Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh

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СКАЧАТЬ felt four inches thick, the white walls featured a thick anaglypta, frieze-like wedding-cake-decoration motif and even the staircase in the distance seemed to lie back luxuriantly on soft pillows. It was like the soft furnishings department of Arding & Hobbs, grown to colossal size but with no merchandise in sight. Instead there was a manager in a formal tuxedo and bow-tie, and two ladies in strict red-and-white stripey uniforms selling things. One had a tray that hung around her neck on long ribbons, full of tubs of ice-cream.

      ‘No ice-creams until the interval,’ Mr Breen sternly informed us. ‘And everyone must spend a penny before we go in.’

      The other lady sold big, glossy magazines with pictures of actors on the front. ‘Don’t bother with the programmes,’ Mr Breen warned us. ‘They’re a waste of money. You can’t be too careful in these places.’ Instinctively he had become our intrepid native scout guiding us through the jungle of the modern commercial cinema. The foyer of the Odeon didn’t look much like a jungle, though. It was more like a big sofa. The atmosphere was almost creepily tactile, like velvet or suede, something you could run your finger along, something you could almost fondle.

      We shuffled upstairs, marvelling at the airy splendour of this secular cathedral, were dispatched to the Gents, were reassembled like a lost platoon, ticked off for talking and shoving, then, in a fourteen-strong group, went through the door into a profound darkness.

      It was like going over the top in a war. I could see nothing but a massive sheet of screen on our left, on which a giant young woman in a gingham frock was accepting a light for her cigarette from a laughing man about Mr Breen’s age. They were enjoying a picnic beside a river. I kept my eyes on the girl, who was pretty and seemed very easily amused, and, moving forward blindly, I crashed into Armfield, who’d stopped in front of me.

      ‘For Christ’s sake, Walsh …’ he said crossly.

      ‘Sh!’ whispered Mr Breen, as our troop of choirboys and servers milled awkwardly around the Dress Circle. A grown-up woman flashed a torch at an empty patch in the third row and we filed into it like automatons.

      ‘Consulate,’ intoned an adenoidal voice from the screen in seductive tones. ‘Cool as a mountain stream …’

      While the others took their seats around me, I stood looking at the gigantic plaque of light, transfixed, turned to stone by my first encounter with the big screen, oblivious to my co-scholars and the rest of the audience, gazing at the bright cloudless day in front of me, feeling a strange longing to get up on-stage and walk straight into it.

      ‘Sit down, will you?’ asked a stroppy voice from behind.

      Beside me, Armfield yanked the sleeve of my school blazer. I subsided, and sat on a surface approximately one foot wide. It was amazingly uncomfortable. How, I thought, can I sit on this for three hours? Without undue fuss, Armfield reached behind my back and pushed, so that I flew forward as my first-ever tip-up seat subsided beneath me with a bump.

      It had a strong spring, this seat. It was far from certain that my puny weight would keep the thing down under me. Could it, I wondered, tip right back up again, folding me in half and leaving me helplessly mewling with only my legs and school socks showing? This was a whole new territory of alarm – the total darkness, the usherette’s stabbing light, the fearsome jaws of the seat I was perched on, the huge, brightly-lit, wall-sized rectangle I’d never encountered before – that screen that drew your eye, whatever was on it, and made you forget everything else. It was fantastically exciting, all of it, better than any funfair ride. Best of all it was in colour, whereas our tiny Rediffusion TV back home showed things only in monochrome greys. I felt simultaneously lost, elated and completely at home with the enormous new world unfolding in front of me.

      The words ‘Preview of Forthcoming Attractions’ appeared on the screen. They meant nothing to me, but I watched like an urchin with his nose pressed against a sweet-shop window as the faces of Leslie Caron and Tom Bell appeared – emoting, argumentative, flushed, agonised, rapturous – in a series of bleak domestic scenes and dismal black-and-white views of London parks. It was the first trailer I’d ever seen (advertising The L-Shaped Room), and although the story looked fantastically depressing, the voice-over dramatically promised that it was shocking and challenging and ‘a film for today’, so that you felt duty-bound to see it as soon as possible, despite being eight years too young (it carried an X certificate) to do any such thing.

      The preview ended. Two mile-high curtains swished shut. The lights came on. Was that the end? Had we come to the wrong cinema? I could see the bright auditorium at last, and looked around. We sat, all fourteen of us plus two teachers, line-abreast across a whole row, chattering and gazing at the Odeon’s mile-high ceiling, the complicated sculptures on the facing walls, the great proscenium arch. I wondered if people – real people – came out and acted on this massive stage in front of the film while it was showing. If not, it seemed a shocking waste of the dramatic expanse before us – it was a sort of epic altar, far bigger than the stage on which I’d witnessed Puss in Boots at the Wimbledon Theatre’s panto season the previous Christmas.

      Then the lights went out again, and the great curtains swished back to reveal a snarling lion. The unseen speakers took the snarl and fed it through some abysmal sonic filter so that it reverberated until the sound went down underneath where you were sitting, and made your seat vibrate. A pause, and the lion slothfully disgorged a second, basso profundo growl that was like the post-lunchtime belch with which my friend Grzedzicki could thrill his classmates, but magnified 4,000 times.

      Then the title came on screen and remained there for ages, while an overture of orchestral savagery thundered behind it. Kettledrums bonged, cellos sawed like neighing horses, violins ran about shrieking ‘ding-didaling-didaling’, brass trumpets went ‘dum-da-dah!’ and, in an abrupt mood-swing, breathy woodwinds came quietly into the mix, conjuring up a moody Tahitian sunset before we were returned to rolling waves of splashy brass and chaotic surges of strings. It was tremendously exciting.

      The film began. A botanical expert from Kew was strolling along the quay at Portsmouth in a tricorn hat, with a cylinder under his arm and what seemed a pitifully small sack of clothing for a long sea voyage. (My mother would never have let me bundle up my shirts and trousers in a horrible sack like that.) He encountered a gaggle of sailors, some with elaborate beards, some with rolling eyes, all destined for the HMS Bounty. They laughingly upbraided him for calling a ship a ‘boat’ and talked in unfriendly, joshing tones about the ordeal that lay ahead. The man from Kew Gardens was earnest and slightly lost, a nice guy fallen among rough, know-it-all companions. As he signed on for the voyage, leaning on a slanting desk, something about the opening scenes began to strike a chord – but I didn’t yet know what it was. The rough-diamond sailors pulled the cylinder from under his armpit.

      ‘Careful with that,’ he said. ‘Those are scientific documents.’

      But they were merely pictures of breadfruit, which he laid out on a convenient barrel and used as part of a lecture about West Indian eating habits, not unlike the lesson we’d endured two hours earlier.

      We’d been right. This was going to be an educational bore after all. Then Captain Bligh, played by Trevor Howard, appeared. He had a lined, rather cruel face and small piggy eyes, and something about his old-maidish mouth suggested he was always chewing something nasty without ever spitting it out. Dressed in white stockings, a dark blue uniform and a Duke of Wellington hat, he cut a comical but faintly sinister figure. He instantly reminded me of Mr King the sports master, whose appearance on the rugby pitch in his navy blue tracksuit was always the prelude to random acts of violence.

      Fletcher Christian wafted on board. I had heard about Marlon Brando, the American actor with the cissy name. He was a real hero, my friends said, a brilliant actor, an exotic figure who probably СКАЧАТЬ