Fiona McCade: Why women can ruin a good movie

Bullitt is a brilliant film. It has everything you could want in a thriller: a labyrinthine plot, a super-cool cop hero, an icy baddie, the car chase to end all car chases and a hummable theme tune. It’s nigh on perfect, except for one thing: there’s a girl in it.

Jacqueline Bisset – for it is she – appears in approximately three scenes. First, she has a shirt on. The second time, she gives Bullitt a lift. The third time, she makes him stop by the side of the road because she’s suddenly become upset that he’s a policeman, despite being his live-in girlfriend and knowing full well that that’s his job.

Bullitt may be superb, but everyone I know fast-forwards the Bisset bits, because she ruins it. She absolutely and completely RUINS it. She slows the action down, she gets in the way, she simply shouldn’t be there. Every time I reach for the remote, I’m thinking: why is there a girl in this film? What’s the point of her? Was another explosion too expensive, so they thought, hey, let’s insert some eye-candy instead? If they wanted to show his caring side, couldn’t they have just given him a dog?

But hey, that’s just me. Helen Mirren, on the other hand, probably thinks there should be a sequel to Bullitt, in which Jackie B gets to natter on, to at least three girlfriends, about how tough it is living with a cop who doesn’t talk enough and spends way too much on petrol.

Last week, Dame Helen complained that the new film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was overly boy-centric: “How many women were in that? I mean, come on. There weren’t any women in the Seventies? The secret service always had a huge number of women working for them, and they played major roles in real life. But they were ignored for this film.”

Helen, sweetie, the trouble is twofold. First, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not a documentary about MI6. It is a film of a novel that doesn’t have many women in it. Second, and I don’t expect you to bond with me over this, some films are better without women.

No, let me rephrase that: some films are better when the majority of characters are from one gender. I don’t much care which one predominates, but there’s no harm in occasionally sorting the boys from the girls.

Take The Great Escape for instance. Fantastic film, and all the more fantastic for being totally female-free. You just know that if James Coburn had bumped into some bint, he’d never have made it to Spain.

Equally, The Women (the glorious 1939 original, not the 2008 debacle) is a cinema classic, despite there not being a Y chromosome in sight. However, when they remade it in 1956, added some actual blokes and called it The Opposite Sex, it died a grisly celluloid death.

Many of the best war films have no female characters, and that’s fine. There’s nothing more annoying than having a pointless girl turn up to show a bit of leg and establish the hero’s heterosexuality. But there are also some excellent war films where the main characters are women (Charlotte Gray, Black Book, Sophie Scholl), and this is fine too. The problems start when a woman is parachuted (sometimes literally) into a war film – or any film, for that matter – with no good reason.

I think what Dame Helen really meant to say was: “I’m jealous as hell that there isn’t a cracking ensemble piece like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for women,” but randomly shoehorning superfluous actresses into dramas that are naturally and organically Boys’ Own really isn’t going to make things any better. Like Liv Tyler’s massively over-represented elvish bore in Lord of the Rings, it’ll only make most of us reach for the fast-forward button.

So horses for courses. I’m relieved that the makers of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy didn’t feel the need to give Smiley a girlfriend who was always giving him lifts and getting upset about all the unpleasant espionage going on.

Anyway, Dame Helen, remind me: how many men were there in Calendar Girls?