It's Only a Movie: Reel Life Adventures of a Film Obsessive (4 page)

But as we sat there, with me wondering whether life could actually get any better than this, Bill suddenly leaned across and whispered in a not very sotto voce: ‘This
isn’t
the movie.’

‘What?’ I replied, baffled.

‘This
isn’t
the movie,’ he said again.’This is some TV version of the movie.’

I didn’t understand what he meant. I looked up at the screen, wondering whether it was being projected in the wrong ratio (square, rather than oblong) but no; there was
Local Hero
in all its rectangular cinematic glory.

‘What do you mean it’s “some TV version”?’ I asked.

‘Well, there’s loads of stuff
missing
,’ said Bill.

‘Stuff missing? What stuff?’

‘Well like just then, when they stopped the car because it was too foggy to drive. There’s a whole conversation that’s been cut out – an entire scene.’

I thought about this for a moment. I’d been watching the movie very closely and I was pretty damn sure we hadn’t skipped even a single word. Yet Bill was flustered, sure that something was wrong.

‘Which scene do you mean?’ I asked, adding gently that, ‘I haven’t noticed any cuts.’

Bill took a deep breath, as if readying himself to enact the missing scene right there and then.

Then he stopped. Deflated. Wrong-footed. Unsure.

‘I think,’ he said, as much to himself as to me, ‘that I’m remembering the
script
rather than the film.’

He turned and smiled at me.

‘I
think
,’ he went on, ‘that I cut the scene out myself. In the
editing. I can’t quite remember. I thought I’d left it in. But it was so long ago, and now I’m not sure.’

‘Well I’ve seen this film
loads of times
,’ I assured him, ‘and honestly, what’s up there on the screen is the film that’s been out there in the world for the past twenty-five years.’

‘Ahh yes,’ said Bill sagely.’“The film that’s been out there in the world.” I’m not so familiar with that. I just know the film that’s been inside my head.’

Exactly!

I wanted to hug him.

But I resisted, and sat quietly in my seat, dreaming of the film inside Bill Forsyth’s head …

The film that has been playing inside
my
head for the last forty years is
Krakatoa: East of Java
, an old-fashioned action spectacular from 1969 which boasted
Thunderbirds
-style special effects, later enhanced by the stomach-rumbling power of ‘Feelarama’. Today the film is perhaps best known for its geographically challenged title, for (as any fule kno) Krakatoa is actually due
west
of Java – duh! But for me,
Krakatoa: East of Java
retains a special place in my heart for containing the first scene I can actually
remember
seeing in a movie house – the Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man. Oh, I
know
there was lots of stuff with ships and air balloons and exploding volcanoes – largely because most of those crowd-pleasing highlights were depicted on the poster, and very probably in the trailers. But I can’t remember
watching
them – only being aware that I had seen them after the fact, and in the abstract.

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!’