It's as new as the last century, but simultaneously it's as old as time: film reviewing; moviemania as a way of life; picture-going as a paid passion.
Think of its ritualistic essence. We who call ourselves critics (or, in my case, will do so until New Year's night) sit there in the semi-dark being told stories. The "fire" flickering in front of us is a screen with moving images. Then, in true storytelling tradition, we go away and relate the stories to others.
I have been passing on film plots to readers — and parsing them — for 50 years now. That is an exact number. Like the year commemorated in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, my talismanic twelve-month, my moment of nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again, was 1969. A great deal happened in that year, both in movieland and elsewhere. Horror down below: the Manson murders. Transcendence up above: man went to the Moon. And I, mentally somewhere in between, went to a film called Marlowe, for reviewing which, in a now-departed magazine called Monthly Film Bulletin, I was paid my first professional shilling.
What a movie to start with! It featured a young, weird, shrilly gurgling kung-fu fighter in his first major international movie. He was Bruce Lee. He was fantastic. I believe — I certainly hope — that in what I wrote, I flagged Lee's stardom to come.
To my amazement, I was suddenly made richer by doing something I enjoyed. Seeing films for a living. A school friend, Robert Wynne-Simmons, with whom I had invented a board game that has since become quietly cultish ("The Gothic Game", relaunched this year as "Damnation"), had said to me in the months after we left university, "Why don't you try film reviewing?"
I didn't look back. In 1973, the Financial Times scooped me up from honourable toil at the British Film Institute, where I had spent 18 months as assistant-assistant-editor and contributing critic on the quarterly Sight & Sound, and assigned me the weekly movie whirl. I gave myself five years before the burnout I feared and expected. I even told my FT predecessor, David Robinson, whose move to The Times allowed me in, that I didn't expect to become a veteran.
Three decades later, when a colleague turned to me at the funeral of Alexander Walker, the illustrious and long-serving film critic of the London Evening Standard, and said, "43 years at the same newspaper! No one will ever equal that", I felt a veteran's surge of guilty competitiveness. 46 and a half years: that is the baton I now hand on to the next long-distance runner.
