BWW Reviews: AN EVENING WITH ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, Lancaster Hotel, November 15 2014

Just how did he do it? The boy from Thal Austria, born into poverty as the smashed states of Mitteleuropa climbed out of the moral cesspit and ruined cities of World War Two, who rose to the top of not just one profession (bodybuilding), not even two (bodybuilding and film-starring) but three (bodybuilding, film-starring and politics). We were promised new insights from the man himself on stage (an hour late) with Jonathan Ross, but we didn't really get any. The man who cleared so many obstacles has erected an impressive one in front of himself.

What we did get was plenty of the All-American Dream from one of its greatest examples - an immigrant of course - who embraced the Land of Opportunity and took every one of them offered. He told us, quite a few times, that it was absolutely essential to have a vision (his epiphany came at the age of 15 reading an article about Yorkshire bodybuilder extraordinaire Reg Park) and then let nothing stand in your way. To coin an unfortunate phrase (though one impossible not to think about during these inspirational monologues in a room filled with over a thousand fanatical supporters, many tongue-tied merely by His Presence) Arnold's life truly is a triumph of the will.

While it is easy to admire the achievements (and let me say right now that The Running Man, Total Recall and Terminators I and II would make my Top 50 Films with plenty to spare), it's harder to admire the man. Why? It's the absence of nuance, the strange combination of charisma unattached to empathy, the zeroing in on the individual as the sole means of salvation that grates. The man may have plenty of the political maverick about his (especially on climate change) but he is a Republican after all.

His credo of taking risks in life, ignoring the naysayers because, if you fail and fall, you can pick yourself right up and start over, should surely be coloured by the financial crash of 2008 (when he was Governor of California, so he didn't miss it). That catastrophe was caused by exactly his approach to risk, the traders aiming higher and higher confident that they could always dust themselves down if they fell, ignoring the lesson of Icarus. It was the rather less-starry Gordon Brown whose plan put cash back in the world's ATMs and it's the hoi-polloi who were asked to pick the financial sector off the floor. The towers of Mammon did not fall, but the homeless now sleep in their doorways.

We learned a little about his kiss (or rather waltz) and make up with Sylvester Stallone after their 80s feuds and the fact that his father's beating of him as a child was crucial to making him the man he is today - but no word about whether he advises that parental approach to others. But not much got inside the carapace of achievement, can-do and glitzy star-quality. That said, Jonathan Ross is no Oprah Winfrey and this was no occasion to get under the Schwarzenegger skin - perhaps we never will.

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