The REAL Best Film Of The Summer Of Love?

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I don’t write often about films in this space but that’s hardly for lack of intention. I was scanning through a couple of old notebooks the other day, searching for something entirely unrelated, and got sidetracked by how surprisingly many notes I’d made for prospective cinematically-themed pieces over the last few years. So many thoughts and observations, some of them not totally useless, all of them unused. There was, for example, the bare bones of the never-written essay half-arguing the case for George Lazenby as the best James Bond, for which I’d gone to the bother of watching 13 Bond films in one fortnight (why DID Sean Connery wear the herring gull hat as a disguise in Goldfinger when he was already invisible due to being underwater?), and about 20 pages of notes on Richard Linklater’s Slacker, Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise for a piece about 90s filmmaking and the speed of nostalgia which I have sort of written before but still intend to write again, at greater length.

So why the reluctance to follow through? I watch a lot of films - more than I have for years - but repeatedly come to the conclusion that there are already more than enough people out there writing well about movies, with a far more encyclopaedic knowledge than my own from which to draw context, subtext and whatever other kind of text takes their fancy. Plus there’s a sort of “been there, done that” aspect where, after getting excited about the prospect of writing about a film I've seen, I remember a lesson I learned back when I wrote about films for a living, which is that I find the viewing a more rewarding experience when I’m not focussed on what my subsequent analysis will look and sound like. It’s a less emphatic version of the epiphany that made me quit me taking freelance jobs as a book reviewer and immediately led to me to return to enjoying books on a deeper, looser level.

Picture a Labrador puppy. Actually, no, not a Labrador. A Spaniel: they’re cheekier and tend to be more comfortable hanging out on society's margins. The Spaniel puppy is generally happy-go-lucky, even by the typical standards of a Spaniel not yet at full maturity, and enjoys meeting people and chasing tennis balls. By a fortunate sequence of events, and because of the Spaniel puppy’s unquenchable enthusiasm for tennis balls, someone gives the spaniel puppy a job writing about the history of tennis and interviewing the people who play tennis most successfully. But the Spaniel puppy cannot read, nor does he know the proper rules of tennis.

Have you pictured this Spaniel? If so, you’re not too far off picturing me in my early days as a film journalist. “Are you available to interview Bob Rafelson this Friday?” an editor would ask. And suddenly there I’d be, scratching frantically around, at a time when the internet was still a small hole in the ground full of wires, to find some way of quickly watching Head (1968) and The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972) to bolster the vague knowledge I had of Rafelson’s directorial prowess from watching his mini masterpiece Five Easy Pieces two years earlier and occasionally enjoying repeats of The Monkees as a kid. I was thrown into a deep spot, with few resources available to me, but a thirst for cultural knowledge, combined with an ignorance of my own ignorance, got me through. Overinterviewed film directors and writers and actors coped with the surreality of being interviewed by a Spaniel because I didn’t ask the more tricky questions more astute and seasoned journalists asked, and merely had a relaxed chat with them instead. What strikes me now is how completely not overawed I was at the company I kept. I interviewed the one-man charm riot Sam Rockwell in a Soho hotel room and, despite him being seven years my senior, experienced a strong desire to take him home in my shirt pocket and adopt him. I met Paul McGann from Withnail & I and summoned the self-discipline to somehow ask him the serious questions my editor wanted me to ask, rather than whether he’d been on holiday by mistake lately. I telephoned John Frankenheimer and did my best to sound like a person who wasn’t freshly 22, hadn’t only watched The Manchurian Candidate for the first time less than 24 hours previously, and whose main takeaway from the film hadn’t been, “Blummin' 'ell, is that her from Murder She Wrote playing his mum?”