If you’re feeling indecisive about what to watch over the festive season, simply look for one thing as you scroll.
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.
“I’ve never heard of that,” you’re probably growling – and that’s because I just made it up. And yet there’s no denying that Gentleman Twee does in fact exist. Beyond the (pivotal) coats, ties and caps, the genre is characterised by a few key things.
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.
Where did these gentlemen come from? Perhaps after the story of a stuttering King George VI, The King’s Speech, won four Oscars in 2011, filmmakers realised we all love sad men in ties with a side serving of grave peril. When The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel became an unexpected hit a year later, it may have signalled a nation’s fondness for fictional pensioners. Since then Gentlemen Twee has become a hardy staple of British cinema to which I’m hooked.
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).
Jim Broadbent isn’t necessary – but he definitely helps. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, released in 2023, is Gentleman Twee; it follows a man who walks for months to reunite with a colleague dying of cancer. Then there’s 2014’s Paddington, whose plot I surely need not recount, and in which Broadbent is twinkly old antique shop owner Mr Gruber. Broadbent also starred in 2020’s The Duke, a true story about an elderly art thief. You may notice that despite being polite, the gentlemen in Gentleman Twee movies are not necessarily obedient – they are, in many ways, above the law.
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 MoreAlthough understandably light on comedy, this film masters the idea of following a central, gentle man. There are some things that must never, ever feature in a Gentleman Twee film: namely sex, and more generally, women. No offence to women, who I both respect and am, but our version of twee-ness is ultimately too sickly, all tea cosies and tea dresses and other stuff to do with tea.
Are 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.
Gentleman Twee works so well because the in-universe twee is often incidental and accidental, not a deliberate aesthetic choice by our main men. This is why the overcoats are so crucial: they’re always so heart-achingly shabby. “Can coats be forlorn?” is not a question anyone would need to ask after laying eyes on these sartorial movie stars.
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.
In an encouraging sign of the genre’s health, next April we’ll see a suited Steve Coogan rescue an orphaned penguin in The Penguin Lessons. Hopefully Gentleman Twee will, like a senior citizen on an unexpected and heartwarming mission, continue to thrive for many more years.
Amelia Tait is a London-based freelance features writer
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