UNDER THE INFLUENCE (I)

Influence is a tricky topic. There are influences you can point to; influences you can identify; influences that sound cool (ah, yes, the poetry of Verlaine); but perhaps most intriguing are the influences lost to the realm of your unconscious. A trait, tic, or love you’ve somehow inhaled without the memory of inhaling it.

Childhood influences tend to make the deepest impact. Art, books, music, movies and people to which we are exposed at what is rightly termed an “impressionable” age, imprint most deeply on our developing souls and psyches.

In my own case, I’ll start with four movies and then allude to something else.

In the beginning, so to speak, I had never seen a movie and didn’t know what they were. At the start of the 1950’s, we did not own a television. When my parents told me they were “going to the movies”, I only knew those blinking light bulbs underneath sidewalk marquees with lettering I couldn’t read. Those were movies? Why were they going to see flashing light bulbs? So you may imagine my shock when at age seven I saw my first film, The Beggar’s Opera, moving images a mile high in blazing Technicolor! The movie starred the beautiful Laurence Olivier, on whom I fastened a lifelong man crush. The British Brando – before there was Brando.

That the film was a musical (arguably the first musical) only served to make things more - not less – real to me. When Captain MacHeath was to be hanged, I ran screaming from the theatre.

Later, in typical counterphobic fashion (as my father the psychiatrist explained), the object feared became the object loved. The Beggar’s Opera, with all its flaws, remains a favorite. And movies became my obsession.

(If you had told my seven-year-old self that one day this same Laurence Olivier would be spouting my dialogue in a movie, would I have had the remotest idea what I was hearing? And had I understood, could I ever, in a million years, believed such a prophecy?)

Another two films from the 50’s shaped a good deal of my world and future. In 1954, Walt Disney introduced me to Jules Verne and his works via the best film Disney ever made, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The film manages to be both entertaining and surprisingly grim, with exchanges I didn’t begin to comprehend as a child, let alone expect an atom bomb at the finish. But what entranced me was Captain Nemo’s (nuclear-powered!) submarine, The Nautilus, whose extraordinary design was the work of the largely uncredited Harper Goff (later the designer of much of Disneyland). How I longed to inhabit that first steampunk masterpiece, trying ludicrously to Scotch-tape newspapers together in a foredoomed attempt to envelop myself within the sub’s voluptuous interior. The Nautilus became the mother ship in more ways than one. And Disney’s timing was perfect. It’s surely no accident that when the navy launched its first nuclear submarine, you can guess what they christened it.

Hard on the heels of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, came a slew of Jules Verne movies, one of which, Around the World in 80 Days (1956), crystallized my cinematic ambitions. Mike Todd’s version of Verne’s novel was a big, splashy production that I saw on my 11^th birthday. In the theatre foyer for two dollars you could buy a hardcover booklet about the film and the role of its producer (who enacted another fantasy of mine by marrying Elizabeth Taylor). The article was preceded by three headlines: YOU TOO CAN MAKE A MOTION PICTURE! NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!! DO IT YOURSELF!!!

That was all I needed. “Pop, I wanna make a movie,” and, ever the imitator, the movie I wanted to make was the movie I’d just seen.

The film may have been my idea, but my father, whose artistic aspirations lay dormant, fell in with my scheme and enabled it with alacrity. My project had unleashed the artist manque in him.

Inspired by the Todd film, pop and I made our all-kids’ version of the novel. We used his 8mm wind-up Revere home movie camera. Making the film took five years. It was shot inevitably out of sequence (just like a real film), as time and opportunity presented itself, over school vacations, weekends and summer holidays. I changed size, shape and age from scene to scene.

No matter how hard my father and I fought in my teenage years - and we fought hard and bitterly - all my failures and failings were put on hold during shooting days. When it was finished, we had just under an hour film that entranced children and grown-ups alike; we even made it into Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

But it is the fourth movie which had as much or most influence on my life, possibly eclipsing the sum total of the earlier three. I had idolized Laurence Olivier, dating from my traumatic experience of The Beggar’s Opera, and so, when I saw Olivier advertised as starring in a movie titled, or at any rate pronounced, as I thought, Henry Vee, I had no hesitation in sneaking out of school that afternoon to visit the Thalia (lately the Nimoy), Theatre off West End Avenue. It did not occur to me that the V in the title was the Roman numeral five, which gives you some idea of what kind of student I was.

The poster for the film depicted knights in armor, horses, swords, shields and coats of arms – all the stuff of my fantasy life – and took care never to mention the author. Had it credited Shakespeare, I probably would have given the film a miss. We read Shakespeare in school, of course. Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Romeo and Juliet. None of these, as I recollect, made any impression on me. I seldom learned anything in class, preferring to doodle and stare at the clock, unable to focus, much less understand, what was being discussed. But as I sat with my popcorn in the tiny Thalia theatre, all this was about to change. Forever.

Later I would learn the unique circumstances that had given birth to the film and the extraordinary World War II privations under which it had been made. At the time, however, I was simply clobbered by what was clearly the greatest movie of all time. Prince Hal’s transformation from wastrel to monarch-hero and his triumphant invasion of France (previews of D-Day), culminating in the battle of Agincourt, Henry rallying his exhausted men with the cry of “England and St. George!” atop a prancing white horse, shook me to my core. Later, the full-bore charge of the French knights, caparisoned with nodding plumes and other vainglorious trappings, vs the desperate English infantry with their puny longbows, awaiting Henry’s signal to loose their arrows – this moment branded and defined me forever. Henry V was the greatest movie, Olivier was the greatest actor (and director, as I would realize), and whoever wrote this was the greatest writer. The discovery of Shakespeare completed me. I sat in the theatre until it closed at midnight, watching the film again and again. I did not trouble to use the pay phone in the lobby to let my parents know where I was. My parents, predictably and understandably, were incensed by my thoughtless self-absorption. They yelled, and I suffered, but ultimately didn’t care. About anything but Henry Vee.

I vowed then and there never to read another Shakespeare play. Not until I had seen it first. The stuff wasn’t meant to be read; it was meant to be HEARD. Starting with Henry V, Shakespeare took over my life. I soon realized that I had never had – and never would have – a thought this man hadn’t expressed first and better. With my prodigious memory, I committed the movie and then several other whole plays to memory, always after I had watched – not read - them.

From Henry V, I “graduated” to Olivier’s Hamlet, then his Richard III - learning all the speeches (inevitably including some of Olivier’s interpolations and cuts) and wallowing in the music written for all three films by William Walton.

Which brings me to the “something else” I alluded to earlier. Something that gave Shakespeare a run for his money.

Next week.

And here’s a question: what are the experiences or works of art that have influenced you?