It's Only a Movie Read online

  Strangely, the only scene that I can actually remember watching – that I can replay in what Tropic Thunder’s ‘Simple Jack’ calls ‘mah head movies’ – is a sequence which appears to have nothing to do with fiery mountains or thundering ships, the very elements which would doubtless have appealed to an enthralled six-year-old boy making an early foray into a picture palace.

  Steven Spielberg once told me that he was crushingly disappointed when taken to see the movie The Greatest Show on Earth as a kid to discover that, despite the posters, it wasn’t a ‘real’ circus at all – merely an image projected on to a flat screen behind a tatty velveteen curtain. Yet when that curtain drew back, and giant phantasmagorial moving pictures started dancing before his eyes, he was transfixed, not least by the spectacular train wreck which was the movie’s hi-tech action highlight. I’m pretty certain that my reaction to Krakatoa would have been identical, but while Spielberg can still describe in detail the delicious terror of watching that train roll and plunge toward metal-grinding catastrophe, I can summon no such recollections of witnessing molten lava spew forth from a volcano while airships dangled perilously in mid-air. In fact, if you wait there a moment, I’ll just pop over to YouTube, where someone has almost certainly uploaded the most memorable moments of Krakatoa (illegal, but useful) and see if they ring any bells. Won’t be a moment … Righto, I’m back. You still there? Good. Sorry to have kept you waiting but it was worth it because, as I suspected, all the key scenes were indeed there (volcanoes, boats, waves, etc.) along with a trailer which reprised the most action-packed moments and I honestly can’t remember seeing any of them before.

  What I do remember, with the certainty of Noah deciding that umbrella stocks were going up, is this: a wounded, handsome man, is lying in his sickbed, unable to move (I think his leg has been damaged) but with his cavalier spirit clearly intact. In my mind he has a moustache, but that may well be wishful thinking; I have never been able to grow proper facial hair, and am therefore unreasonably impressed by anyone who can.

  Anyway, the man is somehow incapacitated and is being tended to by a woman in a russet dress with reddish hair piled high upon her head. There is some kind of repressed playful tension between these two characters: he is roguish; she is demure; they are discreetly flirty. At some point she turns to walk away from him, moving from screen left to right, his head being at the far left of the picture, the camera at a low angle from the side of his bed. As she moves away, he reaches and slyly catches hold of the end of a piece of stringy lace which criss-crosses the back of her dress like a corset. She walks a couple of paces until the lace pulls tight, and then she turns to look back at him, with a knowing expression on her face. And then …

  And then?

  Who knows?

  Does pulling the piece of lace (or string) make the dress fall off? I think not, certainly not in a U-certificate feature which had been passed as fun for all the family. In fact, surely pulling the lace would merely make it more secure, so that the woman’s clothing would become even more impregnable than before? The scene could hardly be described as ‘racy’, even by the comparatively prudish standards of 1969. And yet it sticks in my mind in a manner which is so clearly primal and protean that I am almost embarrassed to have to write it down like this. I’m certain that anyone with a GCSE pass in elementary psychoanalysis could write a long and lurid essay on the significance of that moment in the evolution of my personality, doubtless concluding that I have grown into an S&M fetishist with a weakness for restraining straps and a side order of cross-dressing to go. But what’s more significant than any evidence of traumatic erotic displacement is the fact that I’m not even certain that this scene was in the film at all. Like that whole Kim Hunter/Liza Minnelli mix-up, I may well be dealing cards from the bottom of my mental deck, merrily shuffling scenes from one film into another and then preserving them forever in the aspic of my unreliable memory. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a psychotic editor on the loose in my head, creating their very own Cinema Paradiso – or, in my case, Cinema Inferno.

  There’s only one way to sift the fact from the fiction: I’m going to have to sit down and watch Krakatoa: East of Java again, for only the second time in forty years.

  But not right now.

  For now, let’s move on to the other key moments of merry hell which constitute my earliest movie-going memories.

  When I was a child, film programmes changed not on Fridays (as is now the case) but on Sundays, which meant that even in a one-screen cinema it was possible to see two different films on a weekend – four, if you counted the supporting features. Growing up in Finchley Central, North London, I was in striking distance of several cinemas which represented the different distribution chains dominating the market in the early seventies. First and foremost there were the Odeons, two of which (Hendon and Temple Fortune) I could walk or cycle to within an hour. I could also catch a number 26 bus to both, but to do so would wipe out the pocket money which I was holding back for sweets, so I tended to go for the self-steam option. Further afield there were the ABC and Ionic cinemas in Golders Green, the Classic in Hendon (which oddly was nowhere near the Hendon Odeon), the Gaumont in North Finchley, and the Everyman in Hampstead. And then, of course, there was the Rex, latterly reborn as the Phoenix East Finchley, which remains the single most significant cinema in my development as a bona fide cinema obsessive. In moments of weakness I dream of dying and having my ashes scattered down the left-hand aisle of the Phoenix, marking the pathway from the door to the seat where I would sit religiously (ten rows from the front, aisle only, thank you very much) watching the late-night double bills which first introduced me to the work of David Lynch, David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell et al. It was here that I learned to be a film critic, but it was in the Odeons and ABCs that I gorged myself on the mainstream trash which I still love to this day.

  For example, it was at the Odeon Hendon that I first saw Brannigan in which John Wayne played an artificially tonsured Yankee cop who comes to London to take on England’s crooks ‘Chicago-style’. The poster featured Wayne and his toupee brandishing a large gun in the foreground, while in the background a car leaped over a perilous gap between the tarmac jaws of the iconic Tower Bridge. It was also here that I saw Juggernaut, in which Shakespearean hellraiser Richard Harris downshifted as a bomb-disposal expert pitting his wits against the titular villain (‘Oh you’re a good man Juggernaut, but so am I!’) who had laced an ocean liner with high explosives which threatened to blow Roy Kinnear right off the poop deck. And, most importantly, it was here that I first saw Slade in Flame, an unexpectedly grim gem starring everyone’s favourite glam-rock stompers which I have since declared to be ‘the Citizen Kane of British Pop Movies’.

  This is no idle claim. Despite starting life as a goofy sub-Beatles knock-off, Slade in Flame really was surprisingly confrontational fare. Even the name was provocative, flickering with the promise of Britain’s favourite pop act on fire with success, whilst ominously suggesting some sideburn-singeing, crash-and-burn conflagration. The official title may have been merely Flame, but that ‘Slade in …’ prefix was emblazoned on all the posters, and fizzled across the screen during the film’s molten opening credits. Scenes of the band in white suits with projected infernos licking away at their lapels added to the sense of sacrifice, with Noddy, Dave, Jim and Don lit up on stage like some Wicker Man-style funeral pyre.

  According to legend, Slade in Flame was originally envisaged as a sci-fi pastiche entitled The Quite A Mess Experiment (‘Quatermass Experiment’ – geddit?) which featured Noddy as the eccentric professor, and had Dave Hill killed by a triffid in the first fifteen minutes. Somehow this mutated into a more down-to-earth story about ‘the reality, rather than the myth’ of superstardom in the sixties and seventies. Director Richard Loncraine and screenwriter Andrew Birkin (brother of ‘ooh-aahing’ songstrel Jane) joined Slade on tour in America, using their adventures to fuel a down-and
-dirty tale of bickering wannabe pop stars, snapped up by a soulless advertising magnate, and sold to the public as a pre-packaged product. (‘I’m not a bloody fish finger,’ complains Jim Lea in one memorably caustic moment).

  Early drafts of the Flame script (bolstered by ‘additional dialogue’ from David Humphries) were sweary enough to earn an X-rating – a claim supported by John Pidgeon’s savagely readable novelisation of which I still own a battered paperback copy (signed by the author!). To secure a wider audience (i.e. kids like me), the film-makers reined in the language, but kept the rough-and-toughness of the action. In its finished A-rated cut, Flame retained its vicious streak, with the scumbags of the music business jointly personified by greyhound-racing manager-cum-thug Mr Harding (Johnny Shannon, still sizzling from Performance) and slimy salesman Mr Seymour (Tom Conti, in his first starring role). My favourite character was pub-circuit loser Jack Daniels, played by Alan Lake who had served prison time and who apparently researched his role with a liquid lunch which got him fired on his first day. After assurances that his spouse Diana Dors would police his sobriety for the rest of the shoot, Lake was reinstated and proceeded to earn his keep; a scene in which he is dragged semi-naked into a darkened street to have his toes smashed in with a shovel remains a wince-inducing highlight of Flame, closer to the hard-core nastiness of Get Carter than the food-fight fun of Never Too Young to Rock.

  As for the band, they played the dark side of the rock ’n’ roll dream with a commitment which bordered upon the kamikaze. Holder and Lea provided the dramatic core, scrapping and squabbling their way from pubs and clubs to studios and stages, with fleeting glimpses of friendship and affection giving way to shouting matches and petty spats (a typical onstage exchange: ‘Will you shut up!’; ‘At least I was in tune!’). Don Powell was the sympathetic dork, the learning of his lines made harder by a car crash which had left him with amnesia. Dave Hill, meanwhile, played Flame’s knob of a guitarist Barry with a frighteningly relaxed naturalism, despite worrying that the movie might dispel the pop-star myth and thereby damage the band’s reputation.

  The fact that the pubescent pop-pickers reacted so negatively to Slade in Flame in the early seventies merely increased its stature in my eyes, and I have been dutifully extolling its virtues ever since. In the nineties, when I was working at Radio One, I toured art cinemas around the country lecturing on the ‘Great British Pop Movie’ and showing Slade in Flame to audiences who were universally amazed by its downbeat miserablism. More recently, Slade have become the focus of reverential critical attention in magazines like Mojo, and I was thrilled to be asked to knock off a thousand words on the subject of what was so great about Flame when a special edition DVD of the movie was released in 2007. Most rewardingly, writer and broadcaster John Harris told me that when he had interviewed Jim Lea, the bassist and songwriter said that he knew the band had been right to make Flame when ‘that Kermode bloke kept going on about how great it was’. I was a greying forty-four-year-old when I heard that comment, but in my heart I was a lithe twelve-year-old, running up and down the aisles of the Hendon Odeon screaming ‘Jim Lea knows my name! Jim Lea knows my name!’

  Slade in Flame was an unpredictable gem, but back in those innocent days before the internet and easy access ‘international journalism’ it was still possible to be genuinely surprised by movies – for better or worse. Today, net-nerds upload reviews of films which aren’t even finished yet (which serves studios right for relying on audience test screenings) and the box-office takings of every new release are splashed across the web before its opening weekend is through. Try as you might, in this culture of twenty-four-hour Infotainment it’s increasingly hard to see a movie without some prior knowledge of its form, history and financial performance. Some may see this as an empowering process, enabling the consumer to refine their viewing choices and to know exactly what they’re getting before shelling out for a ticket. But it also removes the element of risk which played such a positive role in my early filmgoing years.

  Listen – if I’d known what a downbeat stodge of a movie the Charles Bronson Western Breakheart Pass was going to be in advance, I would never have stumbled upon the supporting film Jeremy which affected me so deeply that I simply couldn’t concentrate on the main feature. The story of an awkward misfit’s fumbling first relationship with a graceful ballet student, Jeremy was a melancholic forerunner of Gregory’s Girl, a film which so perfectly captured the poignant anxieties of young love that you felt like you’d been personally wooed, seduced and then dumped by the movie. During the final reel, as Jeremy said a tearful airport goodbye to Susan whose parents had suddenly decided to move to another city (bastards!) I found my heart breaking into a thousand familiar pieces – this despite the fact that I had never had, let alone lost, a girlfriend in ‘real life’. In many ways, Susan was my first girlfriend, and the eighty-six minutes we spent together in the Odeon that Sunday afternoon in 1975 have stayed with me to this day.’Promise you won’t forget me,’ Susan cried as she prepared to board the plane, and I found myself replying out loud ‘I won’t!’ A few embittered cynics in the audience snickered at my outburst, but I didn’t care; I think Susan heard me. And she knew, she knew …

  Decades later, I was in a record store in London with Todd Haynes, director of Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and the adventurous Bob Dylan ‘non-biopic’ I’m Not There. We were filming a piece for The Culture Show which required a backdrop of vintage vinyl and inbetween set-ups we’d both started compulsively browsing through the random second-hand selection. By strange serendipity our eyes alighted at exactly the same moment on a dog-eared soundtrack LP for Susan and Jeremy (the alternative US title, apparently) the cover of which bore a photo of the girl I had loved and lost all those years ago. It was an ickily Proustian moment which made me shriek with surprise, a reaction made all the more powerful by the fact that Todd Haynes did exactly the same thing. As our hands reached out to grab and cradle the LP, we turned to each other in joyous disbelief, both babbling something along the lines of ‘Oh my gosh I can’t believe you love this movie too, I always thought it was just me!’ If truth be told, I also felt a little pang of jealousy that Susan had been charming other men while I had devoted myself so singularly to her (overlooking a minor crush on the dark-haired girl out of Lost in Space which didn’t count because you could only ever flirt with a TV show – love was for the big screen). In fact, it transpired that she had been unfaithful with the whole of the Cannes Film Festival where Jeremy had been a minor hit in 1973, which perhaps explains how this 16 mm indie oddity found its way on to the mainstream B-feature circuit in the first place. But such rivalries aside, a bond was formed between Todd and I at that moment which was in no way diminished by the fact that the LP cover turned out to be empty, the record itself having long been lost amongst a mountain of scratchy black vinyl. No matter; we agreed to purchase the empty sleeve anyway (‘Er, 50p mate?’) and then let Susan decide whose home to grace with her tattered snapshot presence. It would be indiscreet to say whether she chose Todd or me, but let me just say that she looks very happy to be where she is – sandwiched snugly between Joan Baez and the soundtrack to Rollerball. (Which reminds me – another reason I admired Jason Isaacs so much as a kid was that he made up a playground game of ‘Rollerball’ which involved being dragged along behind a pushbike on a skateboard and attempting to pick up a tennis ball before falling off and hurting yourself really badly while everyone stood round and solemnly hummed Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’. It was brilliant!)

  Of course, my love affair with Susan (and Jeremy) would never have happened if I had been one of those flibbertigibbets who only showed up for the main feature, and who could be found loitering in the foyer while the adverts and trailers were playing – often the most invigorating part of the programme. I well remember the earnest discussions which led cinema chains to agree not to show trailers for movies with adults-only certificates before child-friendly fare for fear of encouraging
younger viewers to try to ‘bunk’ into AA and X-rated movies. In the days before such censorious enlightenment, however, trailers were a glorious free-for-all which gave audiences of all ages a tantalising taste of the most grown-up ‘Coming Attractions’. I remember being taken to see the Magic Roundabout feature Dougal and the Blue Cat at an impressionable age and sitting through a terrifying trailer for An Investigation of Murder which consisted of a POV shot of a man getting on a bus and then apparently slaughtering anyone who saw his face – which was everyone. Time for bed, Zebedee! I also saw memorably disreputable trailers for Enter the Dragon, The Godfather, The Last Detail and (as I mentioned previously) Cabaret, all of which titillated my young imagination in ways which I shudder to recall. But the trailer which had the most profound effect upon my developing consciousness was, of course, a discreet teaser for the greatest movie ever made – The Exorcist.

  Not surprisingly, I can remember exactly where I first saw this trailer – it was at the Classic cinema in Hendon, in Screen Two, before a performance of Woody Allen’s Sleeper which I’d gone to see on the strength of its comically sci-fi inflected poster. I already knew something about The Exorcist because I’d seen a story on the BBC magazine programme Nationwide in which it was reported that American patrons had been swooning and vomiting at screenings, and being carried out on stretchers only to recover and rush back in to test their endurance once again. In a three-minute segment, Sue Lawley quickly recapped the film’s plot (a young girl in modern-day Washington DC becomes demonically possessed), recounted tales of stateside hysteria, questioned the involvement of teenage actress Linda Blair, and wondered whether the film shouldn’t be banned in the UK.

  I was engrossed, not least by the whiff of physical endangerment that surrounded the film – the sense that this was something so scary that it might actually damage its audience, permanently. Certainly that was the line that evangelist Billy Graham was toeing when he declared that there was something evil trapped within the very celluloid of the movie, a demonic force which was unleashed each time the film passed through a projector. Soon, stories began to circulate of punters being driven mad by The Exorcist: of grown men throwing themselves at the screen; of pregnant women miscarrying; of sleepless nights and admissions to asylums. Most of it was clearly nonsense but that didn’t matter a jot – by the time The Exorcist opened in England in March 1974, armies of nuns had been corralled to sprinkle holy water on to punters queuing to see the film and hand out leaflets giving them a number to call if they felt troubled by the devil in the sleepless nights that would inevitably follow.