Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers. Antonia Quirke

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       24

      This is what I did. I watched films to cheer me up when love had made me unhappy. The oldest problem in the world and the twentieth century's greatest solution to it. Plus this was my job, right? Because Eric had actually run my Oliver Stone interview with its two extremely approximate quotes – the only thing I could accurately remember Stone saying was ‘Is the Camden New Journal like the Village Voice?’ – I'd been given a slot on Saturdays at a local radio station filling in holes in the programming with film reviews. It seemed to get easier the more I steered clear of relating everything to Engels. Another ten pounds. I was closing in on the Equity minimum wage.

      I knuckled down. I tapped the fan and it opened. Not directors – who the hell were they? – but actors. Whereas some people might see, say, Women in Love and then go on to The Devils because they're interested in Ken Russell, I would see Women in Love for Alan Bates, and then chase after him in Britannia Hospital, bump into Malcolm McDowell there and follow him into If and O, Lucky Man! and then back to Bates in In Celebration, and without even realising it I would have seen most of the cream of Lindsay Anderson. Had you asked me if I'd ever seen any Godard, I'd have said, ‘Oh, no no no!’, even though I'd seen Breathless, Pierrot le Fou and Une Femme est Une Femme during a Belmondo binge and followed him to Is Paris Burning? where I recognised Glenn Ford among the ruins and hitched myself to him through Gilda and The Courtship of Eddie's Father by Vicente Minnelli and some rather duff westerns to The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee over Gloria Grahame, and then careered after Marvin in everything (he was always brilliant) until we (Lee and I) tracked down the erotically brainy-looking John Cassavetes in The Killers, which got me to Rosemary's Baby – Christ, he's good in that – and a film called Brass Target which had good old George Kennedy in it playing Patton, who in Cool Hand Luke I sort of preferred to Newman and then in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot I even preferred to Clint, meaning that I could no longer avoid The Dirty Dozen, what with him, Marvin, Cassavetes, Donald Sutherland and Robert Ryan, who was so fantastic in Bad Day at Black Rock (with Marvin again!) that I went on a Ryan safari, stalking the wounded beast through Billy Budd, The Set-Up, Men in War and Crossfire, where the mighty Mitchum loomed, and that was me gone, an acolyte in the Mitchum temple, where one day (Cape Fear) I formed an attachment to a mid-ranking avuncular type I saw around a lot, Martin Balsam, that virtuoso of shirtsleeves, who has in fact appeared in every film ever made apart from Trainspotting and Raise the Red Lantern. Balsam's forearms were particularly compelling in All the President's Men (which I can never understand and is anyway not all that good but nonetheless my favourite movie of all time), wherein Hal Holbrook, playing Deep Throat, stank so much of cigarettes that I became passively addicted to him (even his hair looks emphysemic) and got out Capricorn One for another fix – though I had Jeff Bridges by now to take care of and Hoffman and Redford and Robards and Harry Dean Stanton and Terence Stamp from Billy Budd and Gregory Peck, obviously, and Jack Palance who was in Second Chance with Mitchum – and who do you think was running around in Capricorn One, in a flapping tie, but Elliot Gould, trying to rescue James Brolin, who at one point uses his medallion to break out of his prison, an action which perfectly describes Brolin's entire career. (In the ruinously expensive illustrated version of this book, the ‘Connoisseur's Edition’, there will be a full colour fold-out wall chart detailing these connections more lucidly.) It was always the actors. You could track actors through the cities of their films, and they would never disappear.

      The best example of how my actor tracking worked is Woody Allen. I developed an enormous crush on Tony Roberts (oh, Tony Roberts!), Allen's microphone-haired sidekick in Annie Hall, and ignored Manhattan (for years) in favour of the Roberts flicks – Radio Days, Play It Again, Sam, Stardust Memories (great thighs, Tony Roberts) and Hannah and her Sisters, in which I saw, sort of for the first time, Max von Sydow (‘Haf you been kissed tonight? You can't fool me, Lee, I'm too smart!’), whom I hunted down through Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Three Days of the Condor and The Seventh Seal, during which I tumbled head over heels for the acrobat played by a man called Nils Poppe. Since I couldn't find Poppe in any more Bergman films, I callously discarded the great Swede and sought out Tony Roberts again, who I mistakenly thought had a part in Allen's September (even better than Gene Kelly's thighs in a way – he's taller) in which I saw Sam Waterston, who I went on to fancy even more in Capricorn One of course and even more, so meticulous and lonely-seeming, in The Killing Fields, which had the effect, I remember, of splitting me in two directions – towards Malkovich and also towards Patrick Malahide, who happened to be on television at the time as Casaubon in Middlemarch, in fact it was on tonight, СКАЧАТЬ