Do you remember the first time… watching a grown up film?

Paul Clarke takes a trip down celluloid memory lane.

Reading the Futurist cinema feature I got to thinking about the first grown up film I ever went to see.

I grew up in a Northern industrial town called Barrow in Furness where there were lots of nuclear submarines, but precious little culture. My only escape as a little kid was the ABC Minors on a Saturday morning where kids came together to eat huge hot dogs, collect badges with ABC on them, watch cartoons and – surreally – reruns of The Three Stooges.

Remember we only had three channels on the TV in the seventies, and the blackouts caused by the miners’ strike weren’t helping our Scooby Doo addiction.

I eventually graduated to the Herbie series where a grown man had – what even an eight year old could see – an unhealthy relationship with his car.

But one day when I was 12 I took my first step into the world of adult cinema.  I have no idea what prompted this step other than hormones, and a desperate urge not to see another film where a crap actor talked to a car.

My choice was in retrospect utterly bizarre.  Against all the odds, Annie Hall had made it to the Astra cinema in South Cumbria, so I went to see the classic New York film in a run-down cinema in the middle of an industrial apocalypse.

To make things even stranger my mother insisted she came along in case I was corrupted.  My advice to future budding film buff is to do this rite of passage in secret.  It must have been excruciating for her picking up the sex references with her 12 year old son sat next to her, but I don’t know as we never discussed it then, or subsequently.

Now, I’m not going to pretend as a Northern working class pre-teen that I was so precocious to pick up on the dazzling dialogue, and the complex relationship between Alvy and Annie. I was not that tiresome dweeb in Submarine.

But I was totally transported into another world which is the whole purpose of film.  I saw for the very first time the majesty of Manhattan through the eyes of a filmmaker who clearly loved the place.  It is no accident I have been a frequent visitor to the city all my adult life.

There are bits of that wonderful film that have stayed with me over 30 years.  The scene where Alvy’s family live under a rollercoaster oblivious to the cars rumbling overhead played to my emerging sense of the absurd.  Or when Annie – a notoriously bad driver – parks and Alvy says ‘I’ll walk to the sidewalk from here.’

My favourite was when Annie and Alvy were stood in a cinema queue and some blowhard is banging on about what Marshall McLuhan thinks of the film.  Alvy gets increasingly irritated until he finally snaps and drags the real McLuhan out from behind a display to tell the dickhead he is totally wrong.  This is a fantasy made real for any regular visitor to an arthouse cinema where crashing film bores come with the territory.

I left that cinema a changed boy with absolutely no idea what most of it meant, but just knowing I loved it in some visceral, nameless way. No more talking cars for me.  Before I knew it I was sneaking into a Saturday Night Fever which let me tell you was a total mind fuck, but that’s another story.

So come on Culture Vultures, share your first time and tell us how it changed you and why.

Paul Clarke loves nothing more than a heated debate on cinema and can be contacted at leedsconf@gmail.com or on Twitter @paulleedsconf

If you have any film related stories, articles, reviews with a twist, etc, contact The Culture Vulture’s film editor Mike McKenny on mike.mckenny1983@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @DestroyApathy