Original Cinema Quad Poster – Movie Film Posters 
Sex finally reared its ugly head in the town of Margate in 1968 – cinematically speaking anyway. The quartet of titles as shown above provided enough chatter amongst our age group on the subject to last a lifetime. In fact, me and a former school mate still reminisce about the opening credits to “Barbarella” in which Jane Fonda disrobes whilst floating in zero gravity. That’s how pathetic we get in our old age – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I didn’t realise it at the time but “The War Wagon” turned out to be the last John Wayne film I knowingly went to the cinema to see for quite a number of years, eight to be exact. Our generation were starting to get a bit tired of Wayne’s political views, especially when it came to the Vietnam war, so the old dinosaur was out and in came the likes of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford to overturn the status quo. This meant that I missed out on a couple of real classic JW Westerns including “True Grit” and “The Cowboys” but I did catch “The Shootist” in a local fleapit in London in 1976, which turned out to be his last film and one of his best.
Here are a few random films I saw in 1968. I got to see “Custer of the West” on a Cinerama screen in Birmingham when I went to visit my old school mate Les, and of course “Planet of the Apes” turned out to be a real classic.
“The Good the Bad and the Ugly” was without doubt the best Western of the year even if, the first time I saw it, I remember thinking “for Christ’s sake get on with it and start shooting each other” during the face-off at Sad Hill cemetery between Clint, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach at the end. Later on of course I realised it’s a film set to the brilliant music by Ennio Morricone, and not the other way around.
Finally, on the subject of movies, a quick mention for this weird double bill featuring “The Wild One”, an early Marlon Brando effort that had been banned from the UK for fifteen years. Most of us couldn’t figure out what the problem was. You’d get to see more violence of a Saturday night along Margate seafront than you saw in the whole of the film, and you didn’t have to pay to watch it either.
As mentioned in the book, the final episode of the TV series “The Prisoner” gifted confused viewers with another classic WTF moment in the vein of the Beatles “Magical Mystery Tour” film. I’m still not sure what happened in the end to Patrick McGoohan’s character, and life’s getting a bit too short these days to try and figure it out.
“The Time Tunnel”, yet another Irwin Allen TV sci-fi production, could be fairly entertaining at times but they really should have got someone to work out why the tunnel delivered James Darren and Robert Colbert nearly every week into a situation just prior to a disastrous historical event. In one of the early episodes they ended up on the Titanic just before it hit the iceberg, but too late to catch Leo and Kate copping off with each other in the cargo hold.
I was going to post something on what I believe was the last Allen TV show, “Land of the Giants” but to be honest I only watched one episode and I didn’t think it was any good. I was now a typical teenager – judgemental, opinionated and armed with the attention span of a gnat.
Only four more years to go before I get to the end of this series of tie-in blogs for “The Maynards of Margate”. There’s lots to do in our new house so I’m going to post bi-weekly from now on. Even I’m getting bored talking about myself all the time.
See you again soon.
Steve Mayhew 