Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies - John Walsh

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You are with him. You are waiting and watching beside him. Together you inspect the desert horizon, flat and shimmering and empty. The waiting servant, on the edge of nowhere, snoozes in the heat – but suddenly he is awake and alert, and can apparently see something. You look at the horizon again, flat and shimmering and – is that a fleck of something? What is he looking at? What are you looking at? Is that a tiny interruption in the hazy nothingness, a speck like a single grain of pepper in the soup of earth and sky? As you look at the horizon, you start to become the boy on the camel, you widen your eyes so they can see more clearly, willing the speck to become a man coming out of the desert, you sit forward in your seat as if bidding the seat to move. As the servant rides forward, picking up speed until the camel is racing along, your heart races alongside him, until you are running with him into the middle of nowhere, racing the kid to get there first, to see the unimaginable sight before he does.

      The tiny speck in the distance gets larger, more defined, more vertical, until it’s a small wobbling figure – and the camera cuts away, to disclose a triumphant full view of Lawrence on his camel. They’re running at full tilt, the saintly rider waving his camel-urging stick like a magic baton, and the Arab guy he has rescued (hurrah!) has his arms round his saviour’s waist, clinging on, the way a nervous passenger might embrace a speed-crazed biker manipulating a Harley-Davidson down the New Jersey Turnpike.

      It’s a brilliant rescue sequence, and one of the most visually involving scenes in film history because it makes you stretch your eyes to the horizon. It plays games with your assumptions about what exactly you can see on the screen when you think you’re being shown everything. It’s also a big moral schoolboy lesson – that going back for your fallen mates is the only right and decent thing to do, even when logic dictates that you might die as a result. But there is more to come.

      Not long after the rescue, Lawrence and his Bedouin brothers are camped outside Akaba, which they plan to invade the next morning. Akaba is a distant necklace glow of light on the horizon. Lawrence and his swarthy pals discuss tactics until interrupted by a single gunshot. One Arab has just killed another Arab from a rival tribe, just at the moment when the tribes are meant to be pulling together for the attack. He must be punished, publicly, by death. But (we quickly learn) if a fellow Arab kills him, it will be the start of a terrible internecine vendetta. He must, therefore, be killed by someone from outside the tribes.

      Lawrence proposes himself as the executioner and, as he adjusts his huge revolver, the camera closes in on the bowed head of the doomed prisoner. He lifts his face, and – as the camera itself seems shocked to discover – it’s the man Lawrence rescued in the desert.

      He can’t – can he? – possibly shoot a man whose life he saved. You admire Lawrence for diplomatically offering his services, but you know he can’t possibly kill the guy. Something will happen, you just know – some kindly intervention at the last moment will …

      But then Lawrence’s eyes take on a cruel gleam, and you can almost see his heart hardening. He fires six times, and kills his former friend, for whom he braved certain death the day before; kills him with single-minded efficiency. And you never get over the shock that he could do such a thing.

      Here were two scenes of entrancement: one a classic bit of Boy’s Own Paper derring-do, the hero going back to rescue a stricken comrade in the teeth of warnings and mockery and the threat of the Desert of Death; the other, a moment of grown-up horror, as the hero summarily kills the man he saved. For the eight-year-old viewer, these two scenes – just five minutes apart – offered fantastically conflicting signals. One said simply: you look after your mates when they’re in trouble, no matter what the odds. The other said: you may have to kill your mates if it’s strategically necessary, because of some bewildering higher good called ‘Akaba’.

      Picture, if you will, the palpitating kid in the stalls. I remember being shocked by these contrasting moral lessons, exhilarated by the former and outraged by the latter. The five minutes of film-time that separated them represented, in hindsight, the transition from a schoolboy’s to a grown-up’s view of the world. I didn’t care for what I saw of the latter, but I now knew it existed – Grown-up Land, a place full of stern logic and chilly compromise. And these two scenes got under my skin because they were presented in a way I’d never experienced before, on stage, book or screen. It was the use of the camera lens – one moment stretching my eyes to the horizon, the next closing in on the doomed man as if asking, ‘What are you going to do about this?’ – stretching, then closing in on, my awakening consciousness.

      Do we learn useful lessons from the cinema? When we’re young and impressionable, do we become better or worse people, less moral or more so, more civilised or more brutalised, by being exposed to two hours of celluloid dreams every couple of weeks? Crime psychologists speculate that because a murderer watched a violent film the day before a murder, it may have been a ‘spur’ or ‘spark’ that precipitated his actions – as if murder were the result of terrible how-to knowledge or dumb bovine imitation, rather than terrible will. Other people will insist that film (like poetry, according to W.H. Auden) makes nothing at all happen, apart from changing the way some people buy clothes after seeing Annie Hall or The Matrix. I’ve always been convinced that the cinema is a universe of mostly benign influences, and that it educates us by the simple act of showing us other lives in spectacular close-up.

      Here’s another example. When I was twelve, I went to see His Finest Hour, a glowing hagiography of Winston Churchill, made to coincide with his ninetieth birthday. I was impressed with the historical stuff, the massing of troops and the making of speeches, but it didn’t make me understand about love of country, or whatever that thing is that made men go off and die for England, home and beauty. You could attend a three-hour lecture on the wonderfulness of England and Englishness, about honey for tea and pints of beer on cricket greens, about vicars and seaside vulgarity, and you might be charmed by it all, but what did it have to do with dying for your country, with that fantastic, logical, voluntary swapping of everything the world brought you every day – the sunshine on the houses in your street, the procession of raindrops down a window, the lazy collapse of a log in the living-room fire – for some dimly-imagined ideal of patriotism?

      But then you’d see Casablanca and understand it perfectly. It’s the scene everyone remembers: the Germans in neutral Casablanca have taken to hanging out at Rick’s ‘Bar Americain’, drinking beer and flirting with the local girls. One evening, Victor Laszlo (Paul Heinreid) is in the bar, surveying the officers of the Wehrmacht with contempt. Relaxed and laughing, the Germans start to sing an awful barrel-organy marching song, waving their steins to the rhythm. Laszlo strides over to the dormant orchestra, picks up the conductor’s baton and says, ‘Play the Marseillaise!’

      After a nod from Rick, they do. Some barfly, a Spanish dame with a guitar, starts to sing the words. Others join in. The Germans sing their oompah marching song louder. Laszlo’s baton becomes more agitated. The French national anthem gets louder still. The Germans give up and return to their beers with gestures of contempt.

      Then the Marseillaise hits the chorus (‘Aux armes, citoyens!’) and glory breaks out. The beautiful prostitute, who has shamed herself for so long by fraternising with the German generals, jumps to her feet, eyes shining with tears, because of the glory of the singing. When the anthem ends, she suddenly cries ‘Vive la France!’ with a kind of instinctive passion. Oh yes, you think, and you shout with her, though patriotic love of France is something wholly foreign to you. She is finding something to be proud of. After selling her soul and her body, she is rediscovering the concept of pride, and is on the way to re-finding pride in herself.

      And there you find the essence of patriotism. That it isn’t a simple love of your native land. It’s a love of, or a pride in, yourself, only blown up to a huge, sentimental, national scale.

      The irresistible martial swing of the ‘Marseillaise’ helps, of course, but the scene works because of the faces that the camera cuts between, aglow with longing and desperation and a gleam of resistance. You suddenly realise how the soul of a country might be seen in the faces of its people.

      Even in the epic movies that you saw, it was the tiny details, the intimate human scale amid the

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