Film Studies: You keep churning out the flops, Jeff - and we'll keep lapping them up

So be it - he was a big boy. Nothing would be changed. We'd still honour him as the American actor who made those interesting, dark movies that careerist actors avoided. And after all, it was understandable that an actor already in his fifties was giving some mind to his future and the way that residuals could hold off arthritis and support an attitude that often suggested he'd be happier just hanging out and taking quality photographs (his latest film, The Moguls, is out soon in the UK, but not yet in the US).

I have to admit that Jeff Bridges in person shows no sign of having heard of this army he inspires. He is the son of one actor, the brother of another, and I have been present at an awards dinner where he was taking every opportunity to promote the cause of his daughter. He was also happy at that occasion to talk about his photography. For years, on the sets of his films, he has used a special wide-angle camera (it has a CinemaScope frame) to take some of the great movie-making stills, pictures that know the chaos and the magic of a set. He says he does this to escape the boredom that goes with his job - or, shall we say, to counter the distress that afflicts a decent guy without the usual armour-plating of self-concern. Natural movie actors persist in the marvel of delighted self-discovery - it is not unlike staying young forever. Call it an illness - one which Jeff Bridges has never had.

So while, in person, Jeff Bridges never exactly gives the game away - he never chuckles that movie-acting is a pretty damn stupid business - still, he never owns up to his habit of making "non-hits". It's not exactly that they're flops: only a few have fallen that far, hardly more than a dozen. Maybe 15. No, it's rather that he prefers to make off-beat pictures, ones against the grain - difficult, doubting pictures, ones that are quietly attached to an archaic principle: that, once upon a time, movies were determined by the pain of grown men and women soaked in years of sadness and experience, and fairly sure that a similar crowd of pained people existed, to be referred to as "the audience".

So Jeff Bridges got hired on the idiot-free movies, the ones that weren't based on the myth of Robert Redford or the ones infected by the widespread public disease in America whereby a lot of fools thought they might be Redford. This has always been a clever trick. Jeff Bridges is almost alone in his Robert Mitchum-like urge to say as little as possible about his pictures. Don't explain, don't complain and don't apologise.

So, if you can remember them, consider these pictures far from hits, yet undeniable tributes to the gruff charm of Jeff Bridges, his perseverance and his abiding allegiance to being some kind of good guy (so long as you don't mention it): as the stupid young boxer in John Huston's Fat City; as the Starman, for John Carpenter, beguilingly in love with Karen Allen; as the central figure, ageing, failing but doing his best to be an honourable terror in Wild Bill; as the captain of the training schooner in the amazingly adventurous and noble White Squall; as the handsome wastrel in Cutter's Way - a nearly forgotten masterpiece by Ivan Passer; as one of the dumb cow boys in Robert Benton's Bad Company; as Duane, flashy but dull, in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, and in its sequel, Texasville; humanising Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; as a character named "Nick Ray" in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate; and doing his best to urge Barbra Streisand to stay cool in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Then shift to the pictures that are the citadel of Bridges' castle: Fearless, in which he is one of several people struck numb by having survived a plane crash; The Big Lebowski, in which the numbness is arrived at by other, dedicated forms of behaviour; the very nasty TheVanishing; Jagged Edge, in which his romantic gaze dares us and Glenn Close to ask whether he's psychotic; Tucker - the classic American movie about the triumph in failure; and The Fabulous Baker Boys, one of the most entertaining films ever missed by the public. I could go on, but I'm sure you're getting the point. Bridges is riveting yet casual; tough but gentle; humane and indifferent. It is an art or attitude based in being long-suffering.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'The Moguls' is released on 28 April