The Man In The Seventh Row (7 page)

Anna jumps in: 'Robert Redford doesn't say a thing. And Paul comes and encourages him to leave.'

'And the other guy,' says Roy, 'is obviously going to push it. Newman says to Redford something like 'We've got to go, Sundance'. And the other guy immediately backs off. It is the first time he has realised who his opponent is.'

Anna has pulled her chair closer to the table and is resting her arms on it.

'I remember it so-o well,' she says. 'I've seen it half a dozen times, though I haven't seen many westerns. I like European films.'

'European films?' asks Roy. 'Bertolucci?'

'Yes, yes,' she nods. '
Last Tango
.
Last Emperor
. Just stick a 'last' in it and I'll like it.'

'Here's another great beginning,' he says. 'European film, Bertolucci film ... and a western. Three men are waiting at this train station. Three more villainous, meaner-looking characters you wouldn't find anywhere. They wait and wait. Nothing much is said and nothing much happens, except a fly buzzes around squinty-eyed Jack Elam, and water drips on Woody Strode's bald head and the third one, whose name no one can ever remember, cracks his knuckles. But all the time the tension and the sense of expectation keep building. More and more. And when the train comes no one gets off it. But as it pulls away they hear this harmonica playing, really slowly, eerie, haunting, and there's Charles Bronson on the other side of the tracks. He asks where his horse is. And one of the men looks at their three horses and says they seem to have brought one too few. And Bronson says no, two too many, and draws first and kills them all.'

'
Once Upon a Time in the West,
' she says.

'You've seen more westerns than you make out.'

'I saw it on
TV
once,' she says, 'or read about it. But wasn't it Sergio Leone? How does Bertolucci come into it?'

'Bertolucci wrote the story with Sergio Leone and Dario Argento, who became a horror director ... Here's a western you won't know: It rivals
DOA
as one of the cleverest beginnings ever and is just as slow as
Once Upon a Time in the West
. Three mean-looking villains ride into town ...'

'I think we've done this one,' says Anna. It occurs to her she feels incredibly comfortable and confident with a man she has just met. Then she wonders if she is talking too much.

'This is another Sergio Leone storyline,' says Roy. 'The villains tie up and gag the barber and his son. They're waiting for someone. Henry Fonda arrives and one of them pretends to be the barber and begins to shave him. He is obviously thinking of cutting Henry Fonda's throat when he hears the click of Fonda's revolver and realises it is pointed straight at him. He shaves him and Fonda is looking at himself in the mirror when the other two baddies appear outside and one shoots through the window. Fonda spins around shooting all three. Fonda sprays himself with cologne and leaves $10. The barber and his son appear having managed to free themselves. The boy says he heard Fonda fire only one shot. His father says that is because he is so fast. 'Is nobody faster?' asks the kid. 'Nobody is faster', his father says.'

'What film is it?' asks Anna.

'Ah, that's the punchline,' says Roy. 'Remember the father says, 'Nobody is faster'. The film cuts away to actor Terence Hill and we finally get the title credit. Ten minutes into the film, it comes up:
My Name is Nobody
.'

'Oh God,' says Anna, breaking into a broad smile, 'that is clever, that's really clever ...'

'The unexpected play on words,' says Roy. 'It's like Shakespeare when Macbeth is told that "none of woman born" can harm him and then Macduff reveals that he was "from his mother's womb untimely ripped".'

'I'll watch out for that one,' says Anna. '
My Name is Nobody,
' she adds quickly. 'I didn't mean Macbeth.'

Roy sips his espresso. Anna's cup is empty, but she continues to sit there.

'
Blue Velvet
has a good beginning,' she says. 'Small town America with the friendly, waving fireman, the house with the garden and picket fence, and then the camera goes down into the grass and it's a jungle of insects killing each other; and that wonderful song ... And
Taxi Driver
: the taxi gliding through the steam and the really dramatic music ... And, of course,
Citizen Kane
... In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree.'

She is eager to show that she can quote literature too.

'The gothic mansion all eerie and uninviting. The old man dropping that little glass hemisphere with the snowstorm scene in it. It smashes on the ground and he says that one word, "Rosebud".' She imitates Orson Welles's voice, prolonging the word and letting it trail away, into nothing. 'And he dies. Great, great beginning.'

Roy nods. Anna awaits his response, while her mind flies across other openings. The ape inventing the club in
2001
. The spiders and poison arrows and then the giant boulder that almost crushes Harrison Ford to death in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. The banter in
Reservoir Dogs
.

'Yes,' says Roy. '
Citizen Kane
. Great beginning.' But the passion seems to have gone from his voice, as if he has suddenly tired of the game.

'It's been, eh, really nice meeting you ... I'd better be going,' he says. And before she has the chance to say anything more he has gone.

It seems it was not such a great beginning after all. She always talks too much.

She didn't even get his name.

9

Roy looks at the grey ticket stub, with 'Mann's Theatres' printed on it in white and details of the film added electronically in black. He wonders how many stubs he has held in his hand over the last 30 years, reading their limited information time and time again, while waiting for the darkness to embrace him and the magic beam of light to transport him to another world. This stub carries the name of the cinema, the title of the film, the time of the performance, time and date of purchase and the price. Once upon a time all his stub would have said, after it had been torn in two by the usher, was 'alls' or 'Circ', to denote the part of the house in which he was entitled to sit, printed on a rough grey or purple scrap of paper smaller than a bus ticket. How many tickets had he held between that first 'alls' ticket for the Playhouse, North Berwick, and this $4.50 ticket for Mann's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood? For how many films? In how many cinemas? How many before Los Angeles, with its historic old Chinese and Egyptian picture palaces on Hollywood Boulevard and its new multiplexes in the shopping malls, where Roy watched films from ten in the morning until one the next, sustaining himself on nachos and mega-sized, mega-priced Cokes that fitted into a hole in the armrest of the seat?

Old cinemas and new. The Playhouse in Edinburgh sat more than 3,000 and the North Star on the island of Shetland, off the north coast of Scotland, sat 200 and had only an upstairs, the seats having been removed from the stalls to facilitate dancing. He saw
Taxi Driver
and
Midnight Express
in a double bill there. Brad Davis, stuck in a Turkish jail for drug-smuggling, kisses the prison informer, a long deep kiss. He turns away and spits out the man's tongue. A woman in the audience screamed and fainted.

The Odeon in Edinburgh was designed to look like a Greek amphitheatre. It had statues around its walls and twinkling stars in the ceilings. Some cinemas were plain, functional rooms, a screen at one end, a projection box at the other. You might think cinemas are all the same when the lights go down: the screen at the front and the projector at the back and the audience in the middle, not like a theatre where you can put the stage in the middle and have a chandelier come crashing down just before the intermission, if you're Andrew Lloyd Webber. But cinemas are no more the same in the dark than women. They sound and feel and smell different.

Some cinemas smell musty, of sweat and cigarette smoke and disinfectant. They smell of darkness. Some stink of popcorn and hotdogs. In some there is an aroma of lemon cleanliness, plastic bits and newness. And they smell of light.

A mint print on a pristine white screen is not the same as an old film showing all the lines of age, projected through a nicotine cloud onto a yellow screen that remains fuzzy around the edges and has a patch in one corner where some drunk threw a bottle at a late-night screening. In today's plexes the film is one long strip that runs horizontally through a projector and may continue on its merry way to another projector farther down the projection booth, serving the auditorium next door. So the audience in Cinema 2 sees exactly the same film as patrons in Cinema 1, only a few seconds later. One reel of film serves two cinemas or more. Some small cinemas had only one projector and there would be a short intermission each time the reel needed changing. There is no longer so much scope to liven up a familiar programme by varying the order of the reels.

Red Grant is not the only one who is confused when he orders red wine with his fish – after all James Bond killed him ten minutes previously. Will he kill him again? Roy never found out, because the film ground to a halt, the groan of the slowing film matched by the human groan in the 'alls'.

'I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen,' said the manager, in his customary evening dress, 'but we appear to have a technical problem.'

Not as much of a technical problem as James Bond. You kill someone and ten minutes later they're ordering red wine with their fish.

Roy had been to cinemas with noisy audiences, he had been to cinemas where the audience treated the cinema like a library; he had been to cinemas where there was no audience at all, except him, and he wondered whether they would still have run the film if he had not turned up.

At some cinemas the slightest rustle of sweetie papers met with angry shushing noises. The audience is unique at the Dominion, in Edinburgh's Morningside area, staple for generations of local comics since the original anonymous observation about fur coats and no knickers. Children at the Dominion behave perfectly. There was hardly a whisper when Roger Moore's speedboat leapt from the bayou, flew across dry land, and dropped back into the water on the other side in
Live and Let Die
.

But the pensioners? They chatter away throughout the programme like sports commentators.

'Oh look the boat is flying through the air,' says one senile delinquent at the top of her voice.

'Well I never,' says another.

'I think he'll get away now,' says a third.

'Of course he'll get away', says Roy. 'He always gets away. He's James Bond. It's a film. It's in the script that he gets away. It's not real'

And they all turn and glare at him like the children in
Village of the Damned
.

'Sh-sh-sh ...'

It was the one local neighbourhood cinema in Edinburgh that survived beyond the great cinema depression of the Seventies and early Eighties. It became first a twin cinema, with real domestic armchairs in Cinema 1 and a screen that was far too small. Eventually they turned a broom cupboard into Cinema 3 and
Gregory's Girl
ran there for a record 63 years or something like that.
Gregory's Girl
was one of the first British films to utilise a new technique devised by Bill Forsyth called Wimporama in which the heroes were all wimps. America gave the world John Wayne and Scotland responded with Gordon John Sinclair, a man so stupid he could not remember to put his three names in the same order from one film to the next. For once it was not Halliwell's that got it wrong but the boy himself.

When he was sixteen Roy took Alison Westwood to see
Magnum Force
, the second Dirty Harry film, at the Dominion. He paid for both their tickets and she kept wanting to kiss him. It was not her money, nothing to her if she missed the film, but he wanted to see it. He kept having to push her off.

'I'm trying to watch the fucking film,' he said finally.

'Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh,' said the Grandparents of the Damned.

Alison walked out and Roy never saw her again, but at least he could watch the film in peace and he had a lasting relationship with Clint Eastwood.

He was far too young to get in to see
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
when it came out, but he and his friends would play at being
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
, a variation on the standard cowboy shoot-out which, for reasons Roy never understood until many years later when he saw the film, could only be played in the local cemetery. Bob always got to be Clint Eastwood because he was oldest and, as he pointed out, he was the only one who could whistle the tune and they needed a soundtrack. Roy was never sure whether it was better to be the bad or the ugly.

'Do ye know who's Scotland's answer to
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
?' asked Fat Bob.

Roy shook his head.

'Jock Stein, Colin Stein and Frankenstein,' said Fat Bob, rocking with laughter at his own wit. Roy pointed out that Frankenstein was not Scottish. Bob stopped laughing, stared at Roy in disbelief and turned and walked away. Bob could be like that sometimes.

Roy first saw Clint Eastwood in
Paint Your Wagon
at the Playhouse in North Berwick. It did not show him to best advantage. Not only did he sing in it, but he sang to trees in a clear tenor (or maybe just baritone and no more), while Lee Marvin was declaring a manly wanderlust in a voice that sounded as if he were gargling with gravel. But these are Roy's thoughts now. At the time he loved them both equally and found it easier to imitate Clint Eastwood's singing to the trees. When he tried to sing like Lee Marvin he ended up with a sore throat. Roy not only remembered seeing the film for the first time in North Berwick, but he remembers seeing the trailer. Lee Marvin following his wanderin' star through mud and rain and Rotten Luck Willie, a gambler who has held the riches of the world in his hand and gazed upon all her wonders, declaring the men's respect for the elements in the most powerful operatic voice in the film, and revealing that they call the wind Maria, with that memorably hard, long 'I' in Maria. Roy needed to see only the trailer to know that prospecting was a life for real men.