I'm prone to approve of any writer who describes one of his characters as looking like Eric Portman anyway, but O'Brien's account of a trip to catch a double bill of Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man is great for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it captures the decaying, mouldy reality of cinemas in the days before multiplexes: "In the auditorium it smelt of dust and sweat and the ancient lusts of those now senile or dead," he writes. His characters take their seats in the balcony - remember them? - to watch the local ads: "the advertisements were already playing, the familiar bleached, exhausted colours of generic pieces adapted for local use - the Indian restaurant, the local Ford dealership, the hotel with its misspelt function room."
Reading those few words I had some kind of popcorn equivalent of Proust's madeleine. I'd forgotten all about those tacky, worn-out bits and pieces of vintage hucksterism ("Kar Parts Camelon" has just sprung to mind as I write this). When did they disappear? They were still around in the eighties certainly. I guess they faded to black with the arrival of the multiplex.
As for the movies, O'Brien's narrator writes approvingly about Nic Roeg's Venetian chilly thriller, but is hugely disapproving of The Wicker Man: "Although the Wicker Man has somehow ascended to the status of a neglected classic in recent years, in my view (apparently that of a minority) it remains what it always was, a piece of half-arsed crap full of unintended humour and bungled eroticism - a sort of porno version of Whisky Galore with added human sacrifice."
Can I speak up as another member of the minority at this point? I've never really got The Wicker Man. It feels like just another bad British horror movie of that era (God knows there were enough of them). Silly, flatly filmed, underdramatised. To describe it as the "Citizen Kane of Horror Movies" as one magazine did, is risible. (And what would that make Don't Look Now - a more frightening, beautiful, erotic, cold, eerie, glitering, all-round brilliant movie?)
One of O'Brien's American characters sums it up best: "Jesus, so that's a British film. It's not even as good as the adverts ...No wonder your industry is broke."
This is not necessarily a widely held view. (TJ)
