I wish I could say it was always a passion project but, if I’m honest, it was mostly borne out of necessity. I started going to the cinema fairly frequently over a decade ago, and had always been happy to see maybe a film or two every month, but everything changed last year. I quit nicotine in the summer and, stripped of the one thing that reliably brought me pleasure, I desperately began searching for more outlets.
I started painting more, reading more, walking more and going to more art galleries. None of that was quite enough, though. For some reason, sitting in a big dark room for two hours brought me solace in a way few other things did. There was only one problem: I’m incredibly picky when it comes to films.
Romantic comedies bore me and I can’t abide horror. Hell, I probably can’t watch anything that would scare or repulse a 13-year-old, because it would scare or repulse me too. I am, to use the technical term, a big old scaredy cat. I also have an attention span that is, for the most part, non-existent, and so cannot stand arthouse movies where nothing really happens, and there is no beginning, middle or end.
Similarly, I refuse to watch tearjerkers and movies with dour, unsatisfying endings because the cinema is, to me, a form of entertainment. I do not think of “bawling my eyes out then being left without a definite conclusion” as entertainment.
What this meant in practice is that I found myself with a bit of a dilemma. I yearned to go to the movies more often, but there were only so many flicks I actually wanted to watch. Well, recent ones anyway.
As studious readers of this column may remember, I started dipping my toes into more historical cinema in the second half of last year. Carefully, cautiously, I began looking at the listings for the Prince Charles, the indie legend, and the British Film Institute that bit more closely.
It took a while for me to get started. At risk of offending any true aficionados: I assumed old movies would be boring. I was brought up in a family where new releases would sometimes warrant a trip to the pictures, but nothing in black and white ever crossed our screens or consciousness.
I had, as a result, genuinely no sense of what to expect. I was a complete philistine. No, really: the first movie I went to watch this year, on January 1, was Casablanca (1942). I didn’t know anything about it, except for the fact that, well, it was set in Morocco. I maybe had an inkling that Nazis were in some ways involved, but that was that.
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In the end, I had a ball. I now get why it’s such a celebrated movie. I was so terrified of being bored to death, but the pace never turned out to be a problem, and I didn’t really care about the plot when Victor Laszlo was on screen anyway. Another joy was North by Northwest (1959), my first ever Hitchcock. I knew little about the director, aside from the fact that he was famous and controversial, but the film was so much funnier than I thought it would be. Oh, and the outfits were lovely too.
Still, my greatest joy so far has come from exploring pre-Code Hollywood; the thin sliver of time between films becoming talkies and strict censorship coming into place. Truly, I went in with low expectations, going to watch Baby Face (1933) in the manner of someone gearing up to eat their greens. I couldn’t have been more wrong, or pleasantly surprised. Barbara Stanwyck was so magnetic, and the plot so risque. I adored it. It made me book a ticket for I’m No Angel, which came out the same year, straightaway.
To say I loved it would be an understatement. Though I’d always been familiar with Mae West’s filthy one-liners, I was still blown away by her sheer presence on screen. We complain about today’s actors being mostly free of charisma, but I reckon she could have built up intoxicating sexual tension with a door frame. I’m now planning to watch everything she was in or wrote in those years.
Really, the only bum note so far has, perhaps unexpectedly, come from the fatherland. I went to watch À Bout de Souffle (Breathless, 1960) last week and was certain I’d enjoy it. Instead, I had to talk myself out of walking out of the room on at least four separate occasions. I loathed it. The plot was somehow both non-existent yet needlessly repetitive and not believable in the slightest. I felt no connection of any kind between the two main characters.
Most importantly, I found the constant, demeaning, needless sexism enraging. Belmondo’s character is an ass. I found myself cheering on the police by the end, and hoping they would shoot him straight in the face. I left the cinema muttering expletives to myself.
What a complete, infuriating waste of my time! I’ll never watch another Godard again. I don’t care what anyone says. We all have our limits, and I found mine.
