In love with the movies

Who's to say that Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Bill Murray won't one day be regarded with the same fondness as Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford?

The cinema progresses into its second century with as much allure for most of us as it always did.

The first film star I ever met appeared in a lot of westerns: Victor McLaglen, who won an Oscar as the alcoholic title character in John Ford's The Informer. He once went six rounds in the boxing ring with the great Jack Johnson and was generally the bluff, ever-reliable army sergeant in innumerable tales of the West.

He knew my mother very well, possibly in the Biblical sense, and used to read me stories in my bedroom or down in the shelter during the Second World War Blitz.

If westerns whetted my appetite for the cinema, and the orgasmic sex scene between Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones in King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (nicknamed Lust in the Dust), whetted my burgeoning libido, my next major movie memory was being taken by my father to the small cinema on Victoria Station, just before I was packed tearfully off to my horrendous boarding school.

There I saw Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, Old Mother Riley and The Crazy Gang for the first time.

It was when I was about 12 that I actually met Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who made me laugh until I cried both on the screen and in person. My mother had taken me to the London theatre where they were performing on stage.

At the interval, I had asked my mother, more in hope than expectation, if I could go backstage. To cut a long story short, they let me into their dressing room (while my mother waited discreetly outside) and offered me tea and buns. Olly (the fat one) sat on one of the buns, squashing it flat before offering it to me.

Stan hit him with his hat. It was 30 minutes of my life I will never, ever forget. Which celebrities would bother now?

You may notice that every film I've mentioned so far has been American, except for some of those I saw on Victoria Station. But my tastes changed when I went to university and joined the film society. I still loved the best of Hollywood - it was there I first saw Singin' in the Rain - but I found something else besides.

I was introduced to the staple classics of the cinema, such as Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, Fritz Lang's M and Robert Weine's the Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Not that I liked them much straight-off, since we were invariably shown them on tatty old 16mm prints projected on to makeshift screens.

What's more, we sat on incredibly hard chairs. I often now think that the reason we are at first bored by the great and the good of cinema is because we watched them in uncomfortable circumstances.

Gradually, however, I began to realise that it wasn't only Hollywood that produced good movies and that, in fact, the film-makers of Europe, Latin America, India, China and even Africa could make the imagination race. I've never recovered. And that list leaves out Japan, for whose film-makers I have a special affection.

The first Japanese film I saw was probably Kurosawa's Rashomon, which offered different, equally intriguing versions of a story of ambush, rape and murder. This was incredibly exciting but I soon realised that Kurosawa was not the only Japanese director of international appeal.

There were a dozen others, including two of my all-time favourites: Ozu and Mizoguchi. Ozu's final series of very simple-looking but never simplistic films about family life - Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon - have never been bettered, nor will they be, while Mizoguchi's genius encompassed practically every genre available with supreme style and an acute sensitivity, particularly towards women.

But all this is history now, and has been replaced by something different, often predicated on the relatively new technology that can allow anybody to make a film with a digital camera and the aces of Hollywood to use special effects that DW Griffith and co could scarcely dream about.

So we have the Danish-inspired movement that insists on natural light and totally naturalistic performances, led by the eccentric but often brilliant Lars von Trier, alongside the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which spent more on special effects than von Trier has in his whole career.

Strangely, the big films, such as Titanic, have got bigger and the small films - any number of European efforts - have got smaller. But in between there are still the directors who buck this trend, such as Scorsese (Raging Bull and GoodFellas) and Tarantino (Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill I and II) in America, and Almódovar (All About My Mother) in Europe.

These may be the natural successors to the great figures of the past, with others, such as Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia).

Cinema has produced as many great artists as any other medium during the 20th century, and it goes on doing so, though they are now a little thinner on the ground. Who they are may be a matter of personal taste.

But for me, no writer, painter or composer of the past 100 years can possibly claim superiority over such as Howard Hawks and Orson Welles of America, Jean Renoir of France, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, Luis Buñuel of Spain, Roberto Rossellini of Italy, Satyajit Ray of India and the Japanese directors I've already mentioned.

Unfortunately, the English, who have produced great film-makers such as Hitchcock, Michael Powell, David Lean and Carol Reed (if only for The Third Man), have seldom agreed with me. It's only latterly that we are beginning to take the cinema as seriously as the other arts.

It wasn't so long ago that an Arts Minister said to me: "I can understand collecting and preserving paintings. But is it really necessary to preserve old films?" Another announced at Cannes, when told that Jeanne Moreau was head of the jury: "Oh yes, I've seen a lot of his films."

My series of DVD greats, culled from the whole history of the cinema, will try to convince you that I am right. Though I have to add a word of caution. Many of the great films of the past are not yet on DVD, at least in English versions. And another word of caution.

The films I select will not always be the same as those in a book I wrote called A Century of Film. Those were my favourites - not quite the same thing as the best. Besides one changes one's mind almost daily.

The only rule will be a simple one: film-makers get only one film each and there is no particular order. Otherwise we might have several Buñuels, Renoirs and Ozus, to say nothing of. half a dozen Hawks and Fords. And I promise not to mention Randolph Scott and Roy Rogers too often, though absence assuredly makes the heart grow fonder.