Biography

For a few years in the 1980s, he contributed a regular column to "Sight And Sound", the British Film Institute's house magazine, under the pseudonym of "Heurtebise" (a name taken from the poetry of Jean Cocteau). In this column, he poured scorn on the notion of "British Film Year", which was designed to get the British back into a cinema-going habit (the year in question being 1985). He also said that the British were better off watching films on TV or as videos whilst British cinemas maintained such a poor standard. However, under his real name, he was the co-author of a book called "A Night At The Pictures", a celebration of... British Film Year.

He made very brief (uncredited) appearances in both "Love And Death On Long Island" and "The Dreamers", both of which are based on his novels. In the first, he can seen in the audience for a lecture given by the John Hurt character and in the second, he plays a visitor to the Louvre Museum, past whom the three leading characters run on their way out.

Listing his ten favorite British films in 1985, he named "Fahrenheit 451" (1966), "Frenzy" (1972), "Grown-Ups" (a 1980 TV movie), "A King In New York" (1957), "Man Of Aran" (1934), ""Modesty Blaise" (1966), "Moonlighting" (1982), "Peeping Tom" (1960) and "Winstanley" (1975), in that order; he also added, in tenth place, a film that was never completed, the 1937 "I, Claudius", of which only 28 minutes of footage exist.

He was fond of referring to John Ford's film "Two Rode Together" as "Two Rode To Get Her", which he always claimed was a genuine misprint he had seen in a French newspaper.

The real problem with "minimal" art is not that it's minimal, but that it's not. The eye strays. In the cinema, it has been trained to do so, often with aberrant results. Though I doubt if I could coherently relate the plot of "North By Northwest", a movie I must have seen four or five times, I believe I'll remember to my dying day the color of Cary Grant's socks as he flees from the crop-dusting plane.

[on "Gone With The Wind"]: GWTW is a three-handkerchief movie, all right - but for the nose. It stinks.