Why I Still Go to the Cinema

Two of the best films I have seen in the past few months have been very old.  One was silent. One was in German. The third was in black and white and in a foreign language, and so felt quite old, even though it’s new.

 

They were ‘Ida’, ‘The Battles of Coronel and the Falkland islands’ and ‘M’.

 

People sometimes ask me, after I have excoriated some silly film, why I go to the cinema at all, since I seem to dislike almost everything I see there? Well, first of all, I live in hope.  It’s perfectly possible for modern directors to make good films with modern techniques (I am thinking of ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Witness’, ‘Groundhog Day’ , ‘3.10 to Yuma’ , ‘Walk the Line’, ‘True Grit’ for example, and I’m very fond of ‘Galaxy Quest’ which ought to have attracted more attention when it was first released). I even quite enjoyed ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, though I suspect it’s only interesting for those of us who can (just) recall the bleak era it portrays.

 

Secondly, I just like the experience. I must have mis-spent many long winter afternoons in the Gosport Ritz, the Gosport Criterion, the Odeon North End and the Essoldo in Portsmouth, and what was once the Scala in Oxford ( scene of a hilarious moment in Tariq Ali’s young life when he was called a ‘fascist!’ and pelted with rubbish for standing up during ‘God save the Queen’  and is now renamed the Phoenix

 

Later on there were the Hampstead Everyman, the Academy in Oxford Street (to which I once rode 60 miles on a motorbike in the rain to see ‘Ulysses’ after it was refused a certificate in Oxford)   and the Curzon in Mayfair, and numerous American movie theatres from Texas to Chicago. I even have memories of the ‘Cosmos’ in north Moscow (such hard seats) , and of various French cinemas where I have watched English-language films in ‘version originale’ (i.e English, undubbed), with French subtitles, so that I now know the rather disappointing French equivalent of the rudest insult in the American swearing lexicon, a four-syllable word imputing incest.

 

I love the whole business, the entry into another world through a magic portal, the often wonderful décor, the needless curtains, the censor’s certificate, the trailers and advertisemnets going on so long you often forgot what you’d come to see (still a problem)  the unhealthy refreshments (‘ an hour from now, you’ll wish you hadn’t had one’, as the Hot Dog ads nearly said , or the unalluring , richly-coloured films of the full meals available in the cinema’s actual restaurant – still unbelievably in being in the Oxford ABC in the late 1960s,

 

 This was also the last place I heard the national anthem played at the end of a film, in this case the 1968 version of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ . I didn’t stand. Most people did. But in the spirit of the times, the practice vanished round about then. I can’t recall if there was any centralised decision by the cinema chains. But it seems incredible now that it happened at all. And what happened to usherettes, who used to guide us to our seats with shaded torches, and on occasion expose people who were canoodling or otherwise  misbehaving in the dark?  I can remember them surviving well into the 1970s.

 

Anyway, as to the three that I’ve recently seen, the ‘Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands’ (recently restored by the British Film Institute) is a portrayal of two naval clashes which happened almost exactly a century ago (Coronel on 1 November 1914, The Falklands on the 8th December) . The acting’s all right, and the major characters – Admirals Sturdee and Graf von Spee, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher, Winston Churchill) are played by remarkable lookalikes. There’s even a  farcical interlude in the Falklands which might well have been the original inspiration for Dad’s Army – a shambling platoon of greybeards preparing to take on the Kaiser (the Isles of Scilly play the Falklands) . As they muster to face the foe, one is seen to have turned up without his weapon. ‘Where’s your *$*?*@*%  rifle?!’ shouts the subtitle, as the old loon hares off to fetch it and the German battle fleet looms ever larger on the horizon.

 

It’s almost a 19th-century naval conflict. And it is full of the sort of chivalry that died for good after 1939. At a dinner to celebrate his victory at Coronel, von Spee refuses to drink a toast to the defeat of the damned English, saying they are courageous foes.  And so they are. Poor Christopher Cradock, von Spee’s opponent at Coronel, knows before he decides to fight that he is hopelessly outgunned by the German squadron, knows that the outcome will almost certainly be his defeat and death,  but believes it his duty to try to damage the Kaiser’s ships before he dies. Admiral Ernest Troubridge's disastrous failure to intercept the German ships Goeben and Breslau on their way to Turkey (a knife-edge episode wonderfully described in Barbara Tuchman's 'Guns of August') may have been on his mind. Troubridge, similarly outgunned by the powerful Goeben, decided not to risk his poorly-armed ships and, though acquitted in a court martial of any technical wrongdoing, never recovered his reputation.

 

For his part, von Spee knows well that Britain will not forgive him for what he has done, and will send a mighty force to kill him and destroy his ships. A fascinating segment at the heart of the film shows Fisher and Churchill furiously pressing the Devonport dockyard to prepare the punitive fleet. There are haunting scenes of dockyard workers streaming aboard the chosen ships in their hundreds, to fit them out for war, which summon up the older Britain of hard manual work and old-fashioned skills better than almost anything I’ve seen.

Those who love the sight of warships, as I do, will rejoice at many shots of naval leviathans at speed and at sea.  I think ( an expert will tell me) that one of the British battlecruisers is played by the beautiful 1914 battleship HMS Barham, whose tragic end in 1941 was also filmed, a clip which remains one of the most shocking and distressing images of warfare ever recorded. It is comparable to the sinking of the Austro-Hungarian dreadnought Szent Istvan in the First World War, but far, far worse for many hundreds died horribly in the Barham, and many were appallingly injured too, whereas the casualties in the Szent Istvan were few.   

 

Special effects, no doubt good for the time, now look hopelessly weak, and some of the film is backwards (as you can see from the cap-band of a German sailor). But it’s a compelling and fair account of a forgotten era, often rather beautiful, very unselfconscious and so very truthful.

 

‘Ida’, a Polish film made in 2013, is about a novice nun in late 1950s Poland, who is told by her mother superior to go and visit her aunt before she takes her final vows. Her aunt turns out to be a sardonic and despairing Communist apparatchik, with a thirst for vodka and a habit of driving her car into ditches – yet one of the most attractive and interesting characters I’ve seen in a film in a long time. Her ghastly funeral (yes, she dies in the film, I won’t say how or why)  is a marvellously bleak Godless ceremony, of the kind now becoming common here, attended by potato-faced Communists and enlivened only by the playing of a scratchy record of the ‘Internationale’ (favourite funeral song of so many Blairite heroes and heroines).

 

She introduces Ida to the modern world, of sex and jazz, but also reveals to her that she is in fact a Jew, and that the rest of her family was murdered by a neighbour in the weary, sagging, miserable village which is her place or origin.  It’s the usual complicated occupation story, a bit of heroism, a bit of betrayal, a lot of greed, and now a fear that she will come back and claim what the killer has stolen from her. There’s one exhumation scene of great horror, though no actual charnel-house nastiness is shown, and a terrible moment when the aunt and the would-be nun arrive at an abandoned and weed-grown Jewish cemetery, a place so dark and full of misery and tragedy that you almost expect the very trees to groan out loud, to bury what they have found. These will stay in my mind, as will the sarcastic aunt’s conversation with the village barkeeper (roughly as follows).

Aunt: ‘I’m trying to find out what happened to some relatives who used to live here’.

Barkeeper : ‘Ah. Jews, were they?’

Aunt: (finishing third or fourth large glass) ’No, Eskimoes’.

 

The best thing about it, and there are many good things, is the fact that it does not resort to the usual cliché in such films. You’ll have to get hold of it yourself one day to find out exactly what I mean. But anyone who sees it will be changed, and will be a more complete person than he or she was before.

 

Third is ‘M’, Fritz Lang’s brilliant film about the pursuit of a child-murderer in a great city of the Weimar Republic.  I saw it first many years ago, and there’s now a new and much-restored print. It has everything – police procedural, social commentary,  a ( very unorthodox) trial, a chase. On top of this are repeated glimpses of normal life in a Germany before Hitler, both modern and very old-fashioned, which almost amount to a documentary in its own right. As you watch it, you will see where dozens of subsequent film-makers have got their ideas from.  

 

That’s why I keep going to the cinema. It still has an intense  power to move, inform and captivate. Anyone with any standards is bound to be disappointed most of the time, but not always.  It would have been a great pity if the much-inferior form of TV had (as many predicted in my childhood) put cinemas out of business.