… Sorry.

I’m sorry but I’m going to mention again someone you either love or hate - John Wayne.

I love him without reservation (and on the reservation if you want), and with a passion, lots of passion, and as fellow Humdrumming director, and novelist, Guy Adams, will confirm - under mild torture - I’ve often used the work of the beloved John as an example of a style of film acting that can, when transferred to the stage, work extremely well, and concentrate the attention of the audience in the way a close-up would on the screen. Look at the stuff he did with Ford, especially Fort Apache, and you will see just how ‘theatrical’ Ford’s style is, in the sense that he keeps the camera still, with the actors moving in and out of the frame, or forward to take up a more prominent position before moving to the back of the shot to give someone else the edge of the ‘stage’. And Wayne is invariably the one you notice because he, like the camera, also remains still. Also, when he talks, he weighs every word for effect, creating a combination that is quite magical, with the camera simply an observer. This is a technique Wayne absorbed, and used brilliantly in The Alamo, for instance.

You’ve got me going now. I remember going to see The Alamo in the summer of 1960 at the old art deco cinema in Stratford (sadly long gone), and sitting through the epic twice (try doing that now) knowing I was experiencing something a bit special, but something I couldn’t explain. The same thing happened with Lawrence of Arabia a couple of years later. Both of those films changed my life. Films can do that.

And I’ve only recently seen The Alamo again, but this time on video ( I’m not a DVD man yet) and in the privacy of my own home, and alone, except for a bottle of red wine.

Videos? Hmm? That’s another story completely.

I used to buy lots of videos and now own a pretty good collection, and it’s not my fault, honest.

“ Me Lud, my client pleads not guilty to the heinous charge of buying and watching videos - especially those of John Wayne - to the detriment of himself, and the community at large. And I shall endeavour to prove, Me Lud, that my client, who does not have an ounce of criminal intent in his body, is, quite simply, barking mad, and therefore incapable of perpetrating such a shabby crime deliberately, especially with - as my learned friend with the ridiculous wig has suggested - malicious aforethought, and intent. I would like to call a man I shall refer to as ‘John’, yes Me Lud another John, to the witness stand.”

‘John’ owns a video shop in Stratford, and it’s all his fault, and I’ll say, in my own defence, that if he didn’t have such a wonderful selection of classic films - films you’ll never find in the HMVs of this world I would never have unravelled into the rewind madness that is The Searchers, The Horse Soldiers, Rio Grande, Red River, True Grit, The Shootist, Angel and the Badman, The Sea Chase. Hello? Anyone still there?

As film buffs go ‘John’ is in a class of his own, as the following, overheard exchange, will testify.

“ John, I remember seeing this film, oh years ago now, it had this bloke in it who was a Nazi fanatic. It might have been called The Thirty-nine Steps, or something?”

“ Nazi fanatic you say?”

“Yes.”

“ Thirty- nine? Hmm? Ah! Got it. 49th Parallel, 1941, starring Eric Portman, Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Raymond Massey, and the lovely Anton Walbrook. I think you’ll find it was directed by Michael Powell, with a screenplay by Emeric Pressburger, and of course edited by David Lean, with photography by Freddie Young, with, I think, yes, music by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The action is set in Canada, and I believe the whole thing was filmed there too.”

“ Really?”

“ Really.”

“ Have you got it in stock?”

“ No, sorry.”

“ Oh.”

“ I’ve got a nice new copy of Sink The Bismarck though, with Kenneth More and Dana Wynter, who is gorgeous don’t you think, and the direction, by Lewis Gilbert, who went on to do a couple of bloody awful James Bonds in the 70s, is hugely effective.”

“ I’ll take it.”

“ Thanks, that’ll be six quid.”

‘John’ started his lovely shop about three years ago, effectively turning a hobby into a business, with the place now something of a centre for film nutcases from around the world who are desperate to find a copy of a film that means something special. His most recent request was for the complete BBC Shakespeare, a series that started in the 1970s, and went through to the early 1990s. And after a bit of a search he found the whole set of eighteen lurking on the shelves of a local collector who didn’t think he’d live long enough to watch them all again.

One of ‘John’s’ regular customers is local actor Richard Pasco - remember him in Room at the Top with Laurence Harvey - who, with his actress wife, Barbara Leigh Hunt, is, apparently, an avid collector of films from the 1940s and 1950s.

‘John’s’ little shop is therefore a haven, with images on the walls of men and women actually smoking in public, and sporting hairstyles (especially Dirk Bogarde’s vicious quiff in The Blue Lamp), which are a danger eye and limb.

I was in his shop the other month telling him about Michael Munn’s biography of John Wayne that I’d just finished reading and that somehow I had to get my hands on a copy of The Big Trail, Wayne’s first film in which he had a starring role.

“ Pity you haven’t got a copy.” I commented.

“ It just so happens…”

I sold some books the other week.

I don’t know if it’s the same for you but my books gang-up on me. Oh they look innocent enough sitting there picking their dust jackets, but before you can say bibliography, they start threatening my lap top (a machine they hate with a vengeance), and then, when I’m busy writing, and when I least expect it, a cheap, but willing, paperback will nudge my elbow and turn anti-semitic into anti-semiotic, which is not the same thing at all. It came to a head the other Sunday morning when a heavy, and unread (and that really gets up their title pages) biography of Mark Twain flung itself off the top shelf hitting me very firmly with its 571 pages (plus prologue and index) on the head before landing on my unsuspecting little dog, Rosie, who doesn’t take prisoners and would have torn the flying tome to pieces had I not taken pity on the life of poor old Clemens. But it was the last straw - the ringleaders had to go!

And I could tell who they were.

Those little photographs on the spines gave it away. There was Laurence Olivier looking into the middle distance as ever. Was it him? No, much too theatrical. The stoical Lord Salisbury? Shouldn’t think so, not in his old Tory nature. Lloyd George? Maybe. Shakespeare? Well not on his own, he’d need a bit of encouragement. Hang on a minute. There he was, Professor Stanley Wells, lurking on the inside back cover of his hefty biography of Shakespeare looking all academic and innocent, which is not easy for the Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Vice Chairman of the RST to do. But I soon found out the truth (after squeezing him between a Gore Vidal and a Stephen King for a few minutes) that he’d put the other Shakespearean hacks up to it. So into the Tate Gallery plastic bag he went, along with cohorts Michael Wood, Harold Bloom, and Anthony Holden, plus a few other worthless hangers-on, for the long walk to second-hand oblivion.

Stratford has always had some good second hand bookshops, with perhaps the most famous, The Chaucer Head Bookshop, still very much in business and now owned by the rather avuncular Richard James, who smiles a lot, and actually makes you feel welcome. Perhaps someone should tell him that second hand bookshop owners are supposed to be as miserable as sin, utterly resentful of customers, and must not, under any circumstances sell, or worse still ( horror of horrors) buy books. Surely there must be a course Richard can go on to teach him these necessary skills?

The Chaucer Head Bookshop was established in Birmingham in 1830, but in 1958 the then owner, Dorothy Withey, a short, opinionated, and very determined elderly lady, who probably invented the rules by which second hand bookshop owners should operate, moved to Stratford and opened the present shop in Chapel Street. I got to know Dorothy quite well back in the 1960s when she agreed to order for me, on a monthly basis, the Everyman Pocket Edition of the complete works of Charles Dickens, at ten shillings a copy. I remember she even smiled once.

In the late1970s the business was taken over by the Little & Large of the book business, Bill Bailey and Roy Pearce, who had earlier run Coffee Books on part of the ground floor of a large (and haunted) ex-vicarage called ‘The Firs’, a building where, in 1971, my then wife and I occupied the top floor flat.

Bill is a short wiry haired man, who looks like a character out of The Simpsons, with Roy a six foot six inch Joe Louis look-a-like. Bill was, probably still is, a rather quiet, reticent sort of man, with Roy a gentle talkative character who knew intimately every book in their extensive, and ever growing stock. And that was the problem - they never seemed to sell any books.

The trouble was ‘Coffee Books’ had become something of a haven for the literary poor of Stratford, and on a Sunday morning, with the smell of freshly brewed coffee, and the sound of either Dixieland Jazz, or opera, wafting up through the floorboards my wife and I would make our way downstairs and join a regular down at heel group of people sprawled in an assortment of dilapidated old sofas and chairs, and drink free coffee, listen to the music, argue, smoke an assortment of exotic leaves, and read lots of books. How Bill and Roy survived I’ll never know, but they did, and well enough to acquire ‘The Chaucer Head’ when it came on the market. But by then my wife and I had moved into a new house, the old vicarage had been demolished to make room for a new Police Station, and there was, sadly, no music, or coffee, at The Chaucer Head, just Roy chuckling to himself as he read yet another P.G. Wodehouse. Thinking about it I can only remember ever buying one book at ‘Coffee Books’ - in fact Roy might even have given it to me - which was an old battered edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that still smells of that dusty old place and dozes happily on my shelves next to a biography of Miles Davis.

Richard James gave up a very demanding, and very lucrative, position as a Heritage Management Consultant (he wouldn’t elaborate on what he did exactly other than to suggest it was highly creative) when he bought The Chaucer Head Bookshop back in 1998, but has, he assures me, never regretted the decision. He regrets no longer making any money and told me (with a straight face) that I had made more money out of second hand books than he had on the day he agreed to buy my troublesome little collection. Perhaps he doesn’t need that training course after all?

I have now moved Mark Twain to a lower shelf where he is wedged firmly between two biographies of Ernest Hemingway who considered Twain the greatest of all American writers. They should get on well, although I shall keep my eye on him nonetheless.