A few months ago, I posted a recommendation of the
film director John Boorman's excellent memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy
(Faber and Faber, 2003), in which I considered the idea of one day offering a
loose commentary on Boorman's work using quotes from the man himself. This will be in lieu of an actual blog
'retrospective' - something I once deliberated - but nonetheless still intended
to add to the critical discussion of Boorman's work, which at present seems
non-existent. The 'series' will begin in
a few days with some quotes on the making of a film that Boorman himself has
largely rejected, but which for me ranks as one of the greatest British films
of the 1960s, Catch Us If You Can (1965).
Earlier this year, I referred to the film as "a
'road movie', but a road movie punctuated by Boorman's typically surreal
lyricism", before further defining it as "a formless narrative full
of car chases and fancy dress sequences, underscored by an aching loneliness
and an atmosphere of cold, wintery despair." It was a film sold as a pop-musical, post-A
Hard Day's Night (1964), but is really punctuated by "a feeling of intense
sadness; where the spirit of youthful rebellion is already being sold as a pop
commodity, and where the characters try to escape into a mythical landscape of
rural, post-industrial decay."
John Boorman directing Barbara Ferris, Catch Us If You
Can (1965):
Boorman, for me, is one of the great British
filmmakers. A fascinating eccentric
committed to maintaining that "lost grace in the film-making process,
where the material things of the world – money, buildings, sets, plastic,
metal, people – disappear into a camera and become nothing but light and shadow
flickering on a wall." While
Boorman is primarily acclaimed for films like Point Blank (1967), Deliverance (1972)
and to a lesser extent Hope and Glory (1987), the full breadth of his vision
can be found in films like Catch Us If You Can, Leo the Last (1970), Zardoz
(1974), Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Excalibur (1981), The Emerald Forest
(1985), The General (1998) and The Tiger's Tail (2006); the majority of which
are still awaiting their critical reappraisal.
