Try to Tell the Story Read online

  Another point struck me. Go to a regular store and you had something solid—a pound of sugar, a yard and a half of fabric, a hammer—wrapped up in paper. But if you went to the cinemas, you came away with nothing solid or wrapped. It was just that your head was blown up like a balloon.

  Moreover, the cinemas were immensely decorated, utterly beyond the limits of realism or the lifelike. I had been inside English churches and I abided by their rather harsh self-illustration; if that was the story they wanted to tell, so be it. Church paintings and stained glass aspired to one gloomy message. But the decor in cinemas was crazed and extravagant, and perfect preparation for the films or the pictures. I never thought at the time that the messages of church and cinema were in competition. What chance did the churches have? But I see now how they employed the same way of referring to “another place” or a “once upon a time” so much more vivid than life. I gathered that if you accepted God you were safe for the future, whatever safe was. But it was no contest for me. The cinema had girls and action and music I loved. Everyone involved with the churches of the world had good reason to be alarmed when the movies came in. Whatever his virtues or game plan, God made a big mistake when he first messed with temptation. He should have made us differently or learned to get on with human nature.

  I asked what happened inside these cinemas and Mum said, well, it was a bit like theater. That was a reasonable answer, of course, and not simply wrong. But I felt an early distinction. In the theater, the pigeons were real; they left droppings where they had been. And the people were solid and ready to ask you what you thought. They were as intimidating as the Grand Vizier.

  The people in pictures did not know I was there. I worked this out gradually, and I came to see it as their great kindness. They could be seen in the distance first where they were active and heroic, but then, as if by magic, they came right up to the screen, so you could see their faces, and they were lovely, all of them, not just the women. Even the men had a shining look that made me want to be them or be with them. Their features were attractive and the faces vivid. They were to be seen. And often they were very good or very bad so you knew what to think of them.

  “Where are they?” I asked, looking around the large premises. These suburban theaters were big. They had an upstairs and a downstairs and they must have held at least fifteen hundred people. Morever, in those days they were always packed.

  “They're not here,” I was told. Indeed, ever after, as if to make that plain lie acceptable—because they were here and they were mine and they waited to let me look at them—I was told they were “in America.” As a child, I confused the two terms—”in the movies” and “in America.” And it is only with time that I have come to see how important and creative that confusion is. Of course, what the confusion has done to that unlucky breed of ghost, Americans, is another matter, and I doubt I will live long enough to work it out.

  “Well, if they're not here,” I argued, “what is happening?”

  It's a tough question and one that the people who run the churches have just as much trouble answering as parents with a child on their lap in a cinema. Dad said that the whole thing was on film and there was a man upstairs who turned a handle and the story unfolded. He pointed up to a small bright square window in the back of the cinema, and I perceived that a flood of light or a beam from that window reached to the screen. In those days that beam of light was thick with writhing smoke since everyone at the movies smoked. Projection. The image. The tiny rectangle of celluloid—these were not explained. And so a miracle was occurring and really it was every bit as potent—in which these men, their horses, their range, their America, were up on a screen far larger than life. I knew of only two experiences that were really like what happened in the cinema—not theater, not being read to, but radio and dreaming. The latter was the most suggestive because while the dream might be very exciting, or frightening, I was there at its lip without being noticed. I was infinite and the light was my fantasy. Put it like that, I suppose, and the whole thing should have been stopped in 1905.

  Like everyone else, you might well ask me, “Well, what film did you see first?” I don't exactly know. I was more aware of the process at first than the particular titles or series. But a very early picture was Laurence Olivier's Henry V, which opened in Britain in 1945. I do recall seeing that and being told by Dad that it was one more thing that stood for “our” victory in the war. The film was a great occasion, and in seeing it I was doing my duty. Do I hear or imagine parental amens about the experiment, or how is the boy expected to understand Shakespeare? I think there was a dispute and I believe my dad talked me through the film as best he could. Still, I know I was bewildered by the gift of tennis balls for people going to war.

  What I recall is the face of Olivier just as he goes onstage as the King. If you remember, the movie begins at the old Globe Theater with an audience and players both about to do Henry V. Somehow I got that. But after that I was at a loss until the battle and the sound of English arrows in what was actually an Irish sky. And then it happened. I saw the faces of boys burning in the screen.

  This is not in the film. Of course, it could be now. The idea that we might have to see live flesh burning is no longer monstrous. In 1945 no one would have allowed it. Still, there is a moment when the French raid the English camp, when a group of page boys are described as having been killed. Burned alive. I saw it, and in 1945 in a packed theater I started crying violently and my dad had to carry me out of the theater, no doubt to the scathing comments that it was ridiculous to take a four-year-old boy to see a film like this.

  My parents reassured me that I could not have seen what I described. The futility of that argument! We see what we see. Seven or eight years later I was in a class called upon to see the film of Henry V as a help in Shakespeare studies. I was afraid but curious. So I watched carefully and found that I had been told the truth. One did not see burning faces.

  About forty years later I was living in San Francisco with a young son, Nicholas. He was an enthusiast of films on tape. We had a library of them. His mother and I had chosen a range of films that might be suitable for him. I was in the next room as he watched Henry V. And he came into my office in quiet tears. He had seen something “horrible.” Faces burning. It seemed like a ghost story. But later I looked at the film very carefully. It was the same work from 1945. But here was the thing Olivier had done, and I do not blame him. He had a shot of page boys asleep. Their faces. A tent. And a little later the tent on fire. If the images don't melt, or dissolve, the montage does. Don't tell children they have not seen something in a medium as wild and poetic as the movies. Do not tell them that they have got it wrong in reading the meanings in life. They have only their eyes and feelings to go on. And there were men on the street, their faces like Asian masks, the skin stretched, the eyes at odd angles. These were plastic-surgery faces after a cockpit of fire or a tank hit by an artillery shell.

  15

  “ONE THING ABOUT THAT LAD,” said Grandma, “you can always take him to see a picture. Then he's happy for a couple of hours.”

  Did that mean that otherwise I was unhappy or difficult? It didn't seem that way to me. Though I had got into the habit of screaming the house down and saying no, I wouldn't go to school, to such an extent that it no longer looked like a passing phase. I was against school. But the family rallied round my mother, I think. There was distress that Dad had left her, bewilderment that he hadn't quite completed the shift, and every urge to make things easier for “Non.” In time she got a part-time secretarial job in London on Oxford Street, and I became a latchkey kid. With this extra. That I took the bus to school, got off, took another bus, and came back home. Grannie was there, of course, though her health was slipping fast.

  “Aren't you well?” she'd ask as I came in at the front door.

  “Not really,” I'd say, and I would go up to our flat and listen to the radio. Sometimes after lunch she'd take me off to a film. And when Mum
got back from work, her face would sink and that worried look would come over her. “You have to go to school,” she'd say. “And I have to go to work. So you've got to get on with it.”

  But in half an hour she'd have forgiven me and would be cooking dinner. That evening she'd write the note to the school saying I had been sick. But then sometimes I didn't go the next day either.

  “What did you see at the pictures?” she asked.

  “I don't know what it was called,” I said.

  “What was it about?”

  “I don't quite know.”

  Grannie liked grown-up films with unkind ladies— Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. I could never quite work out their problems.

  “Was it suitable?” asked Mum.

  “Oh yes,” I said, never knowing what she meant.

  So I went all the time. I liked Westerns and adventure films, but I would take anything. It was the being there that I liked. In the same period of time I saw two pictures that referred to St. Louis. There was a Western, South of St. Louis, with Joel McCrea and Zachary Scott, and then there was Meet Me in St. Louis. My mum took me to that one on her own, as if it were for us. And I loved the idea of the big family of three generations living in one house, bright in the summer sun.

  “Where is St. Louis?” I asked, and I noticed that its name shifted from Lewis to Louis.

  “In America,” said Mum. “In the middle.”

  Don't tell me you can't learn from a film (and people did try to tell me that). In Meet Me in St. Louis, I understood the family tension that the dad works in a bank and the bank wants him to go to New York. The family of the girls—it was a girl film—pretend to be very happy about this, but really they want to stay in St. Louis. Because it's home and where their friends are. Then at the Christmas just before they are to leave it all comes out. Esther sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to Tootie, but the younger girl is so unhappy she smashes the snowmen in the garden. The dad hears this and realizes he can't go to New York. He can't leave.

  Years later, I marvel at this un-American attitude, the not going to New York, not taking a chance, and the adventure. But I realize that the movie was made in 1944, so it was saying to people away from home, Don't worry. Home will be as you left it. We are all coming home. (Unless there's a hole in the ground where home was.)

  “My dad goes away,” I said to my mum. I suppose I had noticed.

  “That's right,” said Mum. “But we're still here.” Yes, that was true, and I felt safe, I suppose, though I was afraid that someone who we needed with us went away every Monday morning. Yes, he came back with terrific jokes that seemed to last all weekend. But I had noticed, and I couldn't guess why no one else in the family had.

  Best of all in the film was Esther, a version of my Sally, the older sister who would take care of you, with eyes that ached to be loved as much as Judy Garland's trembly voice begged for it. I liked the way that women sang from a very early age, and I was torn between the purity of Doris Day and the yearning in Judy Garland. Between “Over the Rainbow” and “The Man That Got Away” lay my childhood and Judy's life. I still have a dream in which I am a songwriter and I walk into some scruffy dive one night and there in front of hardly a soul is this lost girl singing one of my songs. So I take her in hand and offer a little advice on phrasing, and soon we are acting out the song.

  For those few years after the war, I became if not Oliver Twist at the pictures then the Artful Dodger. When I skipped school, I would walk around, exploring, waiting for the cinemas to open. After that, I depended on the certificate of the film. If it was a U I could go in on my own, using my school dinner money. But if the film was an A— and I was beginning to discover that most interesting films were As—then I needed an adult to accompany me. So I asked strangers, accosted on the steps to the box office, whether they would take me in with them.

  Yes, my mum learned that I was doing this. I daresay parents could be reported to the Social Services for such neglect or risk taking. But strangers let me ride along with them, and nothing ever happened beyond my going out with a group of old ladies afterwards. We went to the restaurant in Pratt's. They had tea and cakes and I had an ice cream. They asked me what I had thought of the picture and I tried to give an account—it was the beginnings of criticism. Of course, I was upset and afraid quite often, and I think it is necessary for us to remember that, even surrounded by the branches of his family, a child is alone in the dark confronted by the great wonder of a screen many times his own size.

  I saw Scott of the Antarctic. I was eager to see it because I knew the story already. And there came a scene where the men were in their tent eating their grim meal and one of them threw up—it was enough, I was in tears, ready to be extensively sick myself, and hustled out of the theater by whichever relative had taken me. Somehow I saw The Red House, in which the house itself was mysterious and filled with demons and surprises. It was Edward G. Robinson, and I had nightmares of his strange swollen face twisted in fear or malice. Who could be sure which it was? Of course, I should not have been there. I should have been at school. But today I could go into raptures about the strange screen persona Robinson had. He was nasty and frightening sometimes, but he was also a very ordinary little man. I saw The Flame and the Arrow and Captain Horatio Hornblower, two robust adventures wherein I placed myself in dreams and daydreams that can extend the films’ stories. Inevitably, in that predicament, I fell violently in love with Virginia Mayo, who happened to be the female lead in both films.

  Grannie took me to see The Third Man. I didn't understand it, but I was in constant fear from its sinister Viennese atmosphere. And then, very late in the film, Harry Lime, or Mr. Orson Welles, appeared. Grannie reached out her cold three-fingered hand and held my wrist and announced, “Here comes a very bad man.”

  It was a valiant try on her part, and well meant. But as the cat curled on Lime's feet in the doorway, I was with the cat. And when the light from a room upstairs fell on Welles's face and he grinned at us all, I was sure he had seen me—just like Winnie in the street. I believed then, and I have only enriched the point of view after a book on Welles and seminars on him, that this immense talent and personality began with the idea of a boy dressing up to look like a grown man. Lime was by all agreement a wicked man, but Orson's smile was so appealing. I was not in the least surprised when, within a year or two, Orson as Harry Lime was back in a radio series and Lime was a Robin Hood character, or worthy company for Dick Barton, Special Agent.

  I laughed myself helpless at Bob Hope. I was ready to catch Burt Lancaster on the trapeze of adventure. My mother and I used to go to Anna Neagle pictures, content with their loveliness and their blithe references to Park Lane and Mayfair (the purple properties in Monopoly). In these films Ms. Neagle found lovely clothes and happiness— often with Michael Wilding, the tuberose among actors— in a world of luxury apartments and ravishing ease. My mum was quite candid about wanting to live in that “pretty” world. She carried no hint of class grievance. A year or two later, the semiconscious raptures of close-ups in A Place in the Sun drove me to try reading Theodore Dreiser and there I began to feel the throb of envy or resentment. But was it unfair that only some were rich and pretty? Or was it just hard luck? It was a few more years still before I read my first Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, and I caught the whip of irony in “Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?” I still use that phrase.

  I remember all these pictures, and many others, but nothing was like the experience of seeing Red River. Long before it opened, I was ready to see it. There must have been ads or previews in Film Fun, and I had adopted a policy with advertising of complete obedience. It was a Western—the biggest of them all, it was said.

  Well, as it happened, my aunt Trill was the one who had the good luck, or whatever it was, to take me to Red River.

  “Oh, it's black-and-white,” she said, as it came on. She sounded disappointed.

  “They only did black-and-white in those days,” I sai
d with a mixture of nonsense and authority that the critic should master early. And then we hushed as the film began.

  It is the story of a man, Tom Dunson, part of a wagon train going west. There are Indians about, but Dunson and his friend, Groot, leave the wagons and follow Dunson's instinct to go south into Texas. Indians attack the wagon train, and Dunson soon finds a girl's bracelet on an Indian he kills. Dunson and Groot find a boy—Matthew Garth— wandering in the wilderness, the only survivor from the wagon train. They come to the Rio Grande and stop there, but only after Dunson has won the land from two Mexicans. A great ranch is built.

  The film sighs, and fifteen years pass. The Civil War has been fought. Dunson has a great herd of cattle but nothing to do with it. He has heard there is a rail line in Kansas or Missouri, if they could drive the cattle that far. But Dunson is older, more severe, gray haired, meaner. He is John Wayne as no one had ever seen him before. And Matthew Garth is no longer a boy—he is Montgomery Clift. They will lead the cattle drive north.

  It is a hard journey on which Dunson grows harder. In the end, Matthew leads the mutiny against him. He takes over the herd and leaves a wounded Dunson to follow as he wishes. Soon the journey is a pursuit, and Tess Millay appears, a girl encountered on another wagon train. She loves Matthew, but she's ready to give herself to Dunson to save the boy.

  They reach Abilene, with its railroad. The cattle will be sold in a great deal. Everybody is happy, but everyone knows Dunson is coming beneath a vengeful cloud. The story ends on the streets of Abilene, and I won't tell you how. Anyone who gives a story away is unfit to handle story.

  Now, I am not the only one here who may tell you that Red River is one of the classic movies. Still, I am the only one who can have a chance of conveying what it meant to me. I did not want the limited conclusion (grand as it is); I wanted the cattle drive to last in time. I loved the story and I can see no alternative to the way I “identified” with a struggle between a father and a son. Dunson and Garth were not blood related, and their toughness and resolve kept them apart, but they saw themselves as linked. The grown man needed a rebel son. The son needed a teacher. And it was obvious they were going to clash and think about killing each other. This was the first story I had encountered that I knew was meant for me. So I could not give it up.