In praise of an old-fashioned hero

“I'll tell you how l feel about Prohibition. lt is the law of the land.”

So proclaims Eliot Ness, Treasury agent, at the start of The Untouchables (1987). Ness, played by Kevin Costner, has come to Chicago to lead the fight against Al Capone’s violent bootleggers. It’s not that he has any strong commitment to Prohibition as a moral cause – in the very last scene, a newsman asks him what he’ll do if they repeal the Volstead Act, and he replies wryly that “I’ll have a drink”. Rather, it is a statement of intent, an indication of Ness’ high view of the law and its importance in society.

In the film, the US Treasury have dispatched him to Chicago because local law enforcement is wracked by corruption. Money from the gangsters has perverted not only the police, but politics and the judiciary. Ness, by contrast, is the clean man in a dirty world, an avatar of integrity and nobility in a swamp of corruption and cynicism. He cannot be bought – when one of Capone’s cronies attempts to pay him off, the Treasury man not only refuses but refers the crony to the robust capital punishments supposedly used by the Romans on those who attempted to bribe public officials. And Ness’ probity extends to private life. He does not have a secret gambling addiction or a mistress or a drinking problem. He goes home every evening to his wife and children and listens to wholesome comedy programmes on the radio.

With his earnestness and lack of cynicism - before a raid he tells his men, "Let's do some good!" - Ness is a type that has become rare in cinema in recent times; the genuine hero. Not an anti-hero, or a superhero, or a character who “subverts the traditional tropes of masculine heroism” or whatever, but a bona fide male hero, who is unaided by special powers or implausible abilities but nevertheless stands, with a small band of trusted allies, for right and truth and justice against the forces of darkness, greed and dissolution.

"Let's do some good."

War films and TV shows remain a refuge for this kind of character – one thinks, perhaps, of Captain John Miller from Saving Private Ryan, the small-town English teacher whose courage and tenacity and resourcefulness make him a great leader of men. Major Dick Winters from Band Of Brothers (a fictionalised version of a real person) is from a similar mould.

But other examples do not spring easily to mind.         

Ah, the cynic will say, there are no people like that in real life. We all have to put on our trousers one leg at a time, in the splendid US idiom. No man is a hero to his valet. Wasn’t the actual Eliot Ness thrice-married, with an alcohol problem, a man who tried to cover up a drink-driving incident and whose later years were marked by controversy and failure? And doesn’t the archetype of the heroic lawman ignore the ambiguities and complexities of the relationship between law, justice and morality?

But I am not saying that every policier has to be a simplistic morality tale. Not every TV cop show can be Dixon Of Dock Green; we don’t always need to have a lantern-jawed incorruptible in a white hat riding into town to dispatch double-dyed villains with no redeeming features.

But we do need some heroes like that on screen. We do need men who rise above the compromise and temptations of the world, who remind us that there is light amid the darkness, that evil doesn’t always win, that personal and professional virtues are real and achievable. There should be people on the screen whose moral strength makes us want to emulate them.

This latter point, incidentally, is why I exclude superheroes – of any type or description – from my definition of a hero. No small boy will ever be Ironman or Captain America or Superman. He might, however, be an honest cop or a brave leader of men or even just someone who learns to live with integrity in any walk of life. If you doubt the importance of this, read the ongoing revelations about the deceit, corruption and cowardice that contributed to the Grenfell disaster.