Take No Prisoners (3 page)

I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, which displayed a map of some of the more obscure parts of Canada, or maybe Scandinavia – somewhere with plenty of fjords, anyway. Two cops were arguing heatedly about the morality of shooting traitors in cold blood. The fish market was noisily closing for the night. (In all my time in that apartment I never once bought fish from the market, even though it was almost directly downstairs. The fish looked good and smelled good. I think it was the constant daytime noise of the staff and customers shouting at each other, a noise that started at five in the morning and went on until seven at night, that engendered my aversion to the produce.) A kid bellowed, presumably having fallen off its swing. Were there fjords in Canada? I couldn't remember. Maybe the map could be of a bit of New Zealand – I was pretty certain there were fjords there ...

And once more a deep and dreamless sleep took me into its arms.

~

And so the weeks went by and went by, each of them following very much the same pattern. Christmas, with its excruciating visit home, came and went. Although I continued to work hard at the university – my parents had made sacrifices to get me there, so it was my obligation to do so – I found that more and more I was living for my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo, that veterinary science was being shifted off towards the edge of my preoccupations. Only during those three and a half hours each week when I was sitting in the Rupolo, with or without popcorn (more usually without), did I feel that my mind was truly alive, and enlivened. It was the genesis of a lifelong passion, one that has molded the man I now am.

Of course, at this distance of years I cannot possibly recall the titles of all the movies I saw during those Monday afternoons, and, although I can remember great tracts of their plots, sometimes I suspect they have all become jumbled each among the others, so that what I bring to mind are not individual movies but just some gigantic composite, a sort of huge metamovie. Most of the movies were British, or at least centered on Britishers, and generally the Britishers were in conflict with the Germans; but there were a few that featured Americans, and their struggles with either the Germans or the Japanese or both. The movies were generally from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, although occasionally the Rupolo's owner saw fit to show something a bit more recent. A few of the titles that I do remember are
Albert RN
,
The Great Escape
,
The Bridge on the River Kwai
,
The Colditz Story
,
Ice Cold in Alex
,
Stalag 17
,
Sahara
,
D-Day
,
Gallipoli
,
Danger Within
,
Foxhole in Cairo
,
The Captive Heart
,
The Mackenzie Break
,
The Purple Heart
,
The Longest Day
,
Tora! Tora! Tora!
,
Hannibal Brooks
,
King Rat
,
The Password is Courage
,
The Betrayal
,
Prisoner of War
...

I suppose I should make a confession here. I am not an unusually stupid man, and several decades ago, when I was studying for my doctorate, I was undoubtedly brighter and sharper than I am today. However, I have to admit that, while I followed the plots of these movies keenly – others might snore during a Rupolo Monday matinee but not me – it took me a long time to realize that a composite was emerging from the whole sequence of movies that was, well, distinctly ...
odd
. I still cannot understand why it took me such a while to notice this. Nor can I understand why it was that, for all my genuine and unbridled passion for these features and by extension for cinema as a whole, it never occurred to me until near the end of that academic year to do more than simply watch the movies – never occurred to me that the university library must contain scores if not hundreds of books on the cinema in which I might revel between one Monday afternoon and the next. I suppose the truth is that I was at the stage of being merely a fan; my awakening as a student of the cinema was for some reason delayed. Or maybe it was the subconscious notion that, the moment I began to take my devotion more seriously, as symbolized by my starting to search out books on the subject, would also be the moment I had to confront the fact that my interest in veterinary science, to which I had sacrificed nearly a decade of my young life, had ebbed to such a degree that all that was left was a darkening of the sand.

Whatever the reason, it wasn't until sometime in the late spring or early summer of the following year that I located the Performing Arts section of the university library and then, embedded within it, the long shelves dedicated to books on the cinema. I strolled backwards and forwards in front of those shelves for several minutes, I recall, reluctant to take the final step of actually pulling a book down and opening it. There were books about individual directors, actors, studios ... even individual movies. There were histories of Hollywood in general, and of specific genres; this was the first time that I realized, for example, that animation was something more than kids' stuff but was worthy of serious consideration by grown-up human beings – a significant discovery, as it was to prove, because animation has become one of my major obsessions within the broader field of cinema studies. There were books on the philosophy of the movies, books on the silents, books on series like those starring Tarzan or Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy or Batman, books on the technologies of cinematography and special effects, encyclopedias and movie guides, how-to books for wannabe screenwriters ... There was a whole world contained within those books, and I had been doing nothing more than looking at the outside of one of its aspects. They presented a challenge starkly before me: if I wanted, I could turn and leave the building and forget all about them, become a vet who enjoyed watching the movies whenever he had the spare time; otherwise, I was going to start an exploration that would likely remain incomplete even if I dedicated the rest of my life to it.

Knowing exactly the import of what I was doing, I eventually reached out a slightly shaking hand and took by the spine a copy of
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
. I carried it over to a desk and opened it. I saw in a blur two pages jammed full of small print. It was an encyclopedic listing of movies – over 20,000 of them, according to the splashline on the cover. Once I got my eyes to focus properly, I could see that the movies were listed alphabetically, each with basic details such as year of release, running time, director and stars, plus a short synopsis. The spread I had open in front of me contained these brief descriptions of movies like
Four Men and a Prayer
,
The Four Musketeers
,
The Four-Poster
,
Four Sided Triangle
,
Four's a Crowd
,
The Fox and the Hound
,
Fragment of Fear
,
The Franchise Affair
,
Francis of Assisi
... Reading the summaries – none was longer than a couple of sentences – was a tantalizing and soon frustrating experience: I began to salivate at the prospect of all these movies still waiting in the future for me to watch, but what I really wanted was to watch them
now
– and all of them at once.

Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
bore a bold blue REFERENCE stamp, so all I could do was look at it there – I wasn't going to be able to take it home with me and browse through it late into the night. I looked at the price on the cover and realized glumly that it would be a long time, no matter how much I scrimped, before I could save up enough money from my allowance to buy a copy of my own. But there were other books on the shelves which I
was
allowed to borrow, and soon I'd amassed a stack of half a dozen of them – as many as my university library card entitled me to borrow at any one time. Clutching them to me as if I were a small child who'd just discovered a trove of chocolates and was making good his escape while the coast was clear with as many as he could carry, I checked them out and made my way back to the apartment.

Now here's a curious thing. I cannot for the life of me remember what those books actually were – an omission from memory as grievous as if I'd forgotten the name of the woman to whom I'd lost my virginity. (No, not to Glenda Doberman.) But certainly I discovered that they had the property of banishing the sounds of the fish market and the shrieking kids and Mrs. Bellis's soap operas. I got home in the late afternoon and didn't stop reading until I fell asleep face-first into the third of the books I'd started, my last memory before unconsciousness hit me and the words on the page receded wildly from my vision being that a lot of people seemed to be laughing very loudly on the other side of the wall at the quips of a chat-show host.

The next day I had to drag myself to the laboratory. It had to be faced that, overnight, veterinary science had transformed from an interest – albeit by now only a marginal one – into a chore. I did a few studies of the larynx of a dog, wrote a couple of paragraphs of my dissertation, stared out the window a lot. I'd brought the two cinema books I'd finished last night with me, and at lunchtime I almost sprinted to the library – not just to exchange them for two more but also for an hour's uninterrupted browsing through the pages of
Brunner's Companion to the Cinema
.

Lenny
,
Leo the Last
,
The Leopard
,
The Leopard Man
,
Lepke
,
A Lesson in Love
...

It was only then that it occurred to me that, rather than just leafing through the book, I might be more profitably occupied using it to find out something about the specific genre of movies with which I'd fallen in love – those old World War II movies I saw at the Rupolo. Accordingly, I turned back through the pages to the Gs, hunting for
The Great Escape
.

I found
The Great Diamond Robbery
– a minor comedy thriller, apparently – and
Great Expectations
, but clearly Mr. Brunner thought
The Great Escape
was beneath his notice. I wasn't unduly surprised: most of the Rupolo's Monday-afternoon presentations were obviously very obscure and very aged B-movies, and any reference work has to draw the line somewhere. Maybe I'd have better luck with
Reach for the Sky
.

I didn't. Nor with
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, or
The Wooden Horse
, or
Ice Cold in Alex
, or
The Colditz Story
, or ...

In fact, Mr. Brunner had ignored
all
of the war movies whose titles I could offhand recall.

I shut the book and stared at its cover in a state of complete incredulity. It was reasonable that some – possibly most – of these undistinguished movies might have been omitted for reasons of space, but
all
of them? It didn't seem feasible.

And it was then that something which had for months now been subliminally troubling me about my weekly forays to the Rupolo came hammering irresistibly into the forefront of my conscious – that disturbing pattern that evidenced itself in the Monday-afternoon movies as a whole. In items like
The Great Escape
and
The Wooden Horse
I'd seen plucky British prisoners-of-war outwitting rather stupid Germans and gaining their freedom. There were battle movies in which the forces of the Axis got the crap beaten or bombed out of them by the Allies. The Brits or the Americans had almost always been portrayed as brave heroes; the Germans and the Japs almost always as cowards or villains or both – or just as expendable non-people who could be mown down in their hundreds and thousands without the smallest tear being shed. Moreover, although it hadn't been stated, these movies' stories had seemed implicitly part of a larger story in which the Axis had been defeated and the Allies had triumphed. Indeed, now that I began to think about the whole thing properly – started using that rational mind which my parents had donated so many thousands of dollars to train – it seemed distinctly peculiar that any of these movies had ever been made at all. OK, one, perhaps two – as curios in which the tables were turned on history. But
dozens
of them?

Taking this further, how come the cops were allowing the Rupolo to show such seditious features? – for seditious they were, now that I'd begun to regard them analytically rather than just with the wide-eyed, naive gawp of enthusiasm. Surely the place should have been busted by now and its owner marched off for, at the very least, extensive interrogation? A chill ran down my spine as I realized that the audience, too, should have been scooped up in the net. We were almost as guilty as the Rupolo's proprietor through having returned, week in and week out, to watch such dangerous stuff. Without ever noticing that I was doing anything illegal, I'd become in effect a habitual criminal, a serial offender – a traitor in thought and arguably a traitor in deed as well.

Up to this point in my life I had always been the most law-abiding of persons. I hadn't committed so much as an act of littering. Now I was involved in an extremely serious crime.

Is it any wonder that I never made it back to the laboratories that afternoon, but instead drifted home haphazardly, my stomach feeling as if it were filled with ice and my head most certainly filled with visions of my arrest, my interrogation and the shame I would bring down on the heads of my parents?

~

Yet by the morning my attitude had changed. This might seem surprising – indeed, in retrospect it's slightly startling even to me – but you must remember that I had for months now been affected by that curious sensation of being more related to the fictional world of Chips and Ginger and Forbes-Hepplewhite and the rest than to what my intellect but not my gut acknowledged as the real world: the world around me. In that sense, to ask myself to give up my Monday afternoons at the Rupolo was to require of me more than forgoing a pleasurable activity: in a very true sense it was to require me to give up my existence – in effect to commit suicide – for I was a part not of a three-dimensional Technicolor world but of a two-dimensional monochrome one. If I abandoned the monochrome world, then something that strongly resembled a doctoral student called Kurt Stroheim would continue to go through all the action of existing in the Technicolor world, but he wouldn't be
me
: he – or it – would be just another puppet, like all the rest of the denizens of that world.