Why can't men just be men?

Today's buff, muscular movie stars are giving ordinary chaps like Tim Stanley a complex

Hollywood sets unreasonable standards of physical beauty for women, but what about us poor men? The physiques of Zac Efron or Brad Pitt look suspiciously like the product of special effects - bulging muscles defined to the point of pain - and, for some peculiar reason, none of them have any body hair.

Every trip to the cinema leaves this average Joe feeling rather depressed. My own physique is classically English: bow legs, scrawny arms and the torso of an inflated balloon.

It wasn't always this way. There was a time when Hollywood stars looked a bit more like the rest of us. Consider that Roger Moore was still playing James Bond when he was 58. Despite the flabby chest and turkey neck, he still seemed to have no trouble attracting women. By contrast, the contemporary Bond is played by the man-mountain that is Daniel Craig - with a compact, muscular body that might make men and women weep for very different reasons. How did we get to the point where Hollywood is as demanding of men as it is of women? And is it entirely healthy?

Of course, there have always been musclemen in the movies. One of the pin-ups of the '30s and '40s was Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympian athlete who swung into women's hearts playing Tarzan. In the '70s, Italian stallion Sylvester Stallone made a screen debut in a soft-core porn film, The Party at Kitty and Stud's, before playing the boxer who wouldn't stay down in Rocky.

But the muscle-bound stars of old were genre characters rather than all-rounders, and whenever they tried to break free of the sweaty-men genre, critics were unimpressed.

Most pre-millennial actors were athletic or healthy rather than buff, while the more "manly" stars tended to be defined by rugged good looks, rather than brawn. Physically, it is hard to imagine what Ingrid Bergman saw in the chain-smoking Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942), or why Audrey Hepburn, 34, so desperately wanted to snag the 59-year-old Cary Grant in Charade (1963).

Those actors who did draw big crowds when taking their tops off were permitted to go on doing so long after they had lost their youthful physique. The Charlton Heston of Ben-Hur (1959) was considerably more defined than the Heston of Earthquake (1974), yet the age of his onscreen lovers remained the same.

The problem was that movies were made by male-dominated studios in a sexually conservative era. Up to the early '60s, the ideal woman was still perceived to be chaste and therefore their capacity to lust was undervalued by the marketing boys. Some male stars still managed to draw crowds on sex appeal (from Rudolph Valentino to James Dean), but they were rarely subject to the same degree of objectification as female actors. The sexual revolution of the '60s was supposed to change all this. Suddenly men and women were encouraged to show more flesh and enjoy each other on more equal terms. But Hollywood took a long time to catch up.

The Bond series is a classic example. It's remarkable that Michael Gambon was considered for the role of 007 in Diamonds Are Forever (1971). Gambon is supposed to have told producer Harry Saltzman that he was unsuitable for the part because he was too bald, had too many chins and had "tits like a woman".

The fear of appointing a man with a little extra weight didn't stop the studio paying Sean Connery $1.5-million to return to the role instead. In one scene, he undresses in front of a vixen and she exclaims: "Why James, there's more to you than meets the eye!" The uncharitable might answer: "Yes, about two stone." When the thinning Connery returned in Never Say Never Again (1983), it looked like he had grown a whole new head of hair.

So how did we get from Connery to Craig, from hairy, slack leading men to hard-bodied models? The answer is marketing. Producers have tried to turn cinema into an event.

The impact on the quality of the movies is measured in a loss of wit and charm. It's a controversial observation, but I've found the recent Bond films most un-Bond-like. They're ultra-violent and humourless; bone cracking against bone as Mr Craig unleashes his taut body like a whip.

There was a time when Bond was a man in a safari suit with a gun in one hand, a Martini in the other, a cigarette in the mouth and a cheeky glint in his eye. On skis or in space, he was a gentleman whom the ordinary punter could both admire and aspire to be. If Roger Moore is still available to play the part, I would pay good money to see it.

©The Sunday Telegraph