Just recently I saw a short video on a social media site, I think it was Instagram, one of those sites where you are constantly scrolling along until you find something slightly interesting and then after a few minutes or even seconds, you carry on scrolling again. After a while you find that an hour of your life has been lost and it’s time to put your phone or tablet down and do something else.
On this occasion the video in question was one of Tom Hanks who was asked to name four pictures he saw at the cinema and to name the actual cinemas where he saw those films.
That short video has gone and I cannot remember the films Tom saw or the picture houses that he visited but well, that’s modern social media for you. You watch, you scroll and move on to something else. Anyway, here are four pictures I saw at the cinema.
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Once, many years ago back in the 1960s, my school friends and I were taken on a Christmas school trip to watch the film. We walked it as I remember in crocodile fashion from our junior school, Crossacres, down Wiggins Hill and into Gatley, a small nearby village that boasted a lovely old cinema, the Tatton. That trip to watch this film did more for me than any teacher or RE lesson had ever done before or since and although I cannot claim to be overtly religious, I am certainly not an atheist and my respect for the person of Jesus has never been greater.
The Greatest Story Ever Told was directed by George Stevens who made such classic films as Shane and James Dean’s last film Giant. Stevens was a director who worked the way I would work if I was a director. He shot a great deal of film then sat back, reviewed everything and put his film together one brushstroke – or film clip – at a time. He chose Max von Sydow to star as Jesus as he wanted a performer who was unknown to the general public.
Max was in a way an unusual choice to play Jesus; he was pale and blue eyed and had a faint Swedish accent. Even so, he played a good part, so much so that whenever I see another portrayal of Christ, I always mentally compare it to that of Max. As for being pale and blue eyed, I suppose it is inevitable that people everywhere will envisage their religious icons in their own terms.
He might have been better in choosing unknown actors for the other roles too because the many star appearances seem to stop the viewer in his or her tracks as we spot various top actors and actresses in minor roles.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
This is probably the most stand out Bond film of all time. Sean Connery was the first to play the role of James Bond 007 but eventually he tired of the part and moved on. The producers at Eon productions decided on an unknown actor to take over the Licence To Kill, George Lazenby, a former male model and star of the Big Fry chocolate bar TV ads. My brother and I were taken to see the film by our mother. This must have been 1969 and once again we saw the film at the Tatton cinema. The Tatton was a large cinema with a very grand façade and like many old cinemas there were the stalls downstairs and the balcony upstairs. If I’m not very much mistaken, the film was shown as a double bill with one of The Man From Uncle films which for me and my brother was a very exciting double bill.
Above you can see the Tatton as it is nowadays. No longer a cinema but a Co-op supermarket. How times change.
OHMSS was the very first Bond film I saw at the cinema and to me it was everything I had imagined it would be and what I liked about George Lazenby, the new 007, was that he looked pretty much as I had imagined Bond. He had the authentic ‘comma of black hair’ as Fleming had always described Bond having and not only that, Diana Rigg was probably my favourite Bond girl too.
The Bond films were not then a staple of UK TV but there was always a Bond documentary, usually on TV at Christmas time which built up, as it was supposed to do, the public interest in Bond. It certainly built up mine. There was one documentary I remember which showed the viewer how Ian Fleming suffered with back pain and was sent to recuperate at a rest home where they put him on a back stretching machine which he later incorporated into ‘Thunderball’. Aha, I thought, this is how writers think!
Around the World in Eighty Days
This was a wonderful film based on the book by Jules Verne. In the film David Niven stars as Phileas Fogg who, while playing cards at the Reform gentlemen’s club in London, enters into a wager than he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days. Fogg bets £20,000, a huge sum back in 1872, that he will meet his gentleman friends back in the same club exactly 80 days later after traversing the globe.
The film then takes us on a tour of the globe with Fogg and his new manservant Passepartout played by Mexican actor and comedian Cantinflas.
The film was produced by Mike Todd and stars a mesmerising assortment of guest stars including Frank Sinatra, Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Ronald Colman, George Raft, Marlene Deitrich and numerous others. The production was a tour de force by Mike Todd who sadly was later killed in a plane crash in 1958.
The film was released in 1956, the year I was born so I certainly didn’t see it at the time. It was re-released in 1968 which was probably when I saw it at the cinema, again with my mother and brother. We saw it at the Gaumont cinema on Oxford Road in Manchester and I’m pretty sure we bought a very lavish programme with pictures and information about the film.
The Gaumont opened on 21st October 1935 with Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps. It was a beautiful cinema. There were 1,300 seats in the stalls and 1,000 in the circle, all with good sightlines. There was a Wurlitzer organ which was considered one of the best instruments in the UK which was later moved to the Granada Studios, cared for by the Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust.
The exterior on Oxford Road was in the Italian Renaissance style and the entrance was dominated by one of the largest neon displays in the city. The Gaumont name alone was four feet high and below this there was a triple bordered panel which could take up to 12 rows of 18 inch letters in red neon announcing the attractions.
When the cinema closed it was turned into a nightclub. First it became Romanoffs and then later Rotters. Rotters closed in 1990 and the building was sadly demolished to make way for a multi storey car park. Why anyone would even attempt to drive into Manchester city centre in 2026 I really don’t know so how long that car park will last is anybody’s guess.
Henry V
I really don’t know much about the plays of William Shakespeare. Despite taking English Literature at school, we never studied Shakespeare, but then again I left school at 16 clutching my 4 O’ levels. Anyway, in later life I began to read some of the Bard’s plays and my first real introduction was the 1989 film by Kenneth Branagh. It’s a really wonderful film with some great supporting players including Paul Scofield, Derek Jacobi, Ian Holm and Emma Thompson. I saw it at the Odeon in Manchester where I saw many other films over the years. I think my mother took myself and my brother to see The Sound of Music there and my brother and I went there to see numerous films. I think I had my very first kebab at a fast-food place next door.
The Odeon all closed up in 2013
The Odeon opened as the Paramount in 1930. It was a massive venue seating nearly 3000 people. It eventually became a seven-screen cinema but closed in 2004. The building sat empty until 2017 when it was demolished.
Those are my four films. The Odeon and the Gaumont have both been demolished and the Tatton is now a supermarket although despite being extensively remodelled, the developers kept the old façade of the cinema. At least those four films are still going strong and finding new audiences on the TV screen.
Sometimes you make a big mistake and don’t realise it until months later. Many weeks ago we checked our diaries and searched through ferry websites looking for the best deal to travel over to France but it was only a few days prior to departure that we realised we had booked to travel on the August bank holiday. Well, how bad could it be? Really?
I still have a DVD collection. Not a particularly impressive one and certainly not one that would make me a fortune on Antiques Roadshow in thirty years’ time but there’s something I like about having a shelf full of films I can actually hold in my hand. These days, of course, you can watch pretty much anything without owning a physical copy. When there are so many new TV channels around and everything can either be downloaded, streamed or watched on catch-up TV, what is even the point of a DVD? They just take up room, fill up cupboards and shelves and generally get in the way.
Time for another film connections post, in which I link films and cinema personalities together and tell a few interesting stories along the way. This week, I hope to connect Douglas Fairbanks to Marlon Brando — and maybe even back again.
The fundamental clash was their acting styles. Olivier was classically trained and dismissive of the Method, the technique Marilyn had embraced. Yet in the finished film which I watched recently, Marilyn comes across far better than Olivier.
When
The late seventies and early eighties were the heyday of the TV ‘mini series’. What is a mini series I hear you asking? Well, they were short TV series with only a few episodes. You rarely hear the name ‘mini series’ these days but they are still about. I mentioned some time ago about the series ‘
I’m going to kick off with the film Young Winston. I’m a great fan of Winston Churchill and I’m not amused about current plans to remove him from UK banknotes, but getting back to the film, Young Winston is a wonderful dramatisation of Churchill’s own book, 
I’ve always liked this final sequence but when I bought my VHS copy back in the 1980s the scene was omitted. Likewise, every time in recent years, since I first watched the film on television, this scene has always been removed. I’d love to know why. Perhaps the producers thought the film too long or perhaps preferred the new ending in which Winston talks briefly about his marriage and living ‘happily ever after’. After a search on the internet, I came across a post which claimed that Carl Foreman, who wrote and produced the film, found that US audiences occasioned so little reaction to the scene that he promptly had it cut. What reaction was he expecting to see I wonder?
I’m not sure what counts as a heatwave in other countries but here in the UK it seems to be a run of a few hot days. The recent heatwave lasted for around two weeks and during that time perhaps only five days were really extraordinarily hot. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it, I like the warm weather even though we’re not really equipped to deal with it here in England.
For Christmas the previous year my mother had given my brother and me a shared present. It was a portable stereo record player. At the time neither myself nor my brother were that interested in the pop charts. The first album I bought was a collection of TV theme tunes by composer John Barry. Barry wrote a number of famous tunes for both TV and the cinema. He is probably best remembered for a tune he didn’t write, the James Bond theme tune. There was actually quite a controversy over the authorship of the tune. Monty Norman is credited as the writer of the music although it was John Barry’s jazz arrangement of the theme that most people are familiar with.
The title track from the album is the theme from The Persuaders, a TV show starring future James Bond, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The pair played Lord Brett Sinclair and US businessman Danny Wilde who are recruited by a retired judge to fight crime. Tony Curtis drove my favourite car of all time in the series, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT. Price tag today, anything between £500,000 to a million.
MASH was a series based on a book and film about US army surgeons in Korea who worked in a mobile army hospital unit. Alan Alda played the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce and the series ran for many years combining humour and drama in a most impressive way. It perhaps ran a few years longer than it should have done and the later episodes were not as good as the earlier ones, at least in my opinion.
I’ve always rather liked Kenneth Williams, the slightly over the top star of many a Carry On film as well as many radio comedy shows, however it did feel rather odd reading his private thoughts through his diary, although sometimes it was hard to keep track of what was happening. In a lot of the diary entries Kenneth refers to people by their initials rather than their name. The habit of using initials can be rather annoying as the editor will mention in one of the many footnotes that SB for instance refers to his friend and fellow performer Stanley Baxter. Later on, SB will turn up again and I find myself flipping back through the footnotes because I have forgotten who SB was.
Albert Speer was Hitler’s armaments minister and favoured architect and this book is made up of diary entries he had secretly smuggled out of Spandau prison where he was incarcerated for 20 years after the Second World War. Speer admits he was one of those people seduced by the power of Hitler’s personality. Looking back at Hitler today in grainy old black and white films, it is hard to understand how this strange and dour man who ranted and raved while speech making could seduce anyone, however many have testified to the startling power of his personality. I remember watching that interesting BBC documentary ‘The Nazis: A warning from History’. In one segment various people were interviewed who declared their youthful love for Hitler; a young girl who looked into his eyes and saw goodness or an old man who testified he had once seen the great side of Hitler. Sadly Hitler let them down and many more like them. Speer maintained that he knew nothing of concentration camps and the final solution but author Gitta Sereny claimed in her book Speer: His battle with Truth that Speer knew more than he let on.
This is the first of Michael Palin’s diaries and it’s been pretty interesting, especially being a fan of the TV show Monty Python. Anyway, Palin started his diaries soon after packing in smoking. Perhaps it was a way of helping get over his tobacco addiction, or perhaps not. The diaries also begin just as Monty Python, the comedy TV show, was starting and Palin mentions this in his introduction, his aim not to record the start of the ground breaking comedy but more to record things about his new family, his wife having recently given birth to their first child.
My diaries are definitely not for publishing. Looking back at them I notice that whenever something interesting has happened to me I have never written about it at the time, it has always been some time later when I have set down my feelings about the incident, whatever it may have been. The diary may be a confessional for some people but for me, as I said earlier, I started writing a diary as a way of making myself write when I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. In the early 2000’s I started writing a diary on my laptop, only to lose all my recollections from 2005 to 2006 when the file somehow became corrupted and refused to open. I was quite excited when the latest version of Microsoft Word came out because it gives you the option to repair a damaged file. Alas, that option would not work on my diary file. Then of course there are my big boxes of pre-2000 diaries. What shall I do with this lot I wonder? Will they add something to social history or grace the rubbish tip when I’m gone?
The first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about spies and espionage is probably James Bond, perhaps not the version of Bond as written by Ian Fleming but more the version given to us by the producers of the Bond films and portrayed by a succession of actors like Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore and latterly Daniel Craig.
I was probably first introduced to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by the 1979 TV series starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley. In the story Smiley has retired but he is brought back into the intelligence fold after Lacon, the senior civil servant responsible for the service, asks him to investigate a story that has been brought to him by a missing agent named Ricki Tarr. The story concerns a ‘mole’ working for British Intelligence but passing information to the Soviet Union.
Kathy Burke plays Connie Sachs, an old Soviet watcher who became convinced Soviet diplomat Polyakov was a spy but her idea was rejected by the new Circus leaders but Smiley realises Connie might have been on to something. There are various suspects for the mole and they have all been given code names by Control; Tinker, Tailor, Poorman and so on. Control expected Prideux to come back with a code word but he did not and by the time he was exchanged and returned to the UK, the poorly Control had passed away.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 