Stop immediately when you see him: an old or otherwise fragile man in a statement overcoat, stood stock still, staring directly at the camera and looking slightly lost. He’s probably wearing a tie and almost certainly a flat cap. You can relax now. You’ve found it. The greatest movie genre ever made: Gentleman Twee.
A Gentleman Twee film features a vulnerable but unexpectedly resilient man/bear/shell who gets himself into outrageous scrapes, feat. japes. He is often soundtracked by violins and wants nothing more than to lightly toast your heart.
The gentlemen in Gentlemen Twee movies must cry, or at least get close to it. They must be largely repressed until an opportune moment in which they will whisper something quietly devastating. You must start to feel – when watching them – that you’d rather kill them with your own bare hands than see anyone else hurt them ever again. Your sympathy must be deep and aching and ever so cheaply bought (usually by a combination of trembling strings and lips).
Broadbent-less examples of the genre include 2021’s The Phantom of the Open, another true story in which an amateur golfer worms his way into the British Open. An unexpectedly American but nonetheless painfully potent one is Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a mockumentary about a shell seeking his long-lost family. There’s 2022’s Living, in which Bill Nighy is a terminally ill bureaucrat who finally decides to live a little. Then there’s 2023’s The Great Escaper, in which Michael Caine plays a WWII veteran breaking out of his retirement home to attend a D-Day anniversary commemoration. That same year there was One Life; Anthony Hopkins embodies Nicholas Winton, a stockbroker who helped rescue refugee children during the Holocaust.
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Read MoreAre Gentlemen Twee movies actually good? Barring Paddington and Marcel, no, not technically. Most of them are solid 6.6s out of tens, but I keep coming back to them because I know they’re guaranteed to make me cry. I’m simply not above being manipulated by an old man’s face. In general, I feel quite allergic to Keep Calm And Carry On quaint Britishness, but stick a classically-trained actor and some antics in my face and that all seems to melt away.
These movies are also, of course, extremely family friendly – a relief for anyone who accidentally watched Saltburn with their grandma last Christmas. That’s why I must implore you to make space in your heart/on your screens for them over the holidays. Will you emerge a better person? I don’t think so. Will you learn something? Almost certainly not. But will you cry? I hope so.
Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features writer
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