Rattle these days has as much to say about the centre of the repertory as he always did about its margins. That will certainly have bought some Berlin Philharmonic votes.For the moment, the most interesting thing about Rattle’s appointment is the burst of national euphoria that accompanied the anouncement. His photograph displaced the usual run of politicians, footballers and Kosovan refugees on the front pages of the national press – quite rightly if, as many people think, this is the top job in the music world. But serious musicians rarely get that kind of coverage: their CBEs and knighthoods pass unnoticed in the wake of OBEs to soap stars.So the Rattle job, presumably, has touched some kind of national nerve: a recognition, at long last, that the arts in this country do matter and can provide the basis for an honourable British influence throughout the world. And in particular I think the job has touched a nerve among the young musicians in this country.

Serious music these days seems to lean toward the geriatric: audiences on sticks and Zimmer frames, and pundits telling us the end is nigh. With Rattle in Berlin there promises to be a new tomorrow some of us had barely hoped for And of that I’m pretty confident, so you can hold me to it Sort of.. The American Film Institute has just announced the results of its poll of movie people as to who were the 50 “Greatest Screen Legends”. The results were predictable, which may be why neither the poll nor the wretched TV show that went with it attracted much attention. The top 10 males were Bogart, Grant, Stewart, Brando, Astaire, Fonda, Gable, Cagney, Tracy, Chaplin. For the women, the names were Hepburn (K), Davis, Hepburn (A), Bergman, Garbo, Monroe, Taylor, Garland, Dietrich, Crawford.

All of which gives you a picture of the modern bias in film history

So long as we’re quite sure what “legend” means. Is it simply stardom, box-office power, or endurance? More or less, all those names – and most of the people in the 50 – stand up today and appeal to the majority of voters who must have been people born after 1940 and raised on current notions of who has survived. Only that could explain the absence of Rudolph Valentino (his funeral was the biggest in movie history), Lon Chaney and Ronald Colman (true giants of the 1920s), Hope and Crosby (dominant box-office figures from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, and both also stars of radio). Indeed, Crosby was once the triple-threat giant of show business – movies, radio, records – yet he is nowhere in the top 25 men. Nor will you find Hope, Colman, Chaney or – I can scarcely credit this – Mickey Rooney (box-office champ from 1936 to 1945, dynamic screen presence, and the epitome of instantly identifiable uniqueness).
Turn to the ladies and you realise that while Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish are there, the list omits Gloria Swanson, Clara Bow, Janet Gaynor and Marie Dressler who were major attractions in an age when, proportionately, far more people went to the movies than do so now.

But there are later aberrations: Lauren Bacall is number 20 among the ladies, while Doris Day is omitted. Day was a major star through the 1950s, and the world’s top draw in the early 1960s. Bacall never had a big following, and it could be argued that she was only really “Bacall” in two films (To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep) made with “Bogey”.But bear with those quotation marks a moment They tell us something instructive. I grieve for Doris Day and the ignorance that regards her as old-fashioned. But “Bacall” has a case, even if it only has two films as proof. A “legend” is a story, a tale, a fictional pattern; it is a message that survives through the ages.

Maybe “Bacall” was just a 19- year-old being manipulated by Howard Hawks, as she fell in love with “Bogey”, or even Bogart, the humble Humphrey behind the legend. But “Bacall” in those films is something the world still loves – a foxy sexpot who seems far older in what she knows, and who will do whatever the guy wants He just has to whistle. It may not be respectable – but it’s a message we understand.More than that, “Bogey” could easily have missed his own meaning, if not for “Bacall”. Humphrey Bogart was in pictures a dozen years before anyone got his point. He was a mere tough guy: he snarled, he leered, he sometimes whined when he was getting his come-uppance. But he was no match for Cagney or Edward G Robinson (number 24). Then, in the early 1940s, he did The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra and Casablanca, and we learnt to see that “Bogey” was “really” tough, laconic, a loner, smart, sarcastic, hard to reach, but a sucker for dames.