Anne Bancroft’s death on June 6 permitted a suite of male Baby Boomer film critics to nostalgically trot out their adolescent fantasies of older women. They returned to a time – before the reality of their own sagging visage – when satisfying an experienced lover was a greater challenge for the young and eager than arousing a woman with an age below room temperature. In that time capsule of 1967, the sensual Mrs Robinson became the archetype of the demanding and predatory women, the seducer. She was erotic and thrilling.
But Bancroft was much more than a character in a proto-boomer sexcapade. Born in the Bronx in 1931 and trained at the Actors Studio, the role for which she won an Academy Award was as Annie Sullivan, teacher of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. Her performance captured the epitome of great teaching, balancing empathy with respect. This film confirmed a physical range beyond an action hero and emotional depth beyond The Bold and the Beautiful.
For me, it is the absence in remembering Bancroft’s career that has been most disturbing. 84 Charing Cross Road, the film for which Bancroft won a BAFTA Best Actress Award, has been left out of her lists of achievements. Released in 1987 and based on a book by Helene Hanff, the narrative tracked the tale of a twenty year correspondence between a rare book dealer and a collector.
This bare narrative captures little of the complexity and subtlety in the film. It is significant because both the main actors are now synonymous with other roles: Anne Bancroft is Mrs Robinson and Anthony Hopkins is Hannibal Lector. Yet dipping into their hidden and shared cinematic history reveals great rewards. Certainly the film is wordy, intelligent and subtle, a relic from an age where intimacy was not reliant on a quick snog before dinner. The cultural reference points are literary, not punched through a backbeat. Bancroft had the scope and experience to capture wit, intelligence and humour.
I admire popular culture that is anchored to the cultural forms it replaces. 84 Charing Cross Road captures a love for books and pushes it through visual media. Letter writing is uncinematic in the extreme, encouraging excessive voiceover, chronological jumps and a dearth of dialogue. But with a focus on antique books, current events are washed by a more undulating and gentle historical stream.
The breadth and scale of the Hanff library is extraordinary. I understand bibliomania. I live in a six bedroom house and have no children. The house was bought to hang shelves for my books. It is a comfort to dialogue with the words of dead, so that they may live in the present. Both the book and film of 84 Charing Cross Road are obsessive in their validation of reading, writing and thinking. Hanff and Doel read together for twenty years, although they never meet. Their relationship confirms that, when sharing ideas, we also share lives.
Books and bookshops construct spaces for thinking pop. Quirky and distinctive comedies have their origin in such spaces. The Book Group and Black Books are fine examples of how black ink on a parched page can commence drunken discussions about inadequate sex lives, dull work and inelegant words. After the Amazon.com-modification of book retailing, it is little surprise that print and paper in an era of text and screens triggers eccentricity, passion and humour.
My favourite story about 84 Charing Cross Road is that 84 copies of the book were left on park benches and bus shelters on both sides of the Atlantic to be read and passed to other prospective readers, with comments and phone numbers intact. This story still moves, and is moving. Appropriately, there is a website for the book and film – with guestbook attached – transforming an analogue history of reading into a digital dialogue
This film always raises the issue of intimacy. The desire for contemplation and transcendence, to move beyond the self and experience, is part of the joy of reading. Bancroft delivered one of my favourite lines in film, a statement carried in daily life via my filofax: “I never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.” When I first watched this film in the late 1980s, it was this statement that propelled me into a history degree, not literary studies. So much of my own writing in popular culture and history can be sourced from this single statement. A memory of Bancroft after her death returned this legacy to me.
In a time of email, online chatting and text messaging, the twenty year correspondence between a collector and dealer, separated by religion, nations and experience, is intimate and evocative. It was Bancroft who captured the obsessive New Yorker’s desire for English – not American – Literature and the sharpness of her brash wit in comparison to the dark desperation of post-war Britain.
The tragedy is that if lovers of the film were to go to the street mentioned in the title, very few bookshops remain. High rents saw the end of Waterstones and Silver Moon, a specialist store featuring works by and for women. While Foyles, Murder One and Al-Hoda remain in the Street, the ultimate sadness is that 84 Charing Cross Road no longer sells books at all. The building has transformed into a pub. This touristic disappointment parallels that of Hanff. When she was finally in a position to visit the United Kingdom, the bookshop had already closed.
Through such relentless redundancy, we are lucky to be remembered for one role, image or idea. Anne Bancroft has become Mrs Robinson. Near the end of her life, she was exasperated by the fickle nature of this popular cultural memory. In a 2003 interview, she confirmed her surprise that “with all my work, and some of it is very, very good … We’re talking about Mrs. Robinson. I understand the world. I’m just a little dismayed that people aren’t beyond it yet.” Indeed, sex has an insistent predictability to it, fuelled by desires unmet by the lunchroom, treadmill or shopping centre. Bancroft’s wish to move beyond seduction and the supposed controversy of an older woman shagging a younger man is not yet matched by the journalists who wrote her obituaries.
My hope is that her death is the trigger, not for I-pod dipping into the Simon and Garfunkel Greatest Hits, but to remember her wider filmic catalogue. 84 Charing Cross Road is a subtle and important presentation of men, women, intimacy and ideas. The notion that two adults fall in love with words, literature and then each other even though they never touch, is beyond the grasp of the tabloid grab, and grope. Here’s to you, Ms Bancroft. You captured the complexity of women on film, and the limits of seduction.
