now see the remarkable pattern of steady work on pictures you haven't seen very often because they were minimally released/ slipped quietly away on video/ no one's sure whether they were even made: Nightwatch, The Thin Red Line, Simpatico (a wondrous Bridges-Nolte duet), The Golden Bowl, Trixie, Breakfast of Champions, Investigating Sex and now The Good Thief.

HBWC members sighed with rapture when we heard about The Good Thief, simply because it was offered as a remake of one of our gospel films: Jean-Pierre Melville's French thriller, Bob le Flambeur, made in 1955 and one of those dry, deadpan, naturalistic film noirs that did so much to inspire the New Wave. It's about a likeable, small-time thief who has a big opportunity (a casino robbery), but who fails because of the vagaries of chance and human nature. Who could not see the shabby, hangdog, growling, hung-over Nolte in such a work, dreaming gloomily of a big break, while knowing that some pretty woman on his arm was likely to betray him? The film doesn't work. It struggled to find release in America. In part that may be because its very inconsistent writer-director, Neil Jordan, was misguided in retaining the French setting. So I cannot recommend the picture to anyone except those people who are prepared to go to the far ends of tube lines to chase down Nick Nolte pictures. Nolte is lovely in the movie, effortless, downbeat yet boyish, crushed but resilient, tough and tender. I know how close this may come to cliché, but what I'm trying to say is that Nick Nolte is the real thing, impervious to all his wretched and aborted projects. He's movie. He's axiomatic. And somewhere deep down in the tricky heart of show business there is a sublime commitment to keeping him in work – so long as the work is suitably lousy, and hard to find.

Some of you are going to leap to the conclusion that this column is written ironically – that in fact I can scarcely credit the limits of Nolte's bad work. Not so. I think this is a rare actor, and if you want to discover greatness you can find it in Affliction, Mulholland Falls, Cape Fear, Q & A (a Sidney Lumet police picture, and Nolte's great glory), all the way back to Who'll Stop the Rain (the movie that really pioneered the totally non-commercial brilliance of Nolte, and did much the same thing for Tuesday Weld). In that vein, this actor is the true son of Robert Mitchum.

Yet Nolte is also a wandering hobo among other film stars, a man who hardly takes good care of himself, who has run-ins with alcohol and disturbs the peace now and then, who must have seen his salaries wither, but who remains the kind of "name" who can sometimes get small, wayward and eccentric pictures made. He must be careful: he is soon to be seen inThe Hulk, Ang Lee's comic-book movie, and it threatens to be a hit. Nolte now is 62, looking older, sadder, wearier. So long as he continues to mine the forlorn and the fragile, the sure-hit failure can be guarded. Pray for him.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'The Good Thief' (15) is released on 7 March