Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

The film that shaped my vision of the world

I fell in love with Africa, aged seven, in the cinema overlooking Southend pier

Joyce Marriott of Pyrton, Oxford, has written a letter to the Times on the subject of how a person’s imagination can be unduly influenced by one particular film. The film Old Yeller, she says, had such a powerful effect that for the past 30 years she has devoted her life to animal welfare, dogs particularly. ‘Such is the power of movies,’ she concludes.

Although I haven’t seen Old Yeller, I agree that a film can sow seeds in the imagination which prosper and flourish and eventually overrun it. My own imaginative Japanese knotweed was sown by the first film I ever saw, aged seven, on the big screen at the Ritz cinema in Southend-on-sea in 1964: Zulu, starring Stanley Baker, written by John Prebble and Cy Endfield, directed by Cy Endfield and produced by Stanley Baker and Cy Endfield.

It was in the Ritz cinema overlooking Southend pier, aged seven, that I fell in love with Africa

Zulu is basically one long battle scene, a dramatic retelling of the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a company of South Wales Borderers against 4,000 Zulus, the untested section of the massive Zulu impi which earlier in the day had wiped out an invading British army column. It was a unique triumph of the short stabbing spear over the Martini-Henry carbine with an effective range of 400 yards. The final scene shows four rows of red-coated infantry in a redoubt shooting down hundreds of semi-naked Zulu warriors at point-blank range. The film could easily be dismissed as mad jingoistic nonsense, perhaps even a foundational myth of the moronic, white-supremacist generation who tipped the vote in favour of exiting the European Union. As a seven-year-old, I’d never dreamed of such violence.

But notice this: Baker was a lifelong socialist; Prebble was a communist party member and Endfield a Young Communist League worker at Yale.

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