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From Chaplin to Selleck, film stars have been festooned with fuzz. Not now. Daniel Bettridge mourns the demise of the mo
Venice, Sundance, Cannes; to the list of the world's great movie fiestas we can now add another, after it was announced earlier this month that the first ever moustache film festival was set to twirl its way onto the cinema circuit. The event, which will take place in New England this March, is part of Stache Pag - the eastern seaboard's annual celebration of facial fuzz. Organised by a group called No Umbrella Media, the festival aims to raise money for charity and offer new ways to "better celebrate moustaches and to maximise the moustache man's moment of expression".
It might sound like a joke, and with a $100 prize on offer it probably is; but isn't it about time we started celebrating the role that bristly upper lips have played in the story of film? After all, moustaches have played an important role in movies down the years - in fact, it's possible to trace a long, furry, line throughout the entirety of cinema history.
Think back to the earliest days of cinema, and a string of moustachioed movie stars spring immediately to mind: Charlie Chaplin's trademark toothbrush 'tache, Clark Gable's shapely chevron, Douglas Fairbanks's neatly coiffured caterpillar, and Errol Flynn's impossibly manicured mo. There's even Groucho Marx's greasepaint smear, an affected attempt at a movie-star moustache which he later covered up with real facial fuzz.
All of these men are icons of the silver screen who are as well-remembered for what graced their upper lips as the...