The Man In The Seventh Row (12 page)

'What a fucking dump,' said Debbie. 'It stinks.'

'You get used to it,' said Roy.

'What is that smell?'

'It's the smell of history,' said Roy as he settled in the seventh row.

'It's the smell of dust and piss,' said Debbie as she inspected the blackened seat next to him. The cinema was empty, but for a woman offering Eldorardo ice cream from a tray.

'I don't know why I agreed to come. It's not even a new film. You could watch it on
TV
.'

'Not on a big screen.'

Debbie sat down huffily and they both sat in silence. Soon the faded red curtains would draw back in a strange striptease, to reveal a naked off-white screen, stained by the cigarette smoke of past audiences. The house lights would dim and John Wayne would once more appear to take Roy away from cold, rainy Edinburgh to ride the ranges of that place they called the Wild West.

'I hate John Wayne,' said Debbie, as the Warner Brothers logo appeared on a brick wall. Roy could not remember seeing this opening card before and thought a brick wall a curiously inappropriate motif to introduce a western.

'He's a man's actor,' said Roy.

'Shite,' said Debbie. 'He's a crap actor ... and a fascist.'

The film opens with a plaintive ballad that asks what makes a man to wander and to roam, what makes a man turn his back on home.

'What a naff song,' said Debbie. 'Is this a comedy?'

'Give it a chance,' said Roy.

John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, who returns to the family homestead in Texas after fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. It has taken him three years to get home. He returns with a medal and two bags of freshly minted Yankee dollars, but little in the way of explanation for his prolonged absence. There is something about the way John Wayne looks at his brother's wife that suggests more than brotherly affection, which Roy did not really appreciate that first time round. Ethan gives the medal to his ten-year-old niece Debbie.

'Oh, she's called Debbie too,' said the other Debbie and Roy interpreted her subsequent silence as evidence that she was beginning to enjoy the film.

Ethan rides off with a posse in pursuit of rustlers. They find the cattle dead and realise the cattle raid was a diversionary tactic. Ethan looks off across the desert, his eyes full of pain and impotent rage. He knows what is happening. Big John always knows what is happening. But there is nothing he can do. Not this time.

Ethan's brother Aaron watches birds take off in alarm and spots something flashing off in the distance. His wife tells Debbie to go and hide where her grandmother is buried. She settles down beside the tombstone.

Roy felt Debbie jump as a shadow fell across her little namesake. She reached for his hand and squeezed it.

It was the shadow of the Indian chief, his face painted in red and yellow.

***

Roy and Debbie had been going out together for six months. The longest he had ever gone out with anyone before was three weeks. His friends called her Mrs Batty and though he was not sure how he felt, he could tell she liked it. He was not sure he was the type who would stay at the homestead with the little lady. He saw himself more as the one who would turn his back on home, coming back only occasionally with his pockets full of Yankee dollars, no questions asked, no explanations proffered.

It took Roy about three months to get Debbie to go on the pill and sleep with him. They progressed fairly quickly from snogging to fondling to petting and he could unhook and remove her bra down her sleeve without her having to remove her top. Her bedroom was the only upstairs room in her house. Her parents never went up there, communicating by shouting from the foot of the stairs. Roy and Debbie spent most of their time smoking cannabis, listening to the Eagles and exploring each other's bodies, with their eyes and their fingers and their tongues, until he was sufficiently familiar with her every nook and cranny to draw the shape of the portwine birthmark on her left buttock from memory. Lately they had not had sex quite so often.

By the time John Wayne gets back to the homestead his brother, sister-in-law and nephew are dead. Debbie and her older sister Lucy are gone. Big John does not cry. Not on the outside. He does his crying on the inside and sets off with the posse after the Comanche who have taken his nieces. He follows their tracks, he reads their signs, he understands their ways, and he hates them. He shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche, because the Comanche believe that without eyes a dead man cannot enter the spirit world and must wander forever between the winds. Big John always knows what is going to happen and he knows when the Indians will attack. He is, as always, the man you would want to be next to when they came – a leader, a hero, a real man, John Wayne. But inside ... inside... . he lost his war, he lost his country, he lost his woman and now the Comanche have taken the last of his family. He finds Lucy's body, horribly mutilated, only telling his young companions much later. Ethan can stand the sight of it, but lesser mortals must be shielded from such truths.

Ethan continues the search for the band of Comanche led by Scar. He is accompanied latterly only by Martin Pawley, a part-Cherokee, part-English, part-Welsh orphan, raised as one of Ethan's brother's family. He was played by Jeffrey Hunter, in the original.

In the version Roy watches with Anna, Marty is played by Roy. He sticks faithfully to the script, or at least fairly faithfully, though he cannot help but appropriate Ethan's catchphrase of 'That'll be the day', once or twice, and the looks exchanged between the two searchers take on an extra depth.

For seven years they search for Debbie who has grown to be a young woman. She will, to be precise, have grown up to be Natalie Wood. Slowly it becomes clear that Ethan continues the search, not to rescue Debbie, but to kill her, because she will have been polluted by the Comanche. It will be like putting a dog or a horse 'out of its misery'.

A Mexican arranges a meeting between Ethan and Scar. When Ethan tells Marty he cannot come to the meeting, Marty looks him full in the eye and says 'That'll be the day.' Scar tells Ethan how he lost two sons, killed by white men. He asks one of his wives to bring the scalps he took in retribution. It is Debbie who brings them.

'Do you know where the toilets are?' asked Debbie.

'Toilets,' said Roy, 'Toilets? They've been looking for her for seven years, and just when they find her you have to go for a piss.'

'Don't be stupid. I'm bursting.'

Debbie Edwards tells Ethan and Marty the Comanche are her people now and tells them to go. Ethan tries to kill her, but Marty stands in the way. Finally by chance Ethan and Marty discover the whereabouts of Scar's encampment, which is about to be attacked by the Cavalry. Before they attack, Marty rescues Debbie and kills Scar. Ethan subsequently scalps the corpse. Debbie runs away but he catches her, lifts her as he did when she was a child and declares that it is time to go home. They return to one of the homesteads, and in one of the most famous final sequences of any film, they all enter – a mish-mash of different nationalities and cultures, all except Ethan, who takes one step towards the door and turns away. The door closes on him. The film ends.

'Brilliant,' said Roy to Debbie.

***

'Brilliant,' says Anna to Roy. 'He's really a tragic character. Isn't he?'

'I said that too,' says Roy.

Anna looks quizzically at him.

'I once split up with someone because she disagreed. I told her it was the best film ever made. And she said it was ...'

He can see the curiosity in Anna's eyes. She said it was what? Crap? Too violent? Boring?

'She said it was "only a western".

***

She said it was only a western and that John Wayne was a racist and a fascist and she was not going to see any more of his films 'on principle'.

'You're missing the point,' Roy said. 'John Wayne's character is a racist, but the film doesn't condone or excuse it, it explains it, explains the rottenness that has eaten into his heart. A hero gone bad. He looks like he is in total control, living life on his terms, but really he's a loser. He lost his war, he lost his country, he lost his woman and he lost all the family he ever had. And in the end there is no place for Ethan in civilised society. In the end he loses everything. That is the tragedy.'

'His tragedy is pretty tragic for the Indians too,' said Debbie.

'The fact you think it's only a western, that is the real tragedy,' said Roy.

'It's a film about John Wayne the racist killing Indians, pretending to be a film about John Wayne the hero killing the savage who murdered his family.'

'You're right about one thing, that Ethan's tragedy is the Indians' tragedy too. Scar is Ethan's alter ego. He sees himself in Scar. It is a mirror image, a distorted mirror image. Even the name 'Scar'. He sees himself in the mirror and wants to kill himself, because despite the dignified exterior he loathes himself. He is the past, not the future. There is no place for Ethan or Scar in the future.'

His voice rose aggressively as he forced home his point, striding ahead of Debbie up the road towards the East End.

'I'm entitled to my opinion,' she said, falling behind. 'I think it's only a western, an old, racist western.'

'Well, if that's your opinion, you might be best to keep it to yourself. You just didn't understand the film.'

Debbie started to cry.

'And how could you, you went to the toilet at the most important part? What's the point in going to the cinema at all if you don't see the whole film? There's no point in talking about it.'

'Is there any point in talking about anything?' she said.

'No,' said Roy, though only because it was the answer the question had invited. He stopped. She walked past him, crying, and continued to walk. He waited for her to turn back and they would kiss and make up. But she kept on walking. He watched her figure get smaller and smaller and disappear among the Saturday afternoon shoppers. He caught one final glimpse of her red jacket through the crowd. And then she was gone.

***

'I wanted her to phone, but she never did,' Roy tells Anna. 'And I never phoned her.'

'You must have been unbearable,' says Anna.

Roy smiles sheepishly. They look into each other's eyes. Anna leans forward and their lips brush against each other.

14

Roy had always been tall for his age and he had dark, downy fuzz on his upper lip by the time he was 12. This was in the days before designer stubble, certainly the days before designer stubble was acceptable as part of the uniform of one of Edinburgh's selective schools. Shaving was a hassle at first. But Roy quickly learned that his five o'clock shadow was a virtue when it came to girls and movies, both of which operated a system of prohibiting entry to certain events deemed unsuitable for those under a certain age.

When he was at primary school they filmed
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
in Edinburgh and one of the girls in his class was in it. It was not a big part: she was on the bus that passes the school at the end. Roy's father took him to see the film being made in Stockbridge, and they watched girls pouring out of Donaldson's School for the Deaf in 1930s uniform. Roy waited months and months and months for the film to appear in local cinemas and when it did it was an 'X' – no one under 16.

'But why is it an X?' he asked his mother.

'Because one of the actresses has no clothes on,' his mother said.

'She goes right through the film without wearing any clothes?' asked Roy incredulously. All the girls he had seen at Stockbridge had clothes on.

'No, she just takes her clothes off once or twice,' his mother told him.

Roy thought about whether it was a shame that he could not see the film because of this naked actress, or whether the promise of a naked actress was something to look forward to in the future. His pal Johnnie had shown him a magazine called 'Parade' that contained pictures of women without clothes, the sight of which had produced a pleasurable swelling in his shorts. And one of his 'Animal Life' magazines contained a picture of a bare-breasted native woman wearing bird of paradise plumage in her hair. He often consulted that issue. But films held out the promise not just of naked women, but of moving naked women.

For reasons he ne
ver quite understood, the film
Little Big Man
marked the beginning of his adult passion for movies. He had not been to the cinema for a while when he went to see
Little Big Man
at the
ABC
3 with his father in the autumn of '71. The
ABC
Film Centre had been open for almost two years, but with his move from Fountainbridge to Learmonth, it was no longer the local cinema and he had never been. It seemed new, different and luxurious. Just 300 gold-coloured seats, smaller than any of the local cinemas he had visited. He went with his father, just the two of them, on a school night, to the last performance. His father had been working late and they met at the shop, walked round to the cinema together and sat seven rows back.

Little Big Man
had an
AA
certificate, which meant no one under 14 should be admitted, and Roy was one month short of his 14th birthday, which gave the film the taste of forbidden fruit. It was a western of course. Dustin Hoffman played 121-year-old Jack Crabb, whose memories seem to embrace the entire history and mythology of the west, from Wild Bill Hickok to Custer's Last Stand. But it was a different history, a different mythology. For Hoffman's character was not a barrel-chested Indian-killer. He was raised by the Cheyenne and in this film it is the white men who are the savages. It was at times gentle and humorous, like the Cheyenne, at other times bitter and disillusioned, like the white man. Roy loved it.