A Life Not In Films

The first film I ever saw at the cinema was "The Jungle Book". So I'm told. I don't remember a thing about it because I fell asleep. I was quite young at the time. This would be a re-release - the film originally came out in 1967 - I'm old, but come on. 

I remember going to Saturday morning matinees on a brown, scrappy field in a place called Mileoak. It was a cinema screen (or could it have been projected onto a sheet?) in a canvas tent, and we all sat on elevated wooden planks to watch "Champion the Wonder Horse" or "The Rescuers". I remember being both terrified and jealous: bigger boys spent the entire show screaming and throwing pick 'n' mix at the screen. Wasting sweets! I couldn't imagine such decadence. No one watched the films - it was an excuse for loud delinquency. After a very short while I didn't want to go back. 

"Star Wars"* came out when I was six. And it went in again, as the Higgins' never went to the pictures. I was desperate to see it, but I was also practical. I knew we had no money. We never went anywhere or did anything. There were no holidays, beyond rare day trips to Littlehampton or Bramber Castle, a motte-and-bailey ruin, and a relic of the delightfully named Rape of Bramber. I spent most of my time there climbing the sandy slopes of the motte, imagining what it would be like to storm a Medieval castle.  There was a tiny museum there, full of stuffed Victorian mice in schoolroom dioramas. The seventies really was a long time ago. So I never got to see "Star Wars" or "The Empire Strikes Back" at the cinema, and I never got the toys other people had, the Millennium Falcon models or Bobba Fett figurines. And that was fine. It was just something other, richer people had, like football or sweets or cars or first hand clothes. **

A film I was particularly taken with, and which haunted my childhood, was "The Seven Faces of Dr Lao", which I would have seen on TV. Directed by George Pal (director of "John Henry and the Inky Poo"(1946) and written by Charles Beaumont of "Twilight Zone" fame, "Dr Lao" is squeamish viewing now, as part of its progressive lesson - that racism is bad - is given by Tony Randall in yellow-face. I didn't know that as a child - I thought that Dr Lao was a Chinese guy, in much the same way I thought Masaaki Sakai from "Monkey" spoke English with a slight accent, instead of Japanese. I took things at face value - I'm not even sure I got that blind Tiresias, Medusa and Pan were all Tony Randall as well, I just liked the scary bits. Pan's sweaty dance is feverish and dizzying. The reveal of the Medusa's face is a shock, as is the woman who turns to stone, but it's the end where a tiny fish in a bowl turns into a giant seven headed dragon - all of the faces of Dr Lao - that stayed in my memory, clung to it, and made me want to track this unloved and now horribly dated film down. It was exactly as I remembered it. That ending has the queasy power of a fragmentary dream. The connective tissue is gone, but the limbs still twitch and throb grotesquely. 

I nearly got to see "Grease" when I was eight, as we were supposed to go for a friend's birthday party. But there were queues around the block, and his mum couldn't be arsed, so we went over the road to the Dolphinarium, to see clever aquatic mammals being tortured in pools of their own piss, as was the style of the time. This was vexing, as I was aware of both pop music and blondes at this point, and had a hard crush on Sandy, whom I knew from the "You're the one that I want" video. I had to go crawling back to Barbara Good who had been my first love. But Barbara Good never had to be sewn into her trousers, and she never advised Tom to "Tell me about it, stud", as she was normally just banging on about the "chick-uns" and brewing parsnip wine. (So much more Team Barbara these days) 

I was particularly annoyed as I'd been to the Dolphinarium the week before. From the seal house I was able to observe strangely dressed men running along the promenade screaming, stopping, going back and doing it again. Years later I worked out they were filming "Quadrophenia", but at the time it was completely baffling. 

We went on holiday once, when I was either twelve or thirteen, a package holiday to a hotel called the Pricipe Sol. I've forgotten so many important, useful things in my life, but I remember a hotel in Torremolinos I haven't been to in 38 years. And I've just checked - it's still there! I mean, hotels are quite durable but they could have re-badged it and they haven't. Am I sentimental enough to return? No, it'd be hell on earth. It was weird and exciting the first time: hippies with guitars and skinny stray cats everywhere. In the town, not the hotel. The hotel had men in frilly shirts and moustaches playing "I Just Called To Say I Love You" on a Yamaha Portasound. The smell of chlorine and Tom Collins. Rissoles. Now it will have been consumed by the sports holidaying, pints-for-breakfast hearties of the Costa del Golf. I expect the skinny cats are long gone. 

I did see two films at a cinema club with my Dad there. The first was "The Life of Brian" which I'm quite surprised to say he was fine with. Not a flicker out of him for either the supposed mockery of Christ (he'd been a steward at the Pope's recent English visit) or the exposure of Graham Chapman's old chap. The other film we saw was "The History of the World Part 2" by Mel Brooks. The only sound from my Dad was a sort of disappointed sigh during a sketch depicting "The Origins of Art Criticism" whereby one caveman urinated freely over another's cave painting. "Oh dear!" said my Dad, more for my benefit than through any real sense of horror. He was a Mel Brookes fan. His favourite scene in all cinema was the "beans-round-the-campfire" one from "Blazing Saddles", which would never fail to leave him puce and wet-eyed with mirth. 

The first film I properly remember seeing in the cinema was "The Return of the Jedi", which isn't very cool. I would have seen "A New Hope" on the telly by then, but to this day I'm not sure I've ever seen "The Empire Strikes Back" all the way through, though that's supposed to be the best one. I've seen the "Family Guy" version, so I've got the gist. I was visiting my cousins in London and staying in their massive house in Barnes (you could still see the bedraggled glam-bunting wrapped around the tree that killed Marc Bolan - maybe you still can). They had no idea what to do with me. My cousin Clare knew I liked to draw and she was working for Andrew Neil at The Sunday Times, (is this right? It seems like something she'd do) so she brought me into the office to meet the resident political cartoonist: a fat man with a beard who had no idea what to do with me either. He showed me his drawings - classy political caricatures with big heads and small bodies - but I didn't know who anyone was, and didn't have any questions. So I just sat in the corner. The next day I was dumped at the cinema, but I wasn't complaining. "Return of the Jedi" was great: space-sword fights, monsters, Princess Leia garroting an inter-galactic gangster in her bra and pants; Yoda's ghost by a campfire. I wasn't bothered by Ewoks even then, but the whole thing was pretty good. But it wasn't the only film I saw: "Octopussy" was on, as well. 

People slag off "Octopussy" and with good reason. It's really long and boring. It's all about Faberge eggs and circuses. Steven Berkoff is a really bland villain with an "off" button between the eyes. Roger Moore is far too old and literally dressed as a clown for about half of it. At the climax of the film a septuagenarian appears in a Union Jack hot air balloon -  a counter-intuitive move at best for the British Secret Service. None of this is incorrect. But I don't care: "Octopussy" means far more to me now than "Return of the Jedi" ever did. It's camp old nonsense vs a tawdry morality play full of polyrythmic teddy bears. Roger was 56 when he made this film and it wasn't even his last one! He looks like he'd have trouble getting the lid off a jar of Hellman's. He's wrong for the violence, the sex scenes, and even running for a train looks too much for him, but his hair is immaculate throughout. Bulletproof. Maud Adams is back for a second Roger Moore Bond outing, which is a bit of a swizz, and she's called Octopussy, implying she has a surfeit of fannies, which never comes up as a plot point. And I think one of Pan's People is in this, placing it in a cinematic continuum with "The Stud"***. It has charm. Or it's knock-kneed, stiff and wheezing, and I've mistaken that for charm. And that's called projection.     

That's less than ten films in the first fifteen years of my life. Not the standard story for a cineaste, is it? I expect Edgar Wright was a bit more focused. Normally they've got a cinecam at the age of nine, and are making films of ever evolving sophistication for the rest of their lives. But I never had anything like a camera growing up. Beyond felt-tips, computer paper and the occasional vintage Beano book, I had nothing going on. My brother made films, in fact. Much later on. And they were pretty good ones. He had a big gang of friends who all showed up and acted in them. He must have had charisma or something. I don't have charisma, so I formed a band. Being the singer in a band is a fabulous substitute for a lack of personal magnetism. 

But I was always quietly obsessed with films. Films that were on the telly. My video tapes of the time were chock full of stolen wonders. I loved everything about them: the furry patina of video tape, the sea-spray elisions between programs, the captured adverts - strange capitalism from a distant star - pop videos, studies of the Vienna Secession, Snub TV, Shock Corridor, If...Riders of the Dawn, Mystery Train, Eyes Without a Face, Eraserhead, Buffalo 66, The Other Side of Midnight, Fry and Laurie, Night of the Demon, The Old Grey Whistle Test, A Matter of Life and Death, Crimewave, Drowning by Numbers, The Spiral Staircase, Mondo Rosso, The Fly, Jubilee, The Knee Plays, Dead Head, Max Headroom, Vampires of Venice, The Chart Show, The Quatermass Conclusion, Eurotrash... 

Later, when being in a band proved not to be as lucrative as anticipated, I got a bad job in an office and started buying my own videos. After that I moved on to DVDs and Blurays, of which I have far too many. And never enough. 

Somewhere along the way, cinema became my thing. I'm very partisan - I only like the films I like, so I still haven't bothered with "The Empire Strikes Back". And this remake of "Escape to Witch Mountain" I'm currently watching, is a travesty, despite Carla Gugino being in it. The original was charming, with two space children playing a magic harmonica to a crusty old man in a camper van. In this, The Rock plays an ex-services Las Vegas cab driver who meets a couple of Aryan superkids in perennial darkness. It's basically every thing that's wrong with modern films. No harmonica, not enough Carla Gugino. 

I like film as facts; I like that these people were there, doing this, and infusing the film stock with their  subliminal neuroses, all the involuntary stuff of their 20th Century lives. Cinema is all tells - the tics and nods, the earlobe tugging. It's humanity thinking it looks good but its skirt is tucked into its knickers, it's fly at half mast. All those Ealing films with children screaming through bombsites, the cold war burnt into the Sixties and Seventies like a black silhouette on a wall. Explosions of hair as brylcreemed tresses mushroomed during black and white fistfights. The sound of those woody bar-room brawls on cheap sets; those unmistakable scuffling noises pressed into the memory. The 1940's stars still being caricatured in Looney Tunes in the late 80's - you'd switch over from "Luna" or "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" and see Jimmy Durante being lampooned as big beaked cartoon crow. I love the stuff of cinema. Its accumulated strangeness, its denial of its past, its self-hatred and inability leave things alone. Its crassness, its quackery, its endless missteps, its totality, its majesty. Cinema is a collected unconscious, a dream of the 20th Century we refuse to wake up from. It's better, bigger than "Star Wars".

*Episode 4, apparently. 

** We didn't stay poor. There is no poverty porn here. We had food and heat and a house always. By the time we moved to Basingstoke my dad was doing pretty well. From that point forth my trousers had known no other bums. And wouldn't again for several years. 

***It's Cherry Gillespie in this one, Sue Menhennick is in "The Stud". For extra bonus points Suzanne Danielle plays "Disco Dancer/ Woman in Toilets" in the latter.