We seem to be obsessed with the wounded male, temporarily damaged by the hand of another, resulting in a broken nose.
Bandaged or unbandaged, the broken nose has taken residence on the face of a youngish male actor, often not necessarily the most attractive, but certainly an endearing sort with a charm of his own. In 1974, there were two bandaged/broken noses of note in cinema, Elliott Gould in California Split and Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. (There is debate as to which director, Robert Altman or Roman Polanski, came up with the gimmick first. Altman fans, Am/Mex included, would say California Split was in production first, thus making his Charlie Waters character, played by Gould, the original.)
It's hard to miss the obvious revisitation of the same visual quirk on Wes Anderson's Owen Wilson character in this year's The Darjeeling Limited. (The first thing to strike Am/Ex was this visual similarity to the two previous films in 1974. No attempt was made to downplay this particular broken nose, as this image and others splash the pages of most every promotional st still of this film.)
2 comments:
Great post. But strictly speaking Jakes Gittes's nose in Chinatown wasn't so much broken as it was sliced open by the knife-wielding punk played by Polanski himself.
Yes, temporarily damaged and thus requiring a bandage is a more accurate description.
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