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Getting it right
John Boorman’s excellent Adventures
BY WILLIAM CORBETT
Adventures of a Suburban Boy
By John Boorman, Faber and Faber, 320 pages, $27.


John Boorman, the British movie director best known in this country for Deliverance, is a good writer. Not a good writer for a movie director, but a good writer, period. Boorman has written or contributed to most of the scripts of his movies, he co-edits Faber and Faber’s Projections magazine and books, and he has published journals chronicling the arduous, often hilarious hither and thither of a director trying to get any one of several projects into production. The Emerald Forest, which was published in England under the ravishing title Money into Light, is worth looking up and reading as a companion piece to the humane, discreet, and satisfying Adventures of a Suburban Boy.

As a director for more than 45 years, Boorman has followed his nose. His four best movies — the great noir Point Blank (1967); Deliverance (1972); the best version of the King Arthur legend to date, Excalibur (1981); and the autobiographical Hope and Glory (1987) — seem to have little in common. Boorman wrote Adventures of a Suburban Boy in part to make known to himself what of him is in his movies. He believes that "The power of film lies in its links to the unconscious, its closeness to the condition of dreaming." Although his book does much else, it charts these links.

They are, as we might expect, many and various — grand, like the love triangle that defined his mother’s married life, and seemingly minor but crucial, like the fitful night he slept in a tent beside the Thames (rivers are sacred to him and flow through his movies) as a boy. "That experience," he writes, "so profound, sent me on a quest for images, through cinema, to try to recapture what I knew that day. And occasionally, in the course of my life, I did."

A wonderful aspect of this book is that the mysteries of Boorman’s creative life are not solved but rather described, so that you connect your own moviegoing experience with them. After reading Adventures of a Suburban Boy, you will want to see again a few of his movies, but you may also want to, as I did, see whatever’s playing, to sit in the dark again enjoying the play of shadow — the thoughts Boorman puts in your mind — and the light on the screen.

If this has begun to sound impossibly high-toned, be assured that Boorman does not stint on the sort of juicy stuff anyone who takes the movies seriously loves. His portrait of Lee Marvin, whose signing up to star in Point Blank triggered Boorman’s subsequent career, is vivid and tender. So is his portrait of director David Lean, whose phone call from Spain to a studio executive while shooting Doctor Zhivago improbably sped Point Blank on its way. A great pleasure of Boorman’s book is how often the improbable intervened to direct his career. (In my limited experience with the American moviemaking world, improbability rules. It is a wonder that any movies get made at all!) A script that took the director of the Dave Clark Five movie Catch Me If You Can — the Beatles had appeared in two moneymakers, so why not try another British group? — through the American South of James Dickey’s Deliverance into the Amazon rain forest of The Emerald Forest and full circle to the World War II of his childhood might be rejected as far-fetched. But this book’s title says "adventures" and means it.

Adventures of a Suburban Boy is a personal volume, but it is not private. Boorman describes himself as shy, and though it seems almost impossible to be so and write an autobiography, that trait comes through. Toward the end of the book, he notes the death of a beloved daughter and the break-up of his marriage, but he does not pause over either event. This does not feel like withholding, because he has so well established his reticent self. What he does give, and in full, is a wealth of good stories that illuminate both his art and the wonder — what other word to use — of movies. He is a well-read man adept at quotation. Several good ones, including one of my favorites, are in the book’s final pages. "The great director Sam Fuller," he writes, "was more practical with his advice: ‘Spend your money on the ending and shoot it early in the schedule. If you wait until the end, the money has usually run out and you are too exhausted to get it right.’ " In no other art is the practical so harnessed to the visionary. Boorman serves both beautifully.


Issue Date: February 20 - 26, 2004
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