Most of the journeys I’ve made over the years began somewhere on that map.
The journey into movies began here in Hampstead. The shop was founded by my grandfather in 1927. The advertisement used to be the first thing you saw as you stepped out of the lift at Hampstead tube station. Unlike the Everyman Cinema, which claimed to be opposite Hampstead tube station but wasn’t, my grandfather’s shop really was – and exactly 39 steps away when I tested the distance in about 1967.
I wrote about the Everyman Cinema some weeks ago. It was through the Everyman that I met Lindsay Anderson, who has been a regular presence in these pages, most recently in a piece about his dissident film on WHAM!, If You Were There...
When Lindsay in the early 1950s published a piece about the great British documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings, he took for his title the E. M. Forster epigraph “Only Connect”. He looked to Jennings as an important influence in his life, as I suppose I now look back to Lindsay – with affection and huge regret that I didn’t have a chance to get to know him better.
As different things connect, somehow life has a way of coming full circle. Joseph Losey’s films get this idea. The extraordinary opening shots of Eva and The Servant come to mind. Some years ago I wrote a piece about The Servant for Studiocanal when it released a 4K version of the film. At its dark heart is the brilliant performance of Dirk Bogarde as the gentleman’s gentleman. I was very lucky to have an opportunity to do an interview with Bogarde when I wrote my first book, The Finest Years. At the time he was one of Penguin’s most successful writers and I was working as an editor there. To go from contract star for the Rank Organisation in the 1950s to A-list author for Penguin in the 1980s, that was a sort of full circle.
Another believer in the full circle was the Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti. How I wish I had been able to interview him! He left Brazil when he was still a boy to be educated in Switzerland. In 1914 he won a scholarship to study architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He went on to become a hugely influential contributor to the French avant-garde in the 1920s, the British Documentary Movement in the 1930s and Ealing Studios in the 1940s, but then completed the circle when he returned to Brazil to make films there in the 1950s.
Although he is one of four named directors for the Ealing portmanteau film Dead of Night, I suspect that it is he who deserves the most credit for the chilling full circle of the framing narrative. The film begins with Mervyn Johns arriving in his car at a strange house where he thinks he’s been before. It ends a 100 minutes later, as he awakes from a nightmare only to find himself – like one of those dimension-defying Escher drawings – back where he started, arriving at the same house.
“Proud Without Being Arrogant”
1974. It was a good time to meet. Rudolf Nureyev had just made his début as a film-maker, co-directing with Robert Helpmann a film version of the ballet Don Quixote: he must have been very interested to learn what was required to make a good movie. And Lindsay Anderson had just directed one of the best movies of the 1970s, O Lucky Man! So a striking aspect of this BBC Omnibus interview, now available on BBC iPlayer, is the obvious mutual admiration between interviewer and interviewee.
Lindsay Anderson could not resist the opportunity to ask the most famous dancer in the world about luck….
Only Connect!
It’s a lovely idea, but it doesn’t always work out unfortunately, as I found out recently when I tried to rejoin a forum that I had co-founded many years ago.
