To a good friend born in 1963 -
1963: Annus Mirabilis?
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
(Philip Larkin)
I was one of a group of library students on a visit to Hull University when Larkin made a speech of welcome. His remarks were sardonic and lugubriously droll, rather like those of a thinking man’s Les Dawson.
Although I have to say that this poem is, to me, rather like that of a thinking man’s Pam Ayres.
Larkin’s point is that sex ceased to be a furtive thing, a reward for marriage, and became the guiltless delight of all. Not so, in 1963. Books and films may well have become more open, but ‘middle class morality’ still reigned. While Tom Jones was winning the best film Oscar for its sunny, amoral bawdiness, Cabinet ministers were being hounded from office merely for indulging in a little recreational sex. By the way, why do we talk about ‘middle class morality’? In my experience, nowhere is there more ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy than within the working class. (I speak as a member of both).
Being a late developer, sexual intercourse, in my case, took a little longer to begin. What did begin was politics – between the end of the Cuban threat and the death of JFK. Any number of political and social issues were being debated and there seemed little doubt that Harold Wilson (after whom our budgie was named) would soon be Prime Minister. The quaint forelock-tugging days of old Britain would be gone forever. I remember the passionate arguments over hanging and homosexuality, comprehensive education and decolonisation, the bomb and abortion, race, prostitution, nationalisation, etc, etc.
A brave new world of liberalism and equality was dawning, or so we youthful innocents thought. Those days seem pretty quaint themselves now.
Did you know that in November the BBC banned Joe Brown’s version of George Formby’s Little Ukelele?
I don’t really think popular music changed in 1963. After all, rock ‘n’ roll had been well-established for nearly ten years. Elvis’ best work was already behind him (his films this year were Fun in Acapulco and It happened at the World ‘s Fair – in case you don’t believe me). The best-selling songs in Britain this year were copies, covers and clones. I think what did happen was that, whereas singers like Elvis, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele quickly moved into the mainstream, as what they saw as the only way to maintain a career, The Beatles and their successors became the mainstream or at least a permanent current within it.
Britgrit
But it’s films I plan to talk about, and the Brits were making a strong mark there too. As well as Tom Jones, the second Bond, From Russia with Love, was released. This Sporting Life was typical of many British films of this period, dealing with contemporary social issues in a realistic and gritty style, often with new writers, directors and actors. (I’ve attached a list in Appendix 1).
Of course, the cinema trailed literature by a good half-dozen years. This Sporting Life, for example, was published in 1957. Books are often trailblazers, films jump onto social trends when it is commercially safe to do so.
Where Britain was setting its films in the grimy kitchens of grim council estates, Hollywood was grinding out ever more grandeur and glamour. British exports, Burton and Taylor, were starring in Cleopatra, a lumbering elephant of a film, a white elephant as it turned out. The ‘epic’ style was even being applied to other genres. For example, It’s a mad, mad . . . .world (an alleged comedy); and How the West was Won, which tried to include every conceivable Western situation, as well as every living star associated with the form. It failed to understand that the successful Western, while they might have grand settings, is an essentially simple story. Like a classical drama, they often observe the unities of time, place and action, setting up a situation, developing a crisis and providing a resolution. Think of High Noon and The Naked Spur.
Despite The Magnificent Seven, three years earlier, the Western was becoming as flabby as John Wayne’s waistline. The staple B-features were becoming fewer as major films became longer, the major stars were getting older and the great directors were in decline. Wayne made the jokey McClintock, which was typical of most of his output from now on. Western success would come from Italy, but whether that cynical and alien tone delayed or hastened the Western’s decline is arguable.
Anti-heroes
The British films of this time were fresh and gritty, usually photographed in black and white, which suited the down-beat settings, the dour characters and the social problems which were their dramatic basis. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, was set in the factories and back streets of Nottingham. The ‘hero’ is an aggressive, amoral lathe operator. He probably votes Labour, if at all, but he feels little working class solidarity. ‘I’m just out for a good time. All the rest is propaganda.’
His idea of a good time is getting drunk and sleeping with an older woman, a fellow-worker’s wife. But he picks up another girl, who immediately starts calling him ‘my young man’ and taking him home to meet her mother. He can’t be that bright, because he doesn’t see the warning signs in that; or perhaps he is just resigned to what is inevitable in his world. He also manages to get the other woman pregnant, and there follow unsuccessful attempts at abortion. There’s no real moral judgment on him, although he does get beaten up by the woman’s in-laws. If there is a tragedy here, it is the final scene where the younger woman, to whom he has drifted into engagement, takes him to a new housing estate, where there are nice bungalows they might be able to afford. Even at the age of sixteen, I felt sorry for him.
I mentioned the decline of the Western earlier. Perhaps the best one of this year was Hud, actually a modern-day tale set in Texas, where the small-town life seems just as arid as Nottingham’s dingy back streets. Paul Newman plays Hud, another cynical, amoral character, similar to Albert Finney’s, but he has a father with contrasting old-fashioned values. An old cattle rancher, he is courtly and courteous, upright and inclined to sermonise, and has never forgiven his son for the drunken car wreck that killed his other boy.
An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease provides the crisis. Hud wants to sell off the cattle quickly before anyone knows, but the old man won’t cheat. Nor will he make up his losses by selling drilling rights for oil, which he thinks spoil the land. So the cattle are slaughtered, including the few, symbolic, Texas Longhorns, which he’d kept for sentimental reasons. He dies; the housekeeper, whom Hud had tried to rape, leaves; his nephew abandons him. Hud takes a sip of his beer, shrugs his shoulders, gives us that Paul Newman smirk and slams the door shut on the film. It’s a satisfying ending, in some guilty way.
Of course, it didn’t last. Such films were too depressing, and very easy to lampoon. And why is ‘realism’ only ever applied to the working class? Already, this year, Tom Jones, sunny, indulgent, full of the elements which would always make a British film (or classic TV series) appeal to an American audience. The sort of film for people who don’t really like the cinema, but can’t be bothered to read the book. Twenty years later, Helena Bonham-Carter would make a fortune out of such films.
Soon, glum drama would give way to zany confections like the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and the swinging London of flashy films like The Knack, Darling and I’ll Never Forget Whathisname.
Raoul Walsh
This was also the year when Raoul Walsh released his last film, a forgettable Western called A Distant Trumpet. Walsh is a not well-known director and many of his films (well over a hundred) are indeed forgotten. Neither he nor his films were ever nominated for Academy Awards, not even one for lifetime achievement.
This is unjust, for his achievement was great. Born in 1887, half Irish, half Mexican, he spent some years as a seaman and a cowboy, before fetching up in California. In the free-for-all of the new movie industry he worked as writer, actor and director. He played Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in Birth of a Nation and by 1930 was directing a big prestige Western, The Big Trail, which was John Wayne’s first big break, unsuccessful as it turned out.
Directors like Walsh are sometimes called ‘journeymen’, but they were in reality masters. They could turn their hand to Westerns, gangster films, romantic comedies, musicals. Their films came in on time and under budget; their scenes were short, their dialogue sharp, their camera mobile; they were disciplined, economic craftsmen. All too often they had little choice in what they made or who acted for them, let alone in who wrote the script or handled the camera. When their work was done the film was taken away and edited by someone else, while they moved on to a different project.
But a Walsh film remains a Walsh film. He had the respect of actors and technicians and the editor found he had to cut the film the way Walsh wanted because there was rarely any spare footage to choose from. They called it ‘editing in the camera’.
Walsh was Errol Flynn’s best director (eg Gentleman Jim); he directed Bogart in his first starring role (High Sierra); he ended the gangster cycle with Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and then revived it with him ten years later (White Heat 1949). In 1958, the same year that he directed an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, he made a comedy Western with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield. That’s versatility.
He wore an eye-patch. It’s surprising how many directors of his generation wore eye-patches, but that’s for another essay.
Black is beautiful
In January 1963, segregationist George Wallace became governor of Alabama and in the same month a black student entered a previously all-white college in South Carolina, the last state to hold out against integration. In March James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi, but in Alabama the homes of civil rights leaders were being bombed. The following year the events which would inspire Mississippi Burning took place, when three civil rights workers were murdered, with the collusion of the local police. The dream of Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently this year was a far from coming true.
An early sign of Hollywood’s tentative liberalism on the issue was the presentation of the best actor Oscar to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. I haven’t seen the film, but by all accounts it is sentimental and well-meaning. Poitier was the first black to win a leading actor Oscar, and it would be 28 years before Denzil Washington became the second (in Training Day) and Halle Berry the first woman (Monster’s Ball).
In 1939, Hattie MacDaniel had won the award as best supporting actress for her performance as Scarlett O’Hara’s black maid, but when the film opened in Atlanta, Georgia, she and the other black performers were not allowed to attend the segregated theatre. She was once asked why she lent herself to such stereotypical roles. She replied that, as a maid, she would earn $7 dollars a week; by playing them in the movies, she could get $700.
In Birth of a Nation blacks are venal and rapacious, unless they are Uncle Toms. Half the time they are played by whites in boot-polish. Later they are invariably loyal mammies; stupid, superstitious servants; comic oafs; or drug dealers. The liberal sixties weighted their case by producing impossibly perfect characters. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn play a white, middle class couple, whose enlightened attitudes are tested when their daughter announces her intention to marry a black man. He, of course, is Sidney Poitier, handsome, polite, intelligent, and well-educated – I believe he works for the United Nations. As one critic said, it is ‘mendacious and sanctimonious twaddle’.
Better was Richard Roundtree in Shaft, self-consciously proclaiming ‘black is beautiful’. Or Live and Let Die, where Yaphet Koto has the honour of being a Bond villain. Or In the Heat of the Night, where Poitier is both a clever detective and embittered by the racism around him. More recently, Eddie Murphy’s characters really have to be black to work, but many of those played by Denzil Washington could just as easily be white. And is there anyone who wouldn’t watch a Morgan Freeman film, just to hear that voice. He has taken over from Henry Fonda as the most presidential of actors.
I was struck by these developments when I recently watched the new version of The Alamo. In the 1960 version (John Wayne), Jim Bowie has a slave, an old man, whom he frees when prospects begin to look bleak. The man says that as a free man, he now has the right to go where he pleases. So he will stay in the Alamo. In the final assault he dies, attempting to protect Bowie. The recent version is nearer to historical fact. Bowie allows the slave, a young man, to leave, taking advantage of the Mexicans’ amnesty to women, children and slaves. Bowie says, however, that he will come to claim his ‘property’ after the battle. The man leaves. He has previously said, ‘We work for them, we clean up their shit. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna fight for them as well.’
Great contemporaries
I usually get depressed when I notice that someone famous or successful was born in the same year as myself. Even more so when I realise that just about everyone in the cabinet, say, is younger than I. And don’t mention the obituary column in The Times.
But in your case, to list a few names might reassure you of your youthfulness. For example, George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were born this year, as were Natasha Richardson, Mike Myers and Seal. It was a good year for future superstars and saw the birth of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, but a bad year for poets because both Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost died.
One of your favourites, Lisa Kudrow, made her first appearance. I know how you appreciate a wacky woman.
And Quentin Tarantino, the patron saint of movie anoraks.
So that’s where 1963 has led me. I wanted to look at the year, as a film fan, and give an impression of what was going on, but also to choose one or two elements that were passing away and others that might become the future. It’s been a self-indulgent exercise, but I hope you will appreciate it nonetheless as a belated birthday gift.
Appendix 1
1959 Look Back in Anger (Richard Burton)
1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Albert Finney)
1961 A Taste of Honey (Rita Tushingham)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tom Courtenay)
Dr No (Sean Connery)
A Kind of Loving (Alan Bates)
The Wild and the Willing (John Hurt). Some scenes were shot in
Lincoln. A friend of mine was an extra, as he keeps telling me.
Billy Budd (Terence Stamp)
1963 This Sporting Life (Richard Harris)
Billy Liar (Julie Christie)
The Servant (James Fox, Sarah Miles)
1964 Zulu (Michael Caine)
A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles)
1965 The Knack (Michael Crawford)
Darling (Julie Christie)
1966 Morgan (David Warner)
1967 I’ll never forget whathisname (Oliver Reed)
Appendix 2
Annus Mirabilis
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank;
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Appendix 3: Films of the year
The Birds (dir Hitchcock, starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren)
This Sporting Life (dir Lindsay Anderson, starring Richard Harris, Rachel
Roberts)
The Servant (dir Joseph Losey, starring Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah
Miles)
Dr Strangelove (dir Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers, George C Scott)
The Great Escape (dir John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen, James
Garner, Richard Attenborough)
Hud (dir Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn
Douglas)
The Trial (dir Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins)
Fifty five days at Peking (dir Nicholas Ray, starring Charlton Heston,
David Niven)
Although I have to say that this poem is, to me, rather like that of a thinking man’s Pam Ayres.
Larkin’s point is that sex ceased to be a furtive thing, a reward for marriage, and became the guiltless delight of all. Not so, in 1963. Books and films may well have become more open, but ‘middle class morality’ still reigned. While Tom Jones was winning the best film Oscar for its sunny, amoral bawdiness, Cabinet ministers were being hounded from office merely for indulging in a little recreational sex. By the way, why do we talk about ‘middle class morality’? In my experience, nowhere is there more ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy than within the working class. (I speak as a member of both).
Being a late developer, sexual intercourse, in my case, took a little longer to begin. What did begin was politics – between the end of the Cuban threat and the death of JFK. Any number of political and social issues were being debated and there seemed little doubt that Harold Wilson (after whom our budgie was named) would soon be Prime Minister. The quaint forelock-tugging days of old Britain would be gone forever. I remember the passionate arguments over hanging and homosexuality, comprehensive education and decolonisation, the bomb and abortion, race, prostitution, nationalisation, etc, etc.
A brave new world of liberalism and equality was dawning, or so we youthful innocents thought. Those days seem pretty quaint themselves now.
Did you know that in November the BBC banned Joe Brown’s version of George Formby’s Little Ukelele?
I don’t really think popular music changed in 1963. After all, rock ‘n’ roll had been well-established for nearly ten years. Elvis’ best work was already behind him (his films this year were Fun in Acapulco and It happened at the World ‘s Fair – in case you don’t believe me). The best-selling songs in Britain this year were copies, covers and clones. I think what did happen was that, whereas singers like Elvis, Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele quickly moved into the mainstream, as what they saw as the only way to maintain a career, The Beatles and their successors became the mainstream or at least a permanent current within it.
Britgrit
But it’s films I plan to talk about, and the Brits were making a strong mark there too. As well as Tom Jones, the second Bond, From Russia with Love, was released. This Sporting Life was typical of many British films of this period, dealing with contemporary social issues in a realistic and gritty style, often with new writers, directors and actors. (I’ve attached a list in Appendix 1).
Of course, the cinema trailed literature by a good half-dozen years. This Sporting Life, for example, was published in 1957. Books are often trailblazers, films jump onto social trends when it is commercially safe to do so.
Where Britain was setting its films in the grimy kitchens of grim council estates, Hollywood was grinding out ever more grandeur and glamour. British exports, Burton and Taylor, were starring in Cleopatra, a lumbering elephant of a film, a white elephant as it turned out. The ‘epic’ style was even being applied to other genres. For example, It’s a mad, mad . . . .world (an alleged comedy); and How the West was Won, which tried to include every conceivable Western situation, as well as every living star associated with the form. It failed to understand that the successful Western, while they might have grand settings, is an essentially simple story. Like a classical drama, they often observe the unities of time, place and action, setting up a situation, developing a crisis and providing a resolution. Think of High Noon and The Naked Spur.
Despite The Magnificent Seven, three years earlier, the Western was becoming as flabby as John Wayne’s waistline. The staple B-features were becoming fewer as major films became longer, the major stars were getting older and the great directors were in decline. Wayne made the jokey McClintock, which was typical of most of his output from now on. Western success would come from Italy, but whether that cynical and alien tone delayed or hastened the Western’s decline is arguable.
Anti-heroes
The British films of this time were fresh and gritty, usually photographed in black and white, which suited the down-beat settings, the dour characters and the social problems which were their dramatic basis. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, was set in the factories and back streets of Nottingham. The ‘hero’ is an aggressive, amoral lathe operator. He probably votes Labour, if at all, but he feels little working class solidarity. ‘I’m just out for a good time. All the rest is propaganda.’
His idea of a good time is getting drunk and sleeping with an older woman, a fellow-worker’s wife. But he picks up another girl, who immediately starts calling him ‘my young man’ and taking him home to meet her mother. He can’t be that bright, because he doesn’t see the warning signs in that; or perhaps he is just resigned to what is inevitable in his world. He also manages to get the other woman pregnant, and there follow unsuccessful attempts at abortion. There’s no real moral judgment on him, although he does get beaten up by the woman’s in-laws. If there is a tragedy here, it is the final scene where the younger woman, to whom he has drifted into engagement, takes him to a new housing estate, where there are nice bungalows they might be able to afford. Even at the age of sixteen, I felt sorry for him.
I mentioned the decline of the Western earlier. Perhaps the best one of this year was Hud, actually a modern-day tale set in Texas, where the small-town life seems just as arid as Nottingham’s dingy back streets. Paul Newman plays Hud, another cynical, amoral character, similar to Albert Finney’s, but he has a father with contrasting old-fashioned values. An old cattle rancher, he is courtly and courteous, upright and inclined to sermonise, and has never forgiven his son for the drunken car wreck that killed his other boy.
An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease provides the crisis. Hud wants to sell off the cattle quickly before anyone knows, but the old man won’t cheat. Nor will he make up his losses by selling drilling rights for oil, which he thinks spoil the land. So the cattle are slaughtered, including the few, symbolic, Texas Longhorns, which he’d kept for sentimental reasons. He dies; the housekeeper, whom Hud had tried to rape, leaves; his nephew abandons him. Hud takes a sip of his beer, shrugs his shoulders, gives us that Paul Newman smirk and slams the door shut on the film. It’s a satisfying ending, in some guilty way.
Of course, it didn’t last. Such films were too depressing, and very easy to lampoon. And why is ‘realism’ only ever applied to the working class? Already, this year, Tom Jones, sunny, indulgent, full of the elements which would always make a British film (or classic TV series) appeal to an American audience. The sort of film for people who don’t really like the cinema, but can’t be bothered to read the book. Twenty years later, Helena Bonham-Carter would make a fortune out of such films.
Soon, glum drama would give way to zany confections like the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night and the swinging London of flashy films like The Knack, Darling and I’ll Never Forget Whathisname.
Raoul Walsh
This was also the year when Raoul Walsh released his last film, a forgettable Western called A Distant Trumpet. Walsh is a not well-known director and many of his films (well over a hundred) are indeed forgotten. Neither he nor his films were ever nominated for Academy Awards, not even one for lifetime achievement.
This is unjust, for his achievement was great. Born in 1887, half Irish, half Mexican, he spent some years as a seaman and a cowboy, before fetching up in California. In the free-for-all of the new movie industry he worked as writer, actor and director. He played Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in Birth of a Nation and by 1930 was directing a big prestige Western, The Big Trail, which was John Wayne’s first big break, unsuccessful as it turned out.
Directors like Walsh are sometimes called ‘journeymen’, but they were in reality masters. They could turn their hand to Westerns, gangster films, romantic comedies, musicals. Their films came in on time and under budget; their scenes were short, their dialogue sharp, their camera mobile; they were disciplined, economic craftsmen. All too often they had little choice in what they made or who acted for them, let alone in who wrote the script or handled the camera. When their work was done the film was taken away and edited by someone else, while they moved on to a different project.
But a Walsh film remains a Walsh film. He had the respect of actors and technicians and the editor found he had to cut the film the way Walsh wanted because there was rarely any spare footage to choose from. They called it ‘editing in the camera’.
Walsh was Errol Flynn’s best director (eg Gentleman Jim); he directed Bogart in his first starring role (High Sierra); he ended the gangster cycle with Cagney in The Roaring Twenties and then revived it with him ten years later (White Heat 1949). In 1958, the same year that he directed an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, he made a comedy Western with Kenneth More and Jayne Mansfield. That’s versatility.
He wore an eye-patch. It’s surprising how many directors of his generation wore eye-patches, but that’s for another essay.
Black is beautiful
In January 1963, segregationist George Wallace became governor of Alabama and in the same month a black student entered a previously all-white college in South Carolina, the last state to hold out against integration. In March James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi, but in Alabama the homes of civil rights leaders were being bombed. The following year the events which would inspire Mississippi Burning took place, when three civil rights workers were murdered, with the collusion of the local police. The dream of Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently this year was a far from coming true.
An early sign of Hollywood’s tentative liberalism on the issue was the presentation of the best actor Oscar to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field. I haven’t seen the film, but by all accounts it is sentimental and well-meaning. Poitier was the first black to win a leading actor Oscar, and it would be 28 years before Denzil Washington became the second (in Training Day) and Halle Berry the first woman (Monster’s Ball).
In 1939, Hattie MacDaniel had won the award as best supporting actress for her performance as Scarlett O’Hara’s black maid, but when the film opened in Atlanta, Georgia, she and the other black performers were not allowed to attend the segregated theatre. She was once asked why she lent herself to such stereotypical roles. She replied that, as a maid, she would earn $7 dollars a week; by playing them in the movies, she could get $700.
In Birth of a Nation blacks are venal and rapacious, unless they are Uncle Toms. Half the time they are played by whites in boot-polish. Later they are invariably loyal mammies; stupid, superstitious servants; comic oafs; or drug dealers. The liberal sixties weighted their case by producing impossibly perfect characters. In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, for example, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn play a white, middle class couple, whose enlightened attitudes are tested when their daughter announces her intention to marry a black man. He, of course, is Sidney Poitier, handsome, polite, intelligent, and well-educated – I believe he works for the United Nations. As one critic said, it is ‘mendacious and sanctimonious twaddle’.
Better was Richard Roundtree in Shaft, self-consciously proclaiming ‘black is beautiful’. Or Live and Let Die, where Yaphet Koto has the honour of being a Bond villain. Or In the Heat of the Night, where Poitier is both a clever detective and embittered by the racism around him. More recently, Eddie Murphy’s characters really have to be black to work, but many of those played by Denzil Washington could just as easily be white. And is there anyone who wouldn’t watch a Morgan Freeman film, just to hear that voice. He has taken over from Henry Fonda as the most presidential of actors.
I was struck by these developments when I recently watched the new version of The Alamo. In the 1960 version (John Wayne), Jim Bowie has a slave, an old man, whom he frees when prospects begin to look bleak. The man says that as a free man, he now has the right to go where he pleases. So he will stay in the Alamo. In the final assault he dies, attempting to protect Bowie. The recent version is nearer to historical fact. Bowie allows the slave, a young man, to leave, taking advantage of the Mexicans’ amnesty to women, children and slaves. Bowie says, however, that he will come to claim his ‘property’ after the battle. The man leaves. He has previously said, ‘We work for them, we clean up their shit. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna fight for them as well.’
Great contemporaries
I usually get depressed when I notice that someone famous or successful was born in the same year as myself. Even more so when I realise that just about everyone in the cabinet, say, is younger than I. And don’t mention the obituary column in The Times.
But in your case, to list a few names might reassure you of your youthfulness. For example, George Michael and Andrew Ridgely were born this year, as were Natasha Richardson, Mike Myers and Seal. It was a good year for future superstars and saw the birth of Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt, but a bad year for poets because both Sylvia Plath and Robert Frost died.
One of your favourites, Lisa Kudrow, made her first appearance. I know how you appreciate a wacky woman.
And Quentin Tarantino, the patron saint of movie anoraks.
So that’s where 1963 has led me. I wanted to look at the year, as a film fan, and give an impression of what was going on, but also to choose one or two elements that were passing away and others that might become the future. It’s been a self-indulgent exercise, but I hope you will appreciate it nonetheless as a belated birthday gift.
Appendix 1
1959 Look Back in Anger (Richard Burton)
1960 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Albert Finney)
1961 A Taste of Honey (Rita Tushingham)
1962 Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole)
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Tom Courtenay)
Dr No (Sean Connery)
A Kind of Loving (Alan Bates)
The Wild and the Willing (John Hurt). Some scenes were shot in
Lincoln. A friend of mine was an extra, as he keeps telling me.
Billy Budd (Terence Stamp)
1963 This Sporting Life (Richard Harris)
Billy Liar (Julie Christie)
The Servant (James Fox, Sarah Miles)
1964 Zulu (Michael Caine)
A Hard Day’s Night (The Beatles)
1965 The Knack (Michael Crawford)
Darling (Julie Christie)
1966 Morgan (David Warner)
1967 I’ll never forget whathisname (Oliver Reed)
Appendix 2
Annus Mirabilis
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank;
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Appendix 3: Films of the year
The Birds (dir Hitchcock, starring Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren)
This Sporting Life (dir Lindsay Anderson, starring Richard Harris, Rachel
Roberts)
The Servant (dir Joseph Losey, starring Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, Sarah
Miles)
Dr Strangelove (dir Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers, George C Scott)
The Great Escape (dir John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen, James
Garner, Richard Attenborough)
Hud (dir Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, Melvyn
Douglas)
The Trial (dir Orson Welles, starring Anthony Perkins)
Fifty five days at Peking (dir Nicholas Ray, starring Charlton Heston,
David Niven)
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