The other week Mark Kermode, the critic, who has just turned 50, fronted a radio programme about the films in his life and that of various friends and acquaintances.  We all know that his all-time favourite movie is The Exorcist, from 1973, but the first one he remembers seeing was Krakatoa, East of Java, in 1969.  Most of the others interviewed also recalled films from the 60s including The Nutty Professor (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), the original Thunderbirds film (1964) and Help (1965).

The late 1940s

My first visit to the cinema came when I was just a few months old, much too young to remember anything of what was on that day. It seems that I only raised a fuss when we left: the rest of the time I just  sat in my mother’s lap staring intently at the screen. And so it went on, throughout the wartime years, me sitting as good as gold watching away, not making a sound.

My first actual memory of cinema-going, in April 1945, isn’t as much fun as the ones mentioned in Kermode’s programme. For reasons which I find inexplicable the powers that be had decided that the British public should know the full horrors of what the allied forces were discovering in Germany and had ordered that footage of the liberation of the camp at Belsen should be included in the newsreel.  So, before my mother managed to clamp her hand over my eyes I, at six years old, had taken in scenes of the dead and dying.  I still can’t stand seeing any similar footage.

By this time, from 1944, when he was invalided out of the Merchant Navy, to 1951, my father was assistant manager of the Majestic cinema (later the Odeon) in High Wycombe. And this meant, not only that I got into the Odeon free, but the same applied at the other two cinemas in the town centre: the Palace and the Rex.

(click here        and here     for more about this period)

In these early post-war years there were usually two feature films on a programme, the A-feature and a supporting B-feature, mostly British - since priority was given to homemade products, to boost the UK film industry - and nearly all in black and white.

I particularly remember films from the Ealing Studios such as:

Hue  & Cry, Kind Hearts & Coronets, Passport to Pimlico, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit, and other comedies including Vice Versa, The Chiltern Hundreds, Whiskey Galore and Hotel Sahara.

But the ones which affected me most were dramas and adventure films,  such as

Great Expectations, Green for Danger, It Always Rains on Sundays, the Fallen Idol, the Wicked Lady, the Browning Version, the 7th Veil and the Third Man. There were occasional colour films, the ones which I remember most clearly being Black Narcissus and the Red Shoes, together with that magical film, a Matter of Life and Death, where the scenes on earth are in colour, but heaven is monochrome. (It was years before I learned that all three of these masterpieces were the work of Powell and Pressburger).

I remember just a few American films from this period, most vividly the Wizard of Oz, which was re-released in the late 40s, causing me immediately to be smitten by Judy Garland, a rival now to our own Margaret Lockwood, though the onscreen woman who disturbed me the most in those pre-pubescent years was Kathleen Byron, playing the deranged Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus, all vivid red lips and murder in her eyes.

Ah well; my father eventually got a job working for the Basra Dredging Company in early 1951 and my days of unlimited free movies were over.