The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned To Act

Isaac Butler                                                                                           Bloomsbury £30

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You must remember this. Back in the mid-1970s, Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were making Marathon Man. To create his role of a Nazi war criminal, Larry put on a baldie wig and a Cherman aggsunt. 

But Dustin thought dressing up wasn’t enough. In order to better portray the exhaustion of his character, he supposedly didn’t sleep for three nights in a row. Larry burst out laughing when he heard. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘why don’t you try acting?’

The answer is that Dustin was a Method actor. Devised by the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, the Method says actors should find whatever character they are playing within themselves. 

Whereas for classical players such as Olivier, acting is the art of pretending to be someone else, Method actors aim to find emotional parallels for the part they’re playing in their own lives.

The Method has certainly made for some powerful performances. Once seen, Hoffman’s slimeball turn in Midnight Cowboy is never forgotten. And as Isaac Butler argues in his history of the movement, Marlon Brando’s sweaty mumble in A Streetcare Named Desire is one of the hinge-points of 20th Century art. There is acting before it, and acting after it, and they are not the same.

But for every classic, there’s a clunker. Gene Hackman is surely right to remember how ‘pitiful’ it was when he was an acting student and ‘everyone was imitating Brando’. 

Indeed, there is nothing more embarrassing than Hackman’s own Brando imitation, in French Connection II, when his character tries to rid himself of a heroin addiction by alternating silent moping with violent braggadocio.

Nor is the Method always good for a performer’s private life. Peter Sellers used to identify so closely with his roles that he went on inhabiting them long after a shoot had ended.

Three of his four marriages broke up due to his inability to separate work from life. And as Butler confesses, he himself abandoned acting because he ‘hated the [way] the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality’.

Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, revelled in the licence he believed the Method gave him for misbehaving. Making Kramer Vs Kramer, he got into character by taunting his co-star, Meryl Streep, about the recent death of her partner, John Cazale. 

During one scene he surprised her with a slap across the face – so that ‘her pained response would feel sufficiently real’. Nasty work if you can get it.

Butler tells this story fascinatingly well. He might have found room to wonder whether Alfred Hitchcock, who would bully and humiliate actors if he thought it would get a better performance out of them, was a kind of Method director. 

But he makes up for it by pointing out that when, say, Robert De Niro spent months learning how to box for Raging Bull (he became so good that he actually chipped the teeth of Jake LaMotta, the fighter he was playing), that ISN’T Method acting. It is properly practised pretending.

Larry Olivier would have applauded. 

Let's Do It: The Birth Of Pop

Bob Stanley                                                                                                          Faber £25

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In 1901, an advert appeared in The Stage for a library of sheet music which would furnish punters with ‘the latest Pop. Music.’ This, asserts Bob Stanley in his epic and enthralling pre-rock ’n’ roll history, marks the first recorded use of the phrase as shorthand for the most popular sounds of any era.

The book is full of similarly satisfying revelations. One third of arch modernists Saint Etienne, Stanley has a parallel career as a music writer.

A prequel to Yeah Yeah Yeah, his acclaimed 2013 history of pop, Let’s Do It focuses on the world of commercial music between the late 1800s and 1950s, taking in music hall, Broadway, flappers, Dixieland, hot jazz, ‘hillbilly’ and ‘race’ music, and sundry other pre-Elvis phenomena.

Big hitters such as Bing Crosby, Peggy Lee, Al Jolson, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller and George Formby feature heavily in its 656 pages. Crosby is plucked from his current status as the punchline in a cheesy David Bowie Christmas duet and repositioned as a trailblazing innovator. 

A master of the microphone, he was ‘the first singer to use technology to shape his sound,’ writes Stanley. It made Crosby pop music’s biggest ever draw, the equivalent of ‘fifteen Beatles’, according to Tony Bennett.

But the real stars are obscure scene-stealers such as Mitch Miller, ‘the Willy Wonka of the recording studio’, who produced Vic Damone; Helen Kane, the real-life Betty Boop; and Sam Mayo, the original indie miserabilist.

Stanley’s great achievement lies in rescuing these artists and their music from grainy nostalgia, restoring their innovations and historical popularity to sparkling Technicolor.

He draws lines from then to now, making plausible parallels between Glenn Miller and David Bowie, demonstrating that pop is essentially regenerative, always new yet forever borrowing from the past, continually harking after an imagined golden age.

The big picture stuff, meanwhile, touches on race, gender and global trends which reorientate the locus of pop music from London and Vienna to New York and New Orleans.

Not just an illuminating and entertaining read, Let’s Do It also prompts a spring clean of tired Spotify playlists, offering myriad new choices to the jaded listener.

A hit, in other words.

Graeme Thomson