One was the cake with which the German high command celebrated a general’s birthday – the way the Germans sliced it right across the centre, bisecting the whole thing, this way and that, rather than cutting elegant wedges, as one did at English children’s birthday parties. It struck me at the time as a typical example of Hunnish perversity.
More potent was the scene in which the lone German soldier discovers the invasion has started. Played by Gert Froebe, the fat militiaman is on lonely sentry duty somewhere above, say, Omaha beach. He is bored, sleepy, looking forward to his breakfast, and soporifically riding a mule up a gentle incline of Normandy cliff, when he turns and looks out to sea. Stretched across the horizon, a vast flotilla of invading landing-craft is cruising straight towards him. Instantly he is a-flurry with activity, falling off his mule, grabbing for his gun, wondering whom to call, worrying about what correct procedure you should adopt when the odds are approximately 500,000 to one against you. While the audience laughed at his panic, I felt for him. Forgetting, for a moment, that I was supposed to be rooting for the Allied forces in the boats, I sympathised with the poor schmuck on the other side, with his limited response materials and his ridiculous donkey.
I think it was this personal connection with an individual that explains why the parachute-drop scene also haunted me. As the paratroopers fall out of the sky into a French village where the German army is waiting for them, most are killed in mid-air or shortly after landing. Some of the descending parachutists found themselves in farcical circumstances, landing in a tree, or crashing through the roof of a greenhouse. One man went straight down a well, his parachute imploding above him as it disappeared. I remember the yell of laughter that went up in the audience at this bit of slapstick – and then how the laugh changed to a pitying ‘Ohhhh’. Soon my eyes were misting up at the fate of another victim. A soldier played by the American comedian Red Buttons came to land on the side of a church, his parachute speared by the steeple. He hung there, hardly daring to breathe, watching the killing going on below him, while the church bell donged and clanged just a few feet away from his ear. Against the odds he survives, but when we meet him later in the film, he is completely deaf.
I could just about cope with the massacre of men falling out of the sky – but this poor man whom the bell had made deaf went straight to my tear ducts. As in the case of Gert Froebe on his stumbling mule, his situation posed the question how you would have got on in wartime, how you would have fared. In a departure from the triumphalist, us-against-them glorification of war that I encountered in just about every other war movie I saw, it was a key to understanding the sorrow and the pity.
I grew up mesmerised by the movies. My relationship with the Big Screen was more heady, more intense, more hungrily passionate than my civilised involvement with books, my light flirtations with theatre, my patronising kiss on the forehead of television. Watching films in the dark never seemed to me a passive activity. It was more like visiting a shrine,* going to a great dark church for prolonged communion and prayer – even if the only prayers were that Clint Eastwood should waste the bad guys in A Fistful of Dollars, or that Julie Christie should find true love with Alan Bates in Far from the Madding Crowd, or that Kim Novak should, at some point, take her clothes off in Vertigo.
Cinematic shrines were everywhere when I was young. I was surrounded by them. On St John’s Hill, Battersea, down the road from our house, there were no fewer than three cinemas: the Imperial, the Essoldo and the Granada. The Imperial, despite its grand name, was a fag-reeking little flea-pit where uncouth kids ran about the stalls and there were constant rumours of mice underfoot. The Essoldo was rather grand, a rococo palace of varieties, the kind of place where Robert Donat might have seen Mr Memory in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. The Granada looked boringly municipal, like a bank only with more dramatic lighting, but it had the largest screen and showed the best new films.
Between them, the three picture-houses showed hundreds of movies every year – not just first-run features, but re-runs of old Bogart movies, James Bond double-bills, classic Westerns, Japanese Godzilla movies, cartoon extravaganzas, war films, Biblical epics and slightly moth-eaten romances starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day. The double-bills could yoke together some very odd bedfellows. Who, for instance, would have been the ideal consumer to appreciate both The Wizard of Oz and the new Elvis movie, Roustabout, back-to-back on the same afternoon in 1964?
In the pitch-black cinema, you received occasional glimpses of the grown-up, X-rated world that seemed to lie ahead of you. The Granada was where, aged eleven, I watched a trailer for A Study in Terror, James Hill’s energetically nasty conflation of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. As trailers go (I’ve always loved trailers), it was a humdinger, a howling farrago of blood, screams, swollen bosoms, knives, gurning costermongers, dirt-streaked Victorian tarts in shadowy alleyways and massive close-ups of John Neville’s pinched Sherlockian physiognomy. Minatory banner headlines unwrapped themselves across the screen like a series of flung-down Biblical warning – ‘A MANIAC IS ON THE LOOSE!’; ‘TERROR STALKS THE STREETS’ – and left me badly shaken, as my trembling fingers searched for another orange cream.
My Battersea friends, my sister and I haunted the cinemas at weekends and in the school holidays. Sometimes we’d sit in the stalls without caring much what film was showing. We’d go into a double-bill of second-rate spy movies, half an hour after the first one started, blithely uncaring that we’d missed the premise of the whole movie and would have to work out the plot by ourselves. We were content in the knowledge that, in three hours’ time, the programme would have rolled round to the point where we’d started. ‘This is where we came in,’ we would whisper, although we might perhaps stick around for another hour for the exciting bit where somebody blew up a helicopter, or the master spy got to fondle a Swedish cutie in abbreviated swimwear.
We didn’t care about narrative coherence. We just liked being shown wonders, and spectacular sights, things we’d never seen before, like the plains of Africa or the lunar bluffs of Monument Valley. We enjoyed the darkness, the crepuscular excitement of the long funnel of smoky light stretching out its fat, tapering glow above our heads. We liked the Pearl & Dean advertisements, especially the stunningly tacky ones for local restaurants with their still photographs of wanly deserted curry houses: ‘After the show, why not visit …’
My world in the Sixties remained stuck in a time before the metropolis began to swing – a place of grey streets and rainy puddles and soul-destroyingly dull bus rides to Nowheresville and Loser’s Lane. I travelled between school in Wimbledon and my home in the blank, unfriendly back streets of Battersea, where the biggest excitement that stealth or enterprise could buy was to visit Arding & Hobbs department store and travel up in the lift to the third-floor carpet department to ogle the gorgeous, hopelessly unattainable local beauty, Mary McCarthy, as she saucily advised the newly-married about their urgent need for Berber shagpile.
The cinema became our cultural porthole, our window on a Zeitgeist that never seemed to make its way to Battersea, our palace of shadows, our University of Life. It was there we saw Cleopatra float into Rome and El Cid ride out to battle one last time, strapped dead but upright on his horse; it was there we saw the innocent hayseed James Stewart shoot the bullying villain, Lee Marvin, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and the downfall of the enormous German howitzers in The Guns of Navarone … We spent weeks, months, years watching people completely unlike us emoting and punching, going on safari, carrying out elaborate jewel heists, riding a rickety horse-and-trap through the flames of a burning Atlanta, and falling in love with each other in the middle of a war. How could we have expected to emerge from all that and not be profoundly affected?
You could regard these early movie experiences as just fleeting memories from your childhood, like Desperate Dan or Dan Dare; but some of them made a nagging, intrusive, almost pernicious claim on your