Most of the journeys I’ve made over the years began somewhere on that map.
The journey into movies began here in Hampstead.
This and That
I haven’t figured out yet how this and that works, but my hunch is something like this. The life creates the map. The map then helps one to understand the life.
Most in mind, at this point, are some personal landmarks. I’ve just written about my job at a famous old Hampstead cinema, but there was also my job working for a famous old Holland Park film director, Michael Winner.
I understand the lure of fame, but when I wrote about Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier, the real star was not the world’s 1940s Golden Couple, but one of their most devoted fans, Sarah Bloomfield, whom I first met in Hampstead at the Everyman Cinema.
Perhaps that is a theme of these various connections – the way that life, like many of my favourite movies, so often comes full circle.
Full Circle
Joseph Losey’s films get this idea of full circle. 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.
