Even before I found a music critic in whose footsteps I wanted to follow - he was Christopher Grier, my predecessor on The Scotsman - I had found a film critic who would have been my model, if ever my inclinations went in that direction, which for a while they seemed in danger of doing.
She was not a newspaper writer - in other words, she was neither CA Lejeune of The Observer nor Dylis Powell of the Sunday Times, much as I admired them both - but someone whose reviews appeared much less frequently, in the British Film Institute’s quarterly magazine, Sight and Sound. Her name was Penelope Houston and, though I never met her, she was for years my heroine.
Her essays were substantial reflections on the great films of the day - I first encountered her in the 1950s and never lost track of what she was writing - and I liked her because she treated a film such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford’s 1949 western that opened with the words “Custer is dead,” with all the seriousness and perceptive detail she brought to everything else she watched.
And now, at the age of 88, Houston herself is dead, and her era of film reviewing has come to an end. She was always deemed somewhat intimidating, though that was not how she seemed to me, and I still cherish the memory of the first and only picture of her I ever saw, sitting on the edge of a chair, looking sophisticated with a cigarette in a long black holder between her fingers.
I was not long out of school when I first saw it, and I thought I had gone one better when I started smoking, also with a long black holder, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with gold tips, which for a time were the only (dauntingly expensive) cigarettes I bought, before abandoning their exquisite aroma, along with that of Gitanes, Greek Papastratos, and my other favourite smokes, in the1970s. Though I never inhaled - the art of simply puffing them was enough for me - they were, like Houston herself, part of my life.
In Houston’s day, Sight and Sound was a great magazine, and she presided over it with an eagle eye. It was there that Lindsay Anderson wrote his famous diatribe, “Stand Up! Stand Up!”, and there that everything else worthwhile on the subject of cinema found its place.
The Times said farewell to Houston the other day, complete with the picture of her I remember so well. Although for a while, during my journalistic apprenticeship, I doubled as music and film critic of the old Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, it was music that won me, even if my memories of writing about films during the early days of the Edinburgh Film Festival were to remain vivid in my mind.
13 November 2015
She was not a newspaper writer - in other words, she was neither CA Lejeune of The Observer nor Dylis Powell of the Sunday Times, much as I admired them both - but someone whose reviews appeared much less frequently, in the British Film Institute’s quarterly magazine, Sight and Sound. Her name was Penelope Houston and, though I never met her, she was for years my heroine.
Her essays were substantial reflections on the great films of the day - I first encountered her in the 1950s and never lost track of what she was writing - and I liked her because she treated a film such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Ford’s 1949 western that opened with the words “Custer is dead,” with all the seriousness and perceptive detail she brought to everything else she watched.
And now, at the age of 88, Houston herself is dead, and her era of film reviewing has come to an end. She was always deemed somewhat intimidating, though that was not how she seemed to me, and I still cherish the memory of the first and only picture of her I ever saw, sitting on the edge of a chair, looking sophisticated with a cigarette in a long black holder between her fingers.
I was not long out of school when I first saw it, and I thought I had gone one better when I started smoking, also with a long black holder, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes with gold tips, which for a time were the only (dauntingly expensive) cigarettes I bought, before abandoning their exquisite aroma, along with that of Gitanes, Greek Papastratos, and my other favourite smokes, in the1970s. Though I never inhaled - the art of simply puffing them was enough for me - they were, like Houston herself, part of my life.
In Houston’s day, Sight and Sound was a great magazine, and she presided over it with an eagle eye. It was there that Lindsay Anderson wrote his famous diatribe, “Stand Up! Stand Up!”, and there that everything else worthwhile on the subject of cinema found its place.
The Times said farewell to Houston the other day, complete with the picture of her I remember so well. Although for a while, during my journalistic apprenticeship, I doubled as music and film critic of the old Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, it was music that won me, even if my memories of writing about films during the early days of the Edinburgh Film Festival were to remain vivid in my mind.
13 November 2015
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