Paperboy (16 page)

Gradually I came to see how such films worked their magic. The classic Harryhausen signatures, I noted in my diary, were as follows:

A dinosaur tethered with a rope, simply to make kids ask, ‘How did they do that?’

Mysteriously tousled fur, which indicated the problems of working with hairy animated models.

A climactic roaring fight between two mythical monsters, which ended with one biting the other’s neck.

I tried re-creating these creatures in the form of plasticine models, but the more I re-used the modelling clay the more it merged into one colour, which was usually a sort of foul-smelling brownish purple.

There was other children’s fare at the pictures, of course.
tom thumb
was a rare example of a successful English film that could stand beside
The Railway Children
and the horrible-but-indulgently-recalled-with-fondness
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.
tom thumb
’s creepy Yawning Man, with its resemblance to every child’s weirdest old relative, and a lengthy dance piece involving Russ Tamblyn somersaulting around a cupboardful of animated toys, lingered on in my dreams for years.

Other films disturbed, creating ruffles in my subconscious that could not easily be smoothed away. Moments in the most innocuous Disney films bothered me, usually ones involving sudden upheavals in home life. Every child got upset when brave hillbilly pooch Old Yeller died, because everyone related to the loss of a pet, but I found the idea of uprooted kids setting off in search of relatives deeply disturbing. I was also bothered by the way in which handsome American heroes seemed comfortable strutting around without shirts on, not
minding
who looked at them. I always wore a vest, a shirt, a jumper and a raincoat, topping the ensemble with a cap and a scarf, like a Victorian child actor.

My mother had decided I was unusually sensitive after seeing me reduced to tears by the animated version of
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
, not because the dogs had been kidnapped by Cruella De Vil but because their loss had really upset the maid. Was this normal behaviour in a child, she wondered?

It also bothered me when characters met in a restaurant and left before finishing their meal, or, worse still, when one ordered, argued with the other and left before the food arrived. I also hated characters half-shaving before wiping the rest of the soap off with a towel, or getting out of the shower and wrapping a towel around themselves without drying their backs properly. I hated them getting out of taxis and thrusting a note at the driver without saying thank you, or not giving a full address or time on the phone but just saying something like ‘Meet me at the station.’

Kath could see how this fastidiousness might derail more significant concerns, and wanted to keep me on track. She quietly decided it was time for me to leave behind kiddie fare. I would finally be allowed to see ‘A’ films.

The English attitude to film suffered from the weight of the nation’s theatrical past. Our cinemas had grown out of converted variety houses and music halls. In 1921,
The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse
had premiered at London’s Palace Theatre with thirty members of staff creating live sound effects with coconut shells, as if it was still a stage play.

Variety acts and one-reelers shared the same bill right up to the Second World War, and many theatres kept projection equipment to fill in between acts. After the War,
while
Hollywood was sending John Wayne
²
across the Nevada horizon, the English were busy transcribing the delicate slights of
The Importance of Being Earnest
to celluloid.
³
Only a handful of English films had any sense of landscape, and those that did had but a fragmentary connection with the past, which, in a country with an urban society more than two thousand years old, was a little odd.

For the rest of my life, the act of going to the cinema would trigger deep-seated childhood memories in me; not just the tang of cheap snouts and Jeyes Fluid,
⁴
but the whole experience of communal emotion. For a child who was imaginative and a bit lonely, the cinema was a place where barely acknowledged feelings crystallized into something real and vivid. I grew up with strange loyalties to certain films – why else would I and all my friends have sat through so many identical incarnations of James Bond? Attitudes to class percolated through English comedies in order to condescend to the working man, sneer at the nouveau riche, vilify management and pillory the State, until it was hard to work out who on earth I was supposed to empathize with.

But I needed to see English films because Hollywood didn’t reflect my world. I watched mystified as Californian kids went to school in sports cars, girls in eye make-up were branded ‘bad’, dads attended a weird ritual called Little League, people said, ‘Try to get some sleep, you look terrible’ when the person they were talking to looked fantastic, teenagers climbed into each other’s bedrooms
via
trellises, fathers called their daughters ‘Pumpkin’ and boys called their fathers ‘Sir’, black people didn’t mix with white people, police handcuffed you face-down for doing nothing wrong, wives always died instead of getting a divorce, and everyone shrieked and bellowed at each other at the tops of their voices instead of having normal, quiet conversations.

What was it with the brown paper grocery bags that had no handles? How were you meant to carry them? And there were all those guns. To children raised on
Dixon of Dock
Green
,
⁵
America seemed like the Wild West. Having been taught that displays of public emotion were a sign of innate vulgarity, the mix of violence and sentimentality I witnessed on the screen was thrilling and shameless.

All films were partly about recognition, so it mattered where they were set. It was great being able to recognize a local area when it appeared on screen, so films were also about geography. American movies often had a wonderful sense of location. Theirs was a lateral society, an open, sprawling, outdoor canvas upon which to paint colourful, exciting pictures. English films, by comparison, reflected an indoor sensibility. Where Americans rode and drove and waved and shouted and fired guns at the sky, the English sat and discussed and apologized and cupped their cigarettes inside their hands so as not to annoy the person next to them. This private indoor distinction, the careful attention to space and conversation, was one of the most noticeable traits in English films.

For me they acted as an alternative to the view from Hollywood, and even though many of them were truly
dreadful,
I was able to find fractured reflections of my life there, my language, my hopes and fears.

The gap that existed between British cinema and Hollywood became clear when I considered the word ‘pilot’. In the context of American film, I got John Wayne killing Japs. In the British equivalent, I got Terence Alexander muttering ‘Crikey’ and fondling the ends of his handlebar moustache.

The British studios had been built on London’s drab outskirts, and if their films reflected the past, they presented an image of a rapidly disappearing country: a world of chaps in sensible jumpers and strange hats, misty suburbs, empty roads and grimy canals, coffee-bar girls in pointy sweaters, spivs and dolly birds, jokes about pickled onions and wind, steam trains, bombsites, cheery constables armed with whistles, nurses in suspenders (often in drag), stationmasters, dowagers, vicars, workmen and bureaucrats. The received wisdom was that British films were constipated, class-ridden, conservative and vulgar, but I found them slightly magical, if only because I sensed they represented a world that was soon to vanish completely.

In the years that followed, my movie-going involved visiting cavernous damp auditoriums with names like Roxy, ABC, Forum, Bijou, Gaumont, Gaity, Victory, Eldorado, Tolmer, Essoldo, Embassy and Granada. Cinemas were everywhere. I came to revel in films that were populist, unfashionable, unfunny, forgotten, offbeat and very, very bad, because they were all concerned with telling English stories. Many of them had developed into series: the Hammers, the Carry Ons, the Cliff Richard films, the Doctor films, the Quatermass films, the Will Hays, the Arthur Askeys, the George Formbys, the Bonds, the horror anthologies, the Norman Wisdoms, the St Trinians and numerous other strands that wove
themselves
through the decades. All too often they scraped by on the goodwill of the entertainment-starved public and the barest of cinematographic credentials. Television could not compete; even
Carry On Nurse
was better than squinting at a picture through a ten-inch rectangle of thick glass. Little did I suspect that I would one day get the chance to watch it again on the two-inch screen of a mobile phone.

Of course at the age of eleven, glued to a horsehair chair, sucking a Jubbly in my school-regulation gabardine mac and interference-encouraging short trousers, I was hardly an image-saturated jade. Everything was new. When a movie character in a tense situation said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this’, ‘We should all try to get some sleep’ or ‘You search the basement, I’ll take a look around outside’, I did not think it was a cliché, I thought it was utterly original. When the soundtrack music boomed ominously and the heroine went off to wander about a basement full of dripping pipes, I, fragile, easily influenced and perched on my itchy seat as delicately as a piece of Dresden, was coated in a moist craquelure of fear, my attention dragged away from poking about in confectionery, my jaw slack with amazement.

I knew I had betrayed my beloved books, with their cracked spines and dusty pages, for their flashier, shinier cousins, but I didn’t care. By its very nature, seduction requires a loss of reason.

1
The only thing more exciting than this scenario would have been pirates versus aliens.

2
Real name Marion Morrison. You can’t have a butch cowboy star with a name like a girl and a supermarket.

3
The Americans were exploring wild new frontiers while we were working out how to say ‘A
handbag
?’.

4
A disinfectant whose smell is inextricably bound up with the smell of sick.

5
‘Evening all.’ It wasn’t much of a catchphrase, but after watching this TV series no child could pass a policeman without saying it.

16

The Big Picture: Part Two

I LOST MY
innocence in the damp smoky stalls of the last great palaces, the ones with interiors the size of bus garages. There was a post-war reek about those rows of curve-backed seats with ashtrays, the peeling art-deco ceilings lined with partially fused stars, the handful of silhouetted patrons sprouting out of the stalls like tombstones. Cinematically speaking, I was a child of the sixties, but still spent my time in the picture houses of the forties.

I read books on the history of film, and discovered that it had long been a risky business. Prior to a back-spool being invented for projectors, the highly flammable nitrate stock unwound into a wicker basket that would periodically burst into flame. On 4 May 1897, at the Paris Charity Bazaar near the Champs-Elysées, wood and canvas booths had been constructed in the style of a sixteenth-century town, and a cinematograph caught fire. One hundred and forty distinguished guests were burned alive. The cinema industry had already been having trouble finding favour with the public, but this high-profile disaster set it back years.

The cinema projector remained a dangerous item long after the invention of the back-spool, because it depended on the burning of a magnesium-alloy stick which illuminated the footage as it passed. The stick had to be wound forward manually by the projectionist as it burned down, and if the film jammed it blistered and ignited in the heat. This system remained in place until well into the sixties, and in some cinemas until much later. It seemed bizarre to spend so much money developing sophisticated film techniques, only to print them on to a flammable strip that had to be clawed through a clanking mechanical device the size of a Victorian boiler.

One evening, on my way in to see
Pirates of Blood River
, I picked up a recruitment leaflet at the ABC that said ‘Become a Cinema Manager!’ Inside the folded A4 sheet was a picture of a man in a two-tone lime-green polyester suit and matching tie, looking very pleased with himself. This is what the copy beside it said:

Your Schedule as a Cinema Manager