xii

Westerns

Station, which sadly closed in 1972 when still charging half-a-crown (i.e. 12½ new pence) for the best seats. The continuous performances meant that students could see a film twice in a day and the cheapness allowed them to make several visits.

But a movie could disappear for years or for good. For instance, I was driving out of Santa Fe one morning in 1972 and passed a cinema showing a Monte Hellman double bill of The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind. The former had finally been shown in Britain in 1971, but the latter never got into cinemas here, and nearly a decade passed before I got to see it. All we had to rely on then were our memories and a few notes made in the dark (which often excited the suspicions of other patrons in the way their forebears distrusted Professor Henry Higgins as a police spy). Memory, of course, could play strange tricks and movies shown and re-shown in the mind could grow and take on enlarged and distorted forms. Or, in the case of westerns, merge into one gigantic frontier picture. In writing the additional material for this new edition I did not have to walk down memory lane in retrieval mode. I just went into the room I have put aside for the thousands of VHS and DVD versions of movies that have accumulated these past twenty-odd years. It’s sad really. Mr Memory in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps wouldn’t have to die now for the vital information stored in his mind. It would have been sent abroad by email. Incidentally, I’ve mentioned Hitchcock only once in this book, for his visit to the West in Saboteur, where in crossing the continent the innocent fugitive played by Robert Cummings visits a ghost town. I should of course have mentioned his later excursion into the West in North by Northwest (1959) featuring Cary Grant’s cliff-hanging scene in South Dakota, as well as the fact that Hitchcock’s next movie, Psycho (1960), opens in Arizona, and that the Master’s signature appearance has him wearing a Stetson in the streets of Phoenix.

Philip French 2005