Dirk Bogarde: the rebellion of a reluctant pinup

The Odeon, Leicester Square, 1960. The red-carpet premiere of a film that will change the story of British film and British society. The lights are killed, the crowd falls silent. The roar of industrial machinery thrums from the speakers. And over the noise comes the voice of the hero, a Brylcreemed lathe-operator with greasy overalls and insolent good looks. "Don't let the bastards grind you down," says Dirk Bogarde, and with those words, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and its star give instant definition to the new decade.

In some fairly proximate parallel universe, this is how the 1960s might have begun. It could have happened here, too, if the owner of Pinewood studios had not been born into Methodism. To J Arthur Rank, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a book about beer and adultery, and he wasn't keen on either – particularly in a vehicle for the last big star held under contract by his tottering film outfit. So he returned the movie rights, no questions asked, to the novel's author, Alan Sillitoe. They were picked up by a brash new company founded by Tony Richardson and John Osborne, the lions of the Royal Court theatre, who cast a bright-eyed young Shakespearean called Albert Finney in the leading role – and the star of Doctor in the House was obliged to look for another project with which to destroy his wholesome reputation.

Bogarde died in the last year of the last century. He would have been 90 years old on Monday. For the last two decades of his life, however, cinema commanded very little of his attention. Instead, he became a prolific producer of witty but not particularly reliable memoirs – bestsellers in which he romanticised his childhood in a verdant swathe of the Thames Valley, gave a dubious account of his wartime experiences and poured gentle scorn on his former life as a matinee idol.

His film career, however, is in no danger of slipping from our cultural memory. That pretty-boy psychopath who guns down PC Jack Warner in The Blue Lamp; the sleekly charming Simon Sparrow in all those Doctor comedies; his angsty Sydney Carton, soulful before the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities; the sweatily menacing butler in The Servant, crushing James Fox into submission; the mournful sadist who lays hands on Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter. They live on. Not just as individual performances, but as evidence of a remarkable – and often troubled – life in the movies.

The story of Dirk Bogarde's war against himself is one of the great narratives of British cinema. It's the tale of a gifted young actor who became trapped in the smooth screen persona prescribed for him by his employers, and how he broke from it by embracing controversy, art and Europe. The killer blow came in 1960 when he joined the cast of a campaigning picture called Victim. ("I wanted him! I wanted him!" Bogarde declares, in the film's best-remembered scene, as his lawyer hero confesses his desire for a teenage runaway called Boy Barrett.) And when the credits rolled, so the story goes, all the girls who had swooned over him in the Doctor pictures and fantasised about being taken out by him for a drink at a Home Counties golf club, quietly took down their Dr Sparrow posters and redirected their desires towards Cliff Richard. It's an engaging story. And it's almost true.

A new box set of some of Bogarde's less well-regarded films is released next week; a present their star might not have received with good grace. For me, its contents demonstrate that taking the lead role in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning would hardly have taken Dirk Bogarde off in some new and unexpected direction. The frustration and the fury of the sort that rose from the stage of the Royal Court in the late 50s had been burning inside Bogarde for years. You can feel it as early as the 1949 picture Once a Jolly Swagman, in which he plays a figure who is often assumed to be a discovery of the kitchen-sink generation – a young production-line worker tormented by his aspirations, who pursues a disastrous sexual relationship with a more experienced woman.

Bogarde's Austerity Britain version of the Angry Young Man works in a lightbulb factory somewhere in south London. He sits listlessly under a vast mechanical carousel, from which hot balloons of glass are piped. He's supposed to prove each one with a tap from a metal rod, but the sports pages – and his dream of becoming a speedway racer – prevent him from applying himself too assiduously to that task. The dirt track, presided over by the gloriously untrustworthy Sid James, proves a road to ruin. The story is as much a cautionary tale about the exploitation of working-class athletes as This Sporting Life, but it's the attitude of Bogarde's biker that seems so prescient; the violent, unfocused nature of his disaffection. "Some people are never satisfied," he is warned. "They're always looking for trouble."

Once you've seen the tinge of anger in the Bogarde of 1949, it's hard not to detect it in his performances of any vintage – even in those pictures from the years in which he felt most imprisoned by his contract with the Rank Organisation. In Simba, for instance, he plays a white farmer in Kenya whose brother has been killed in the Mau Mau insurgency. In one extraordinary scene, he rounds on a Kikuyu doctor (Earl Cameron), whom he believes is implicated in the atrocities. Slicked with sweat, a sardonic smile twisting the left side of his mouth, Bogarde's farmer tells Cameron that whether he is guilty or not, it would probably be a good idea to have him put up against a wall and shot. Cameron rips open his doctor's coat to reveal that he possesses none of the ritual scars that would identify him as a member of the rebel group. Bogarde's eyes move unwillingly down. His lips quiver. But before his humiliation can truly flower, a group of British officers march briskly into the room. It is a typical Bogarde moment – predicated upon rage, the uneasy exchange of power, and the sense of something faintly sexual.

So what did Bogarde do, in the absence of Arthur Seaton? He went to Torremolinos to make a lavish western about a love-triangle between a 15-year-old French girl, an Irish priest and a bad, bad Mexican bandit called The Singer Not the Song. The star was keener on the project – partly because he was under the impression that Richard Burton or Peter Finch would be wearing the cassock, partly because it would allow him to appear on screen in a pair of tightly tailored leather trousers. When Rank foisted John Mills on the production, Bogarde became a spirit of vengeance. "I will make life unbearable for everyone concerned," he said. He was as good as his word.

The pain continued long after the crew had packed up and returned to Pinewood. At the post-screening lunch, critics sniggered loudly at those leather trousers and went home to write reviews that wondered whether The Singer Not the Song was about "the love that dare not speak its name". It now seems a film of such telegraphic queerness that it's hard to believe some of those schoolgirls' posters weren't unpinned months before Victim reached the cinemas. The Rank publicity department ballyhooed it, somewhat desperately, as "a new and powerfully different kind of motion picture story". But the monopoly on novelty and power had already been claimed by a picture that opened just weeks earlier – the picture that Rank had rejected on moral grounds.

Despite his turn in The Servant, Bogarde never became the pre-eminent face of the British new wave. Perhaps he was just too old. Or perhaps he boiled with the wrong kind of anger. The fury he committed to the screen was rarely the righteous kind. It is usually a product of something deeply felt but morally murky. In A Tale of Two Cities, he plays a man whose self-disgust is cured by a sharp metal blade and an act of moral self-sacrifice. His teenage gangster in The Blue Lamp despises authority, but, as he plays a gun across his girlfriend's face, seems to hate her more. In Simba, his hero hates Dr Karanja because he is a black man wearing a white coat. A line like "don't let the bastards grind you down" would not have spilled easily from his mouth. And this is one of the reasons why his work remains compelling. Even when he was playing the hero, Bogarde was usually one of the bastards.

Six Dirk Bogarde films – The Singer Not the Song, So Long at the Fair, Simba, Once a Jolly Swagman, The Spanish Gardener and Esther Waters – are out now on DVD.