Last night I encountered my Holy Grail – I watched a film I’ve been waiting over thirty years to see.
One evening when I was eleven years old, this same film was scheduled to show on BBC1 after the Nine O’Clock News. My brother, who would have been twenty at that point, saw it listed in the Birmingham Evening Mail. He told me that it was a very funny film and that I had to watch it.
My brother was much given to impassioned recommendations. He inherited some kind of secular evangelical gene that bypassed the rest of his siblings. Everyone in the family remembers those long years he spent trying to convert someone, anyone to Pink Floyd, to Brian Eno, to John Martyn – forcing whichever one of his four older sisters happened to be in the living room at the time to listen to a particular lyric or chord change, to just acknowledge the self-evident genius. His attempts were entirely unsuccessful, ending usually with the captive audience fleeing to their rooms, often with Nicholas following close on their heels continuing to outline especially fine and noteworthy elements of the recording as they firmly closed their doors on him.
I, however, as his one younger sibling, absorbed it all. I would sit obediently and watch the films, read the books, eat the food and listen to the music which filled him with such wonder. Sometimes, try as I might, I could not share his enthusisasm (I never, I’m sorry to say, got into John Martyn) and even I at times found his critiques a little hyperbolic. (Eg. of a piece of trout cooked in newspaper: ‘This is the best thing you will ever taste in your life.’)
So by the time I was eleven I had developed something of an antenna for differentiating genuine, passionate recommendations from some of the more exaggerated, not to say optimistic, claims. The film though seemed definitely the former. Nicholas told me I would probably never see anything funnier and such was his conviction, I was inclined to believe him. We sat through the Nine O’Clock News in a state of great anticipation, but as the film was announced, my Dad who had not been party to the day long pre-screening buzz, expressed his doubt that a film shown after the news would be suitable viewing for me.
My brother and I reacted differently. My brother pleaded my case, lobbying for the film, insisting on its brilliance, its appropriacy and suitability. I on the other hand, whilst desperately keen to see it, had already developed that awful adolescent terror of sitting through any kind of ‘adult’ material with either of my parents in attendance. I would rather poke myself in the eye than endure an excrutiating few seconds of a ‘bedroom scene’ with my dad in the room. I would, it transpired, rather gather my things together and retire to bed missing perhaps the funniest film in the world and lie awake for the next hour and a half listening to my father and brother’s laughter filtering up through the floorboards.
I’ve often thought of the film since then. It never appeared again, to my knowledge on a tv schedule, it is not available on DVD, or on Netflix or anywhere I have ever tried whenever I have searched for it. No one I have ever asked has either seen or heard of it. It is a phantom.
Last week was my 43rd birthday and a few days afterwards I received a package from Spain. I didn’t recognise the handwriting on the jiffy bag and inside there was a DVD but no delivery note, or message, or clue of any sort. The film was evidently a Spanish edition of an American film. The title was Corazon Verde – which I recognised neither in the Spanish original or the English translation. The film starred Walter Matthau, which is always a good thing, and as my fondness for him is fairly well known, I thought perhaps this was a present from a friend in Barcelona. It wasn’t until I looked again at the cover that I saw tucked away at the bottom of the small print, the original US release title:
‘A New Leaf’.
My brother had tracked down the Holy Grail.
So last night, I sat down to watch ‘A New Leaf’ only thirty two years since I’d last attempted to do the same thing. It’s a wonderful film, funny but with beautifully restrained performances and a dry, understated script. It was written and directed by Elaine May and though she was reportedly very unhappy with the cuts made by the studio, it remains a small masterpiece.
My brother was right – there was nothing unsuitable for an eleven year old and my life could only have been richer to have experienced Walter Matthau calmly repeating ‘You’ve got your head through the arm hole’ while attempting to disentangle his hapless bride from her Grecian nighgown, a full thirty years before I finally did…but there’s something miraculous in finding something that could withstand such anticipation and vanquishing the tediously permanent adult state of disappointment.