A Memoir by David Gilmour

Canadian novelist David Gilmour, who has several award-winning novels to his credit (A Perfect Night to Go to China, How Boys See Girls, An Affair With the Moon) has just published THE FILM CLUB (from TwelveBooks, part of the Hachette Book Group). An unusual, engaging approach to a personal memoir, the book is both an account of a rocky three year period in the life of Gilmour’s teenage son Jesse and an informal guide for father-son movie viewing. The compelling hook to the book – and it has received a lot of media exposure for this – is that Gilmour and his ex-wife Maggie allowed their son to drop out of high school when it was obvious he had given up on the educational system for a variety of reasons. They had already tried other approaches to a formal education for Jesse – all had failed. So David proposed a deal. Jesse could skip school and stay home; he didn’t even have to get a job as long as he followed one simple requirement – he had to join his father three times a week for an informal movie club in their living room. David would pick the movies and together they would watch and sometimes discuss what they’d seen. A mixture of the purely commercial (Basic Instinct, Rocky III, Magnum Force) and the classic (Citizen Kane, 8 ½, Casablanca, Giant), the screenings become more eclectic and interesting as they ease into a routine and so do their disagreements and mutual admirations.  

David and Jesse Gilmour

Some of the criticism THE FILM CLUB has received, however, is leveled at Gilmour’s responsibilities as a father. Is watching movies a substitute for a real education? Why set the bar so low for a teenager who clearly needs to be challenged and experience the real world?  Take a job in a factory as an unskilled worker with no opportunity to get an education or even a green card.  There’s a wake-up call.  Were Jesse’s parents doing more harm than good in allowing their son to make his own decisions about his life, instead of forcing him to do something for his own benefit? Gilmour answers all of these questions and provides a rationale that you may or may not agree with – but you can’t fault the final results of his “experiment” (at least so far) or his perceptive instincts about Jesse. The lad probably surpassed his would-be classmates in experience and came round to an actual diploma on his own terms.  And the best part of this bittersweet saga for me are the film sessions where some of my favorite movies are screened by David for his son - The Third Man, Night Moves, The Night of the Hunter, The 400 Blows, Rosemary’s Baby, The Bicycle Thief- but the responses from both father and son are often unexpected, enlightening and occasionally irritating in ways you wouldn’t expect.  

Jean-Pierre Leaud in The 400 Blows

Here is a particularly revealing passage that every film buff has experienced at some point: “Picking movies for people is a risky business. In a way it’s as revealing as writing someone a letter. It shows how you think, it shows what moves you, sometimes it can even show how you think the world sees you. So when you breathlessly recommend a film to a friend, when you say, “Oh, this is a scream – you’re going to really love it,” it’s a nauseating experience when the friend sees you the following day and says with a wrinkled brow, “You thought that was funny?” I remember once recommending Ishtar to a woman I quite fancied only to have her shoot me that look the next time I saw her. Oh, it said, that’s what you’re like.” (I have to agree with David that Ishtar was murdered by the media despite the fact that half of it is probably funnier than any contemporary comedy such as Hamlet 2 or Pineapple Express).

Warren Beatty & Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar

A perfect example of this occurs when David prepares Jesse for a screening of the Beatles’s first movie A Hard Day’s Night, telling him certain scenes to look for and how the film is “so irresistible, so ecstatic.” Jesse, a fan of rap music, “watched the film in polite silence, at the end of which he said simply, “Dreadful.” He went on. “And John Lennon was the worst of the bunch.” (Here he mimicked Lennon with astonishing accuracy. “A totally embarrassing man.”  

The Beatles in A Hard Day's Night

Before you write Jesse off as hopeless, however, you need to know that he comes to appreciate the films of the French New Wave, feels an immediate connection with James Dean when he watches Giant, is completely won over by Louis Malle’s Murmur of the Heart, especially the ending (“Now there’s a director with balls!”) and repeatedly watches Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. 

Wong Kai-Wai's Chungking Express

While I share many of the same opinions on certain films that David loves, there are several times when I disagree with his judgments and dismissive comments such as “Gene Kelly’s malignant phoniness in Singin’ in the Rain,” “the scariest thing ever made, The Exorcist,” “Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry…is the best documentary I’ve ever seen in my life,” or “..I’m dying to talk about The Searchers  (1956) and the bewildering praise and nerdy analysis it has spawned.”  

Volcano: An Inquiry Into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry

Regardless of your feelings about THE FILM CLUB, it is bound to stir up a lively debate among readers and to maybe inspire some father-son movie viewing/bonding across the nation. And how about some mother-daughter film club  playlists? That would just as telling. Gilmour’s book even made me a little bit envious of Jesse at that age since spending time with my own dad at that point in my life was catch-as-catch can. He was a manufacturing representative of building supply materials and was often on the road traveling, building up a perspective client base for new companies (such as Peachtree Door in its early days). As a family we would occasionally go to movies together (including unforgettable drive-in screenings of The High and the Mighty  – that whistling theme song – and Gone With the Wind  – the burning of Atlanta, Scarlett falling down the stairs), but it was a rare instance when I got to accompany my father (without my mother, older brother, or younger sister) to a film so those moments stand out in my memory. 

The Venus Theatre circa 1942, Richmond, Va.

One of my favorite flashbacks is being allowed on a middle-of-the-week school night (I was nine years old) to go see a movie playing at a fleapit theatre on the wrong side of the tracks – Richmond’s South Side. The Venus Theatre (long since abandoned and currently slated for commercial development) on Hull St. first opened in 1926 and was a plush, upscale art deco cinema. By 1960, the surrounding neighborhood had changed quite a bit and the theatre’s interior reflected it – leather seats scarred by switchblades, winos snoring in the mostly empty, cavernous theatre, a smell of mildew and stale popcorn in the air, stickly floors and less than stellar movies on the marquee. For some unfathomable reason, I begged to see LEGIONS OF THE NILE (1960, Italian title: Le Legioni di Cleopatra), a sword-and-scandal epic starring Linda Cristal as Cleopatra and Georges Marchal as Marc Antony. And, in spite of my mediocre grades at school, my father agreed to take me to see it. I remember it was a semi-rainy night and that the theatre was practically deserted except for a handful of single, middle-aged men in raincoats scattered around the auditorium (as if in anticipation for a porno film). From my limited critical perspective, I thought the film delivered the goods – lots of sword fighting and battle scenes, exotic locales and several slave girl dance sequences which explained the all-male audience.  

Legions of the Nile film poster

I remember my father telling me that the actors’ lip movements didn’t match the dialogue because it wasn’t their voices but someone else’s which struck me as an intriguing and comical concept I was barely aware of until he said it. He also leaned over at one point during a particularly violent stabbing – the sword glistened in the garish Eastmancolor, coated with bright red paint – to let me know that the blood looked really fake. Just in case I was disturbed by that. I also remember that we kept our raincoats on the entire movie in the event my father wanted to whisk me out of that place in case anything weird happened. Nothing did, of course, but he did comment on the sad state of the Venus and that he probably wouldn’t be bringing me back there for another movie. Regardless, there was something sort of thrilling and secretive about that night as if my father and I were stranded in some strange, unsafe neighborhood. Yet I felt completely safe and protected and we were watching a cool movie together! 

Steve Reeves (on right) in The Trojan Horse

I was also able to get my father to take me to a kiddie matinee at the Westover Theatre for the Steve Reeves peplum, THE TROJAN HORSE (1961), but this one was more of an endurance test for him, with boisterous kids throwing popcorn boxes at each other and whistling and cheering during any action scene. But the title prop was pretty impressive and there was lots of grunting he-man combat (a precursor to World Wide Wrestling [WCW]). 

Scenes from Village of the Damned

Much more to my father’s liking were the sci-fi and western genres and I recall our trip to the Loew’s Theatre in downtown Richmond to see VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960), a low key but chilling little sleeper where the inhabitants of an English village fall into a long, deep sleep and when they awake every woman of child-bearing age finds they are pregnant. The children, all born at the same time, turn out to be a sinister group of blonde, mind-reading monsters who control their parents and the town. My father knew immediately that they were the offspring of aliens and this concept intrigued us both to no end. GORGO (1961), however, was a bit of a letdown after that. We saw that one at the Loew’s several months later and while I enjoyed the livid Technicolor, eardrum-rumbling sound effects, and mass destruction of London caused by a prehistoric female beast and her toddler son, I could tell my father was bored from the way he was chewing gum and his general restlessness….moving around in his seat, looking at his wristwatch, etc.  

Here comes GORGO...Watch out London!

I suppose of all these father-son outings, the most memorable one was our trip to the Colonial Theatre to see THE ALAMO (1960), directed by and starring John Wayne, one of my father’s favorite actors along with Dean Martin (the reason our family ended up seeing all of the “Rat Pack” movies). Critics might have massacred the film in their reviews at the time but that had no effect on us then. For me, the film was emotionally overwhelming. At the end, after Davy Crockett (Wayne), Jim Bowie (Richard Widmark), Col. Travis (Laurence Harvey) and all the rest of the Americans lay dead after their last stand against the Mexican army and Dimitri Tiomkin’s melancholy theme song, “The Green Leaves of Summer,” begins to play, I was embarrassed to realize I was crying and ashamed to let my father know it. Then I felt his arm go around my shoulder and give me a little hug. He didn’t say anything as the credits started to roll but I snuck a sideways glance at him and saw that his eyes were misting up too. Damn that John Wayne! 

John Wayne on the set of The Alamo