In the afternoon Wilderness turned out the contents of the Mog. It wasn’t hard to figure out what went where with a 16mm projector and mono sound system, which was just as well since no one was offering to tell him.
But the film library … Farr’s marvellous selection.
Ye gods, he thought, what are they thinking of?
He doubted there was a film less than ten years old. Some of them were twenty years old. He’d seen at least a dozen of them with Eddie when they were training in Cambridge and as many more in the days of courtship before he and Judy married.
The Titfield Thunderbolt—made in 1953. Rustics fight to stop closure of their railway branch line.
The Battle of the River Platte—made in 1956. The Royal Navy blockades Montevideo and the Graf Spee scuttles itself.
Passport to Pimlico—made in 1949. A London borough declares its independence and puts an end to rationing.
Kind Hearts and Coronets—also 1949. Alec Guinness plays umpteen members of an aristocratic family while an utter cad murders his way to a dukedom.
All marvellous … in their way … in their time … but this wasn’t their time … this was 1966. London was swinging. Eddie had assured him it was. Monday was no longer just washing day, chippies open and all. What possible impression of England was the FO trying to convey? Would Finland resist the temptations of communism on an ideological diet of unchanging rural life and wartime British pluck?
He moved to the shorts, the fillers put on between what were commonly known as the big and little pictures, in between the tubs of ice cream (vanilla only) and fruit lollipops—fifty episodes of Look at Life … “The Coffee Bars of Soho” … “Driving a Tube Train” … “A Day in the Life of a London Cabbie” … somewhat more up to date … but a yard and a half wide of the mark. Cultural cliché if not cultural whitewash … a world in which the British could still point to all “the red bits on the map.”
The Americans and the Russians put men into space—the British looked after their branch lines and looked back nostalgically to the days when they sank Nazi warships. It was all so … resistible.
He mentioned this to Janis Bell over coffee the next morning.
“Draw up a list and give it to Eric. He’ll get you anything you want. I know what you mean. It looks like an outdated vision of England, but the truth is, it isn’t anyone’s vision. It’s a lack of vision. Eric’s realm is paper clips and mimeograph machines. If you ever have need of a ‘Top Secret’ stamp and red ink pad, he probably has a cupboard full. And the last time he went to an English cinema it was probably showing The Titfield soddin’ Thunderbolt. If he’s driven the Mog up north it’s only because there was no one else to do it.”
Wilderness drew up his list:
This Sporting Life
The Entertainer
Live Now, Pay Later
A Hard Day’s Night
Darling
The Ipcress File
A different cinema, a different England. A harder, more cynical England. Self-reflecting, not self-regarding.
He thought about The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which had been released just the year before. He and Judy had seen it in Leicester Square. Richard Burton, for once not overacting, for once not seeming too big for the screen he was in—but then he had pause to think … what impression of England did that create?
He wrote it down. Then he crossed it out. Then he wrote it down again. Then he asked himself, Is this too close to home? … Isn’t anyone who does what I do potentially an Alec Leamas? … Is that how I’ll end up? Caught between East and West Berlin with a bullet in me?
So he crossed it out again.