Memoir: During an interview, John Gielgud - a superb dropper of bricks - was asked if there was any one person who played a major role in his career. Gielgud's reply was: "Yes, I owe a great deal to a man named Claude Rains. Very sad case. Wonderful actor, wonderful voice. Then, he went to America and dropped out of sight", writes Hugh Leonard
In Are You Talking to Me?, John Walsh drops a brick of his own with a single reference to "Claude Rains of Casablanca fame", which is rather like disposing of Fred Astaire merely as the star of Finian's Rainbow. It is not that Walsh dates himself; we are all on the same journey as he, but there are different milestones along the way. This reviewer, for example, is of an earlier generation, and if I were to revisit the films that mesmerised my younger self it would not be, as in the author's case, because they "altered the course of my life". Rather, they were beacons of comfort; they reassured me that others were or had been young, too.
I can remember three of these, all of them a generation before Walsh's time. There was Kings Row: very much a flawed movie; but it had a luminous performance from Ann Sheridan, the best musical score ever, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the stunning mise en scéne of William Cameron Menzies. Also, however, it showed us a dark world where the old hated the young, and from my Catholic boyhood up I knew all about that.
Another film was I Vitelloni. I mooched around, like one of Fellini's "little calves", through the dreary streets of a drab seaside town, but unlike Fausto, Moraldo, Alberto, Leopoldo and Riccardo, we did not dodge work; we pursued it; for this was the mid-1940s, and jobs were hens' teeth. And, finally, if one excepts the elegiac coda of Cinema Paradiso, there was Kurosawa's Ikiru, the story of a lead-swinging civil servant, who is dying of stomach cancer and, ironically, sets himself to discovering how a life - his, yours, mine, anybody's - should be lived. And yes, perhaps for me that film was uniquely a turning point.
There are only eight movies revisited in Walsh's book: all the same they are a motley bunch consisting of the Brando Mutiny on the Bounty, The Innocents, Red River, The Sound of Music (the author is at least not a snob), Bonnie and Clyde, Cabaret, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and - probably the best of the lot - Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now.
The author's appetite for detail is prodigious; he not only looks at films; he dissects them and plucks from them what O'Casey called "magnificent meanin's". In the process, he becomes his own psychoanalyst, and at times one is reminded of the critic Raymond Durgnat, who, before he took himself off to America, the home of bosh, declared that the skyscrapers in On the Waterfront and the cacti in Viva Zapata! were phallic symbols. Peel my banana, someone.
It is nice to revisit well-loved films in Walsh's company. Like him, I shuddered at the sight of the demonic Peter Quint in The Innocents, but Quint was not nearly so terrifying as the ghost of the governess, Miss Jessel, weeping in an empty schoolroom or on a rain-swept islet. The terrible pair quite overshadowed my memory of White Zombie, seen when I was five and remembered forever after.
I am glad that The Sound of Music came out when I was already long married and accompanying a small daughter who cried out "I'm so happy!" when Julie Andrews walked down the aisle to a nuns' chorus of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? The author devotes most of his space, not to the picture, but to mid-pubertal gropings. As for his fascination with John Wayne and Red River, I never really liked either, especially I hated the murders along the trail and the climactic shaggy-steer fistfight which turns into a joke when Joanne Dru says, schoolmarmishly: "Oh, stop it, you two!"
And yet Walsh writes so well that it is a pleasure to be in his company. As a coda, he says: "That's what the special movies of your youth can do . . . They reveal that your own life is a movie. You do not yet know who has written the script, or who is directing it or what the climax will be. But you would give anything to find out". Which is a bit portentous in a dewy-eyed way, and I cannot imagine that a superannuated teenager will one day relive the process of growing up with a book that recapitulates The Matrix, say, or Reservoir Dogs or Vanilla Sky.
Nearly all the movie-makers have gone, to be replaced with bookkeepers and members of brat-packs, for whom adolescence is only an eleven-letter word. Those who love movies and can remember George Bailey and his guardian angel being thrown out of a road-house on Christmas Eve or Joe E.Brown saying "Nobody's perfect" or Gunga Din blowing "Scatter, chaps, it's an ambush by thuggee fanatics!" on his bugle, should ponder that Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch are dead. And then they might send a letter urging Steven Spielberg to be careful when he crosses the street.
Hugh Leonard is a playwright, novelist and columnist. His novel Fillums will be published later this year by Methuen
Are You Talking to Me? (A Life Through the Movies). By John Walsh
Harper Collins, 312pp. £16.99