POOR GREGORY Peck’s right handprint has been burnt with a cigarette. Used as a handy ashtray by some fan in Cannes, he suffers the ignominy of being within reach of an overflowing bin. He who was once Captain Ahab on the cruel sea now flounders several nautical yards inland. Washed up in the south of France, he finds the Côte d’Azur can come with a cost.
Peck is among many fine film stars and directors whose handprints are set in the sun-baked Esplanade Président Georges Pompidou. They form a seafront chain of fame, a yellow-brick road of Hollywood and European screen icons. Some names you will know, others you will not. The prints of stubby fingers and meaty palms make something terribly human of their celebrated owners. You can put your own hand over the empty craters of Claude Chabrol, Wim Wenders or Roman Polanski, making mediated contact with films that have fed you for years, maybe even changed you. There is a dark sense of dead stars reaching up to you out of the ground.
The elements are taking a toll on these heroic handprints. Feet from flanking benches and the wheels of prams with sunburnt babies grind them down. Many are filthy with the grime you would expect a hand to catch if left outstretched and open on the ground. Looking down at Chabrol, Dennis Hopper and Louis Malle and others deceased, it’s hard to see these hand marks as other than proxy graves. They are sunken, not so much 6ft as 6cm under. There is something shoddy that makes stardom itself fade. And the Cannes esplanade becomes a Sunset Boulevard of broken dreams.
Parallel to the film vultures at Cannes is a second tourist flow that moves towards shops marked Prada and Gucci and Anne Fontaine. Some visitors look like oligarchs who have put ashore to spend cash. Others look more used to ogling window displays from the outside. Cannes is a town of restaurants, yachts, buoyant wealth and imagined gold bollards. But there are families smiling. Somebody pushing a broken pram, a clan sharing a baguette ham sandwich.
In this easy holiday air, kids are acquiring ice cream memories that will last like permafrost.
But you like films, non? Join the nearby queue to mount the famed red-carpeted steps of Cannes film festival premiers. Take photos in your vicarious stab at stardom. Working your way around the prints, it feels like a privileged but joyless parade. You notice repetition. Surely you saw David Lynch’s prints earlier? Is that really Claude Chabrol again? Maybe it’s just the south of France heat. Blame the suncream your skull has sweated off.
Everything is getting blurred and, in a sudden underground movement, the handprints of Gregory Peck seem to form two fists, each packing an epic punch. Peck’s hands tear him up out of the Cannes pavement. And he clambers on board a nearby boat. He is back as would-be great white whale killer in John Huston’s 1956 movie of the Melville novel Moby Dick. Taking command, he is Captain Ahab again and orders a crew to sail due west. Braving the squalls, he takes us to the nearby port of old Marseilles to drink pastis and marvel at the rue Vacon market.
Marseilles is chalk to Cannes’s over-pasteurised cheese. It teems with a mix of things, from misery to mirth. It’s about paydays and bills and buses. It’s about forklift trucks transporting huge mounds of mint leaves. The port city’s pulse constantly quickens and enthrals the visitor. For three days now, the sea has been choppy. The tourist boats can’t get out around the bay. Sailings to the prison on Ile d’If are cancelled. The coves and porous rock formations stand unseen. Way out along the harbour wall where the city is developing something vast and commercial, an old Arab says he has been waiting for a ship from Algiers. It will bring him his family. But sailings are cancelled so he’ll keep on waiting.
Here the Côte d’Azur feels different. There is a howl in the wind, a violence bedded in the waves. The white spray spits out a small fish of misfortune. It lands gasping at your feet. As the Algerian walks away, you gently kick the creature back in, apologising to it as soon as you do. And through these seas swam an escaped convict to become the Count of Monte Cristo.
As Ahab, Peck would no doubt have enjoyed Marseilles. As would many stars whose handprints are sunk in Cannes. For Marseilles caters to a sense of the sea. Huston shot some of Moby Dick around Youghal. In advance of production, he wanted a good doctor to attend his crew of film-makers and white-whalers. One who could play poker and force down a tumbler or two of whiskey. On personal recommendation, he called the late Dr John Hegarty, who would go on to become the psychiatrist in Portlaoise hospital. But Hegarty reluctantly had to say no as he had just started his first permanent job. His daughter, a translator, has appropriately done a lot of work on sailing magazines since.
Now my midday heat-induced visions have worn off. Gregory Peck has to get back to Cannes. As Ahab, he can easily sail against the tide. But against time? Perhaps not. For while handprints can remain, time is what scuppers us all.