by John Grant
Whatever the reason, it wasn't until sometime in the late spring or early summer of the following year that I located the Performing Arts section of the university library and then, embedded within it, the long shelves dedicated to books on the cinema. I strolled backwards and forwards in front of those shelves for several minutes, I recall, reluctant to take the final step of actually pulling a book down and opening it. There were books about individual directors, actors, studios ... even individual movies. There were histories of Hollywood in general, and of specific genres; this was the first time that I realized, for example, that animation was something more than kids' stuff but was worthy of serious consideration by grown-up human beings – a significant discovery, as it was to prove, because animation has become one of my major obsessions within the broader field of cinema studies. There were books on the philosophy of the movies, books on the silents, books on series like those starring Tarzan or Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy or Batman, books on the technologies of cinematography and special effects, encyclopedias and movie guides, how-to books for wannabe screenwriters ... There was a whole world contained within those books, and I had been doing nothing more than looking at the outside of one of its aspects. They presented a challenge starkly before me: if I wanted, I could turn and leave the building and forget all about them, become a vet who enjoyed watching the movies whenever he had the spare time; otherwise, I was going to start an exploration that would likely remain incomplete even if I dedicated the rest of my life to it.
Knowing exactly the import of what I was doing, I eventually reached out a slightly shaking hand and took by the spine a copy of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema. I carried it over to a desk and opened it. I saw in a blur two pages jammed full of small print. It was an encyclopedic listing of movies – over 20,000 of them, according to the splashline on the cover. Once I got my eyes to focus properly, I could see that the movies were listed alphabetically, each with basic details such as year of release, running time, director and stars, plus a short synopsis. The spread I had open in front of me contained these brief descriptions of movies like Four Men and a Prayer, The Four Musketeers, The Four-Poster, Four Sided Triangle, Four's a Crowd, The Fox and the Hound, Fragment of Fear, The Franchise Affair, Francis of Assisi ... Reading the summaries – none was longer than a couple of sentences – was a tantalizing and soon frustrating experience: I began to salivate at the prospect of all these movies still waiting in the future for me to watch, but what I really wanted was to watch them now – and all of them at once.
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema bore a bold blue REFERENCE stamp, so all I could do was look at it there – I wasn't going to be able to take it home with me and browse through it late into the night. I looked at the price on the cover and realized glumly that it would be a long time, no matter how much I scrimped, before I could save up enough money from my allowance to buy a copy of my own. But there were other books on the shelves which I was allowed to borrow, and soon I'd amassed a stack of half a dozen of them – as many as my university library card entitled me to borrow at any one time. Clutching them to me as if I were a small child who'd just discovered a trove of chocolates and was making good his escape while the coast was clear with as many as he could carry, I checked them out and made my way back to the apartment.
Now here's a curious thing. I cannot for the life of me remember what those books actually were – an omission from memory as grievous as if I'd forgotten the name of the woman to whom I'd lost my virginity. (No, not to Glenda Doberman.) But certainly I discovered that they had the property of banishing the sounds of the fish market and the shrieking kids and Mrs. Bellis's soap operas. I got home in the late afternoon and didn't stop reading until I fell asleep face-first into the third of the books I'd started, my last memory before unconsciousness hit me and the words on the page receded wildly from my vision being that a lot of people seemed to be laughing very loudly on the other side of the wall at the quips of a chat-show host.
The next day I had to drag myself to the laboratory. It had to be faced that, overnight, veterinary science had transformed from an interest – albeit by now only a marginal one – into a chore. I did a few studies of the larynx of a dog, wrote a couple of paragraphs of my dissertation, stared out the window a lot. I'd brought the two cinema books I'd finished last night with me, and at lunchtime I almost sprinted to the library – not just to exchange them for two more but also for an hour's uninterrupted browsing through the pages of Brunner's Companion to the Cinema.
Lenny, Leo the Last, The Leopard, The Leopard Man, Lepke, A Lesson in Love ...
It was only then that it occurred to me that, rather than just leafing through the book, I might be more profitably occupied using it to find out something about the specific genre of movies with which I'd fallen in love – those old World War II movies I saw at the Rupolo. Accordingly, I turned back through the pages to the Gs, hunting for The Great Escape.
I found The Great Diamond Robbery – a minor comedy thriller, apparently – and Great Expectations, but clearly Mr. Brunner thought The Great Escape was beneath his notice. I wasn't unduly surprised: most of the Rupolo's Monday-afternoon presentations were obviously very obscure and very aged B-movies, and any reference work has to draw the line somewhere. Maybe I'd have better luck with Reach for the Sky.
I didn't. Nor with The Bridge on the River Kwai, or The Wooden Horse, or Ice Cold in Alex, or The Colditz Story, or ...
In fact, Mr. Brunner had ignored all of the war movies whose titles I could offhand recall.
I shut the book and stared at its cover in a state of complete incredulity. It was reasonable that some – possibly most – of these undistinguished movies might have been omitted for reasons of space, but all of them? It didn't seem feasible.
And it was then that something which had for months now been subliminally troubling me about my weekly forays to the Rupolo came hammering irresistibly into the forefront of my conscious – that disturbing pattern that evidenced itself in the Monday-afternoon movies as a whole. In items like The Great Escape and The Wooden Horse I'd seen plucky British prisoners-of-war outwitting rather stupid Germans and gaining their freedom. There were battle movies in which the forces of the Axis got the crap beaten or bombed out of them by the Allies. The Brits or the Americans had almost always been portrayed as brave heroes; the Germans and the Japs almost always as cowards or villains or both – or just as expendable non-people who could be mown down in their hundreds and thousands without the smallest tear being shed. Moreover, although it hadn't been stated, these movies' stories had seemed implicitly part of a larger story in which the Axis had been defeated and the Allies had triumphed. Indeed, now that I began to think about the whole thing properly – started using that rational mind which my parents had donated so many thousands of dollars to train – it seemed distinctly peculiar that any of these movies had ever been made at all. OK, one, perhaps two – as curios in which the tables were turned on history. But dozens of them?
Taking this further, how come the cops were allowing the Rupolo to show such seditious features? – for seditious they were, now that I'd begun to regard them analytically rather than just with the wide-eyed, naive gawp of enthusiasm. Surely the place should have been busted by now and its owner marched off for, at the very least, extensive interrogation? A chill ran down my spine as I realized that the audience, too, should have been scooped up in the net. We were almost as guilty as the Rupolo's proprietor through having returned, week in and week out, to watch such dangerous stuff. Without ever noticing that I was doing anything illegal, I'd become in effect a habitual criminal, a serial offender – a traitor in thought and arguably a traitor in deed as well.
Up to this point in my life I had always been the most law-abiding of persons. I hadn't committed so much as an act of littering. Now I was involved in an extremely serious crime.
Is it any wonder that I never made it back to the laboratories that afternoon, but instead drifted home haphazardly, m
y stomach feeling as if it were filled with ice and my head most certainly filled with visions of my arrest, my interrogation and the shame I would bring down on the heads of my parents?
~
Yet by the morning my attitude had changed. This might seem surprising – indeed, in retrospect it's slightly startling even to me – but you must remember that I had for months now been affected by that curious sensation of being more related to the fictional world of Chips and Ginger and Forbes-Hepplewhite and the rest than to what my intellect but not my gut acknowledged as the real world: the world around me. In that sense, to ask myself to give up my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo was to require of me more than forgoing a pleasurable activity: in a very true sense it was to require me to give up my existence – in effect to commit suicide – for I was a part not of a three-dimensional Technicolor world but of a two-dimensional monochrome one. If I abandoned the monochrome world, then something that strongly resembled a doctoral student called Kurt Stroheim would continue to go through all the action of existing in the Technicolor world, but he wouldn't be me: he – or it – would be just another puppet, like all the rest of the denizens of that world.
There was another factor, which was that I was young, and immature even for my age. Continuing to attend the Rupolo's Monday double-bill matinees was risky and risqué, it was to partake of forbidden fruit – and thus it was infinitely appealing to me. Life as an impoverished postgraduate was generally dull and sometimes duller than that, and the excitement of deliberate illegality added a sparkle to something otherwise sparkle-free.
So the following Monday I was back at the Rupolo with my seventy-five cents.
The old guy looked up at me as he reached out his clawed hand for the money, and as he studied my face I could see something die in those fanatic eyes of his – some element of the fire that normally lit them. And, although there was no alteration at all of his habitually hostile facial expression as he grabbed the coins and grudgingly emitted the usual torn card stub through the hole in his window, I could somehow tell that he was disappointed in me. After a moment of disconcertedness I shrugged his attitude off: why should I give a shit about the opinions of a misanthropic old vulture – who anyway, by the look of his nose, probably had some Semitic blood in his ancestry?
Don't get me wrong here. I am not a prejudiced man, and I believe that the Final Solution, as perpetrated both in Germany under the Fuehrer and here under President MacNaish, was almost certainly an unnecessarily inhumane means of dealing with an acknowledged problem. There seems to me no reason at all why the Jews could not have been dealt with in the same way as MacNaish coped with the nigger problem. But in my youth I was more encumbered by the cultural baggage of my elders and peers. That moment when I recognized that the old ticket-seller might well be partly Semitic and yet did nothing about it was a major leap forward in the evolution of my own, independent worldview. From now on I at least recognized that there was the possibility for me to develop attitudes and a morality that were not merely carbon copies of those my parents lived by.
I shuffled into the semi-gloom of the theater and, sure enough, my regular seat was vacant – fifth row from the front, on the right side of the aisle. There were still a few minutes to go before the torn red-plush curtains would draw back and the screen flicker into life, and so as always I craned round to check that all the regulars were arrived or arriving. There was the middle-aged woman with the tightly clutched beadwork handbag and the perpetually watery eyes. There was the young couple who came here to neck in the back row and who I could swear once went the whole way there, right through the central section of a movie called Casablanca, in fact; at the end one of the characters said something like "Play it for me again, Tom" and half the small audience burst into sniggers. There was the tall man who carried himself so upright that I always guessed he'd been in the military fifty years ago. And there were the rest. You understand, none of us ever spoke to each other or even acknowledged each other's presence, yet in a strange way we'd each gotten to know our fellows, and there was a certain bonding between us. Quite how we'd have reacted had any of us ever run into one of the other Rupolo Monday-afternoon regulars I do not know: it never happened to me, and it was a prospect that made me quail. Today, as usual, there were a couple of new faces, too – doubtless stragglers who'd wandered in off the street less to watch the movie than to make three and a half hours of their lives disappear.
I turned back toward the screen just as the curtains drew apart.
The first movie to be shown today was called Private Kohl's War, and it was directed, according to the opening credits, by Thea von Harbou – one of the directors whose biographies I'd noticed on the library shelves. It told the story, in color, of a young soldier who'd taken part in the invasion of England and then fought in the sequence of battles that led to the Fall of London. At the end it showed him celebrating the surrender, contributing to the extermination of the Communists, and making plans to import his beautiful blonde German girlfriend so they could marry and raise kids on the small plot of farmland he'd been permitted to annex. It was a well enough made movie, and some of the camerawork and sets were superb – strongly influenced by Art Deco in places – but overall I found the movie unsatisfying and often tedious. Where were Chips and Ginger? The few Brits who had speaking parts were either villains of the stupidest sort or wise collaborators who might as well have been Germans themselves. And where was all the poignancy of watching stiff-upper-lip heroes who didn't know that, despite all their courage and dedication, they were doomed to be on the losing side, whatever their temporary triumphs? Where was all the antiquated slang I had come to love?
I glanced around me as the lights came up. So far as I could tell, none of the other regulars had found the movie in any way less enjoyable than usual – I seemed to be the only one to have noticed the very different character of this piece from our customary fare. Well, there had been other dreary movies in the Rupolo's seemingly neverending season devoted to World War II, and I supposed it was about time that the owner showed one that presented the other side of the story, as it were.
I settled back to watch the trailer for the movie that was showing in the evenings all this week. It was called Robotic Cop Two, and if the trailer was anything to go by it involved a machine taking the place of a cop and shooting everything and everybody in sight for a solid two hours. I decided not to bother watching it even when it came onto tv.
The second feature that afternoon was called The Rising Sun Shall Never Set, and at last we seemed to be back in familiar prisoner-of-war territory. I relaxed briefly in my seat, luxuriating in the sensation of having come home, but that happy state did not last long. The prisoners-of-war proved to be not Britishers incarcerated somewhere in Germany but Japanese being held in one of the concentration camps that the traitor Roosevelt established in this country. Aside from that the plot was fairly routine, following the lines I had come to expect from my earlier viewing, although with the additional complication that Japanese escapees had a tougher time of it, because of their distinctively non-American appearance, as they tried to make their way across country to join their comrades or make contact with the Resistance. The gimmick of the movie – which for all I know may have been historically based – was that the intelligent Japs got their imbecilic guards, mainly niggers, so involved in learning samurai skills that they relaxed the actual business of guarding. The close of the movie saw the liberation of the camp and a general rejoicing over the assassination of the hated Roosevelt.
My mind was in something of a ferment as I wandered home, clutching one of Mr. Perkins's roast beef and Swiss sandwiches with "the works." Was it possible that sometime during the past week the cops had quietly warned the Rupolo's owner to alter his ways or be busted for sedition? Or was it not more likely that he'd simply had a change of heart? Or maybe he'd run out of movies of the other sort and, rather than start repeating himself, he'd decided to move on to more realistic dramas? Or had he
sold the business, and the new owner ...? There were endless possible reasons for the double bill I'd just witnessed, but none of them seemed entirely plausible to me.
I was still nagging away at the problem as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. Just as I put the key in the lock I was startled by a bellow from behind Mrs. Bellis's door.
"Your maw called," she yelled. "You gotta call her back, you fucker."
I paused. For Mrs. Bellis to speak to me at all was unprecedented. For her to give me a phone message was something I'd never considered outside the bounds of fantasy. Normally, if she answered the phone and it was for me she just slammed the receiver back on its hook and swore – I'd heard her do exactly this several times. Mom must have been extremely firm in her instructions that I was to be informed.
The key still in my hand, I retreated down the stairs and dialed the operator. In a few moments my collect call had been put through and I was speaking to my mother.
Who was in near-hysterical tears.
After all those years of complaining about his indigestion, and how it could be related to a serious heart condition, my father had been chasing some Jehovah's Witnesses off the property when he'd inadvertently stepped into the path of a fire-truck racing to an emergency. He'd died not just immediately but emphatically, with bits of him smeared halfway down the street, although apparently the paramedics had had some difficulty extricating his heavy walking stick from his tightly clenched fist. She'd wired some money to me so I could, as my father's only child, his son and heir, come home the following day.
