Britain says "Farewell" to our old and revered, Prince of Film Critics, Derek Malcolm

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Derek, who has died at the age of ninety-one was sixty-four and approaching his retirement as the Guardian Film Critic when interviewed in 1996 by the 'British Entertainment Project' (link). His definition of what makes a good film critic reveals insight into what made him not just a great critic, but arguably one of Britain's greatest.

Derek said : 

"The first thing to be a good film critic is that you have to write well and entertainingly and fast, because of deadlines. Otherwise its just not going to be printed. So you have to be a journalist first and know what you're doing on paper".

"Secondly you have to know something about your subject and believe in your subject. You have to believe that some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century have been film makers and have to believe some of the greatest geniuses have been film directors. You have believe the cinema is important and capable of doing some good for society as well as just entertaining it". 

"Thirdly, you have to know something about the other arts because the cinema is an amalgam of all the other art forms".

"Fourthly, you have to be a decent human being because films are about human beings and their stories, fundamentally, and if you are someone who is not sympathetic to other human beings and their stories, how can you be a very good film critic when you are dealing with those".

"So it's a hard job being a good critic in the cinema but those are four things you need and now of course is the time when its very difficult to do all those things because, 'A' : you haven't got the space or 'B' : your editor wants something jazzy at all costs and 'C' :  they don't believe the cinema is important in that way and 'D' : they don't give a damn whether you're a shit or a decent human being as long as you can write the kind of stuff which they think is trendy".

* * * * * * * * 

Derek Elliston Michael Malcolm was born the only child of middle-aged parents, Dorothy and Douglas Malcolm in Marylebone in the City of Westminster, West London in the spring of 1932. His father belonged to a wealthy Scottish family with the family wealth based on the jute business and earlier his grandfather's connection to the East India Company. Eighteen years before Derek was born his father had been a lieutenant with the Royal Artillery during the First World War. Derek only partially got the facts right about himself when he said : "I was born in 1932 in a castle in Scotland, to a very rich Scottish family". But it is certainly true that he was : "Sent for education in England. I think I was educated in a boarding school from the age of four to twenty one when I came out of Oxford University. I had a very privileged kind of upbringing except that my family gradually lost all their money. It was a privileged upbringing which got poorer and poorer and poorer and poorer".

By the time Derek was conceived, his parents were scarcely living together. Douglas went off hunting in Northamptonshire while Dorothy, a fine singer and occasional performer, entertained admirers in London. When once asked "Is it possible that they continued any kind of physical relationship?" Derek replied : "God knows. I've no bloody idea. My mother had admirers, but she wasn't sexually predatory. She just wanted adoration. She had me when she was 42. She used to say : "Derek, you've ruined my breasts" ".

When he was seven, in 1939, the Second World War had broken out and the following year the family were bombed out in the London Blitz and moved to Bexhill on the Sussex coast which Derek described as : "A ghastly little seaside town with nothing happening. As a child I used to go to all three of all three cinemas three times a week during the War". At this point the family were not impoverished and lived in their house with a family called Manners, with father as butler and his wife and daughter as cook and maid.

In 1943 he was packed off to Eton to join other sons of the upper middle classes and said : "I didn't enjoy public school at all. I was always a sort of Labour supporter and I was bad at sport and very bad at my work, asthmatic, small, miserable and had a dreadful time most of the time till a master at Eton said : "There's something about this guy. He can write". It was that one master that gave me the confidence to get me afloat. I suppose having a fairly unhappy home. life going to school wasn't so awful. I hated boarding school but I also hated life at home because my parents were very unhappy with each other. I went to university and broke free from most of it". 

His housemaster's report from 1946 when he was fourteen stated : 

When he was sixteen years old he found a book about famous legal cases in his father’s study with a chapter ripped out and deeply embarrassed, his father felt he had to confess. Derek said : “He told me he had something to tell me, and he dreaded it. I just said I knew, quite understood, would have done the same myself”. That something was that his father had shot dead his mother’s lover on returning from active service in the First World War. Derek would later say : “No film I ever saw was any more dramatic than the story of my parents, whose marriage was overtaken so soon by a tragedy that received huge publicity and effectively destroyed the happiness of both”. This was all fifteen years before Derek was born and the case had caused a sensation in London in 1917 with the Old Bailey trial billed as the first example of a 'crime passionel' in an English court. 

His father, Lt Douglas Malcolm, styled in the papers as 'A man of antique honour', had traced his wife’s lover, Anton Baumberg, a bogus nobleman, to a boarding house in West London and killed him with four shots from his service pistol. A jury at the Old Bailey brought in a 'justifiable homicide' verdict against him, finding that when he confronted Baumberg with the pistol and a horsewhip, he had 'acted in self-defence' to preserve his wife’s honour.

A year earlier in 1947, when he was fifteen his mother took him to see Laurel and Hardy performing on stage at the London Coliseum and took tea and buns with his heroes having asked to meet them in the interval of the show and he recalled, although he didn't know why, they said : “Yes, but don’t bring your mother”. Derek later wrote : “Hardy took a bun from the tray, placed it on his chair and sat on it. It was, of course, squashed flat. I’m pretty sure he did it to amuse me. But you never knew with Hardy, who preferred playing golf to working. Laurel looked horrified, especially when Hardy offered the flat bun to me. He was the master of most situations and the pair’s directors invariably deferred to him on set”.

Fifty-six years later, in 2003, Derek would write and publish 'Family Secrets' as an attempt to overcome the lurid prejudice of the original reporting, as he said : “Portraying my mother as an idiot, with this dastardly Jewish brute [her lover] pursuing her, whereas my father was a hero, a gentleman, for protecting her honour”. Derek said : "The real tragedy was that my mother was more talented and beautiful than anyone in the family. Even Toscanini admired her, for God's sake, but all that scandal did for her career". He said he knew his parents would not have wanted their story told and said : "But the truth is I was very fond of them, my mother especially until she was gaga, and my father - if he was my father, and I don't much care; he brought me up - had a sensitive side that came out in later years. I wanted to tell their story but not destroy their memory".

Derek said that, in 1950, when he was eighteen : "I think I only got into Oxford because my mother had known the Warden of Merton College very well and he had more or less taken me on. I don't think I deserved to get in. I didn't do much work there". Down to do English, History and Philosophy, he said he came out with bad degree which wasn't  surprising because he didn't do any work. He also said that he did a lot of acting and Oxford introduced him to the rest of the world, whereas Eton was privileged and closed. In fact he had joined the Film Society, acted in the Oxford University Dramatic Society, where he was produced by Neville Coghill and was rusticated for two terms after being caught smuggling a girl into College late at night. In relation to his parents and his support for the Labour Party as a student in the 1950s he said : "It was just a reaction to every thing they held dear and I did the opposite". 

Derek said that he : "Vaguely thought of writing to get into publishing after university, but couldn't and became an amateur rider because I'd gone hunting with my father a lot. For two years I rode as a staple chase jockey and was a good one, winning 13 steeplechases over two seasons in the mid-1950s". He said he didn't like falling off horses very much and : "I thought, 'Bugger this. This is too hard. I'll be an actor instead'".

He then acted professionally for three years and was in three London shows, including the third version of 'Look Back in Anger', but mostly in repertory on the South Coast doing plays by Agatha Christie, TS Eliot and Christopher Fry. He said : "Awful stuff, bored me shitless. I was always the juvenile lead, walking in through the French windows and saying, "Anyone for tennis?". I was quite pretty in those days. Most of the other actors were gay. They all used to say : "Go on, you know you are too". That's one reason I gave up. I thought : 'Bugger this for a laugh'. Another reason was that he : "Got out because of the nervous energy. I thought I'm not going to stand this for the rest of my life and got out of that and became a journalist".

Meanwhile, back in his 'home' his parents remained married, after a fashion and played out a dreary charade of respectability, living off boiled eggs in their increasingly squalid house in Bexhill-on-Sea, worlds away from the glamour and wealth of their youth.

Derek said he : "Joined the Daily Sketch because his mother knew the proprietor. They thought it was wonderful they had an old Etonian who could go round the London clubs and know the clientele. I didn't want to flit about these nightclubs finding out about what the lower echelons of the aristocracy were doing. The Daily Sketch sent me to Cheltenham, where I got on the local 'Gloucestershire Echo'. I became drama critic there and in the end became News Editor of the paper and stayed there for nearly ten years, getting married and getting divorced". Derek said that his wife, Barbara Ibbott, was an alcoholic and died at a young age, but they had a daughter together, his only child, Jackie.

Derek said : "Because I was an embryo Kenneth Tynan, or so they thought, I used to make my reviews, which were sort of waited for by amateurs and professionals and I was a big reputation in a small pool". He said he : "Rang up Brian Redhead, who was the the Guardian Features Editor and said would he like a piece about the 'Cheltenham Literary Festival'". Derek said he "Tore up the first piece and thought there only one thing I can do : Write a funny piece and wrote a funny piece about all the pompous nonsense that goes on in a  literary festival. I opened the 'Guardian' the next day and there it was, complete at the top of the 'Arts Page' by Michael Elliston". Derek didn't want anybody to know he was in Cheltenham and had used his middle names. He said he was : "Taken on as a sub-editor in the Features Department. Then the News Editor said : "We'll take you on as a reporter". 

In 1962 at the age of age of thirty he said he was : "Up to Manchester as a Feature, Sub film, plus Books and Ballets" He said the Guardian started a feature on racing and he became the 'Feature Editor for Racing ', He said he was : "At one point 'Late night sub racing correspondent' and 'film critic', at the same time for very little money". He said he was  named for the International Publishing Company award for 'Critic of the Year' and said :  "God knows how I won. All I know is that Michael Foot was the Chairman Rab Butler was also on the panel" . It was at this point he dropped other jobs and became film critic. He said with his usual self-deprecation : "I wasn't rally an expert when I became deputy film critic or even critic." In fact he became the Guardian's longest-serving film critic, between 1971 and 1997.(link) 

Derek said : "Its very gratifying to meet famous people, but I can't say film stars interest me very much. Film makers interest me more and meeting Scorsese, Buñuel”.

Howard Hawkes (who he spent a whole day with once) and John Ford remain in my memory far longer than meeting these awful people who are so called stars in the cinema". 

When it came to British directors Derek said : "I don't always agree politically with Ken Loach, but he does tell the truth and tries to tell the truth about  ordinary peoples lives and he does so entertainingly. They're not difficult films that he produces for people, but they are relevant films and they could go and be entertained and actually think : 'Well what he says may be true or not be true, but it's interesting'. Derek said : "As a critic I've met lots and lots of directors. The tragedy is that some of the nicest directors make the most dreadful films and some of the nastiest directors make marvelous films".

Director Mike Leigh said of Derek : “He was not only unique among film critics in his insight and taste, but he was serious in his commitment to serious independent filmmakers, not least young unknowns. His knowledge of World Cinema was immense, and he was an extremely nice guy, with a charming dry sense of humour”.

In particular, Derek was keen to promote the showing of films by directors from India and said : "I get really annoyed when westerners have never heard of any other film maker but Satyajit Ray. I love Satyajit Ray and he deserves to be number one, but very close behind him is Ritwik Ghatak and many other Indian film makers who really should be better known than they are".(link) 

Derek, in his prime at the age of forty-eight in 1980 reviewed forty-one year old Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. (link) (link)

Derek said in 1996 : "I can’t remember a star I've actually really liked, but Robert Mitchum I liked because he was a man who was totally uneducated, but a very bright person, despite all the funny things that have happened in his life and I got on well with him". His biography of Mitchum was published in 1984 and he chaired a Q and A with Mitchum at the British Film Institute. 

But apart from that one exception, he was adamant : "I can't think of a single Hollywood star I could actually warm to, even though they were being especially nice to me because I was a critic. I can't honestly say they're worth anything except when they're up there on the screen. Off screen they may be very nice or very nasty, but they're not interesting people. Most directors, of course, are".

Derek said : "There are two kinds of critics. There are the interventionist kind, like myself, who gets to know a lot of people, does a festival, wants to deal on the political side of film a bit - political and cultural side. And there are those who just write the reviews. And it perfectly valid to be a critic who just writes the reviews and doesn't care what the movie costs or what happened to the director. They see it up on the screen and they write it. But I seem to be much more interventionist possibly because of the 'Guardian' and my own nature". 

"As a film critic I know thousands of acquaintances and not many friends all over the world. The things I've done like directing the London Film Festival, becoming a Governor of the 'British Film Institute' and being President of the 'World Critics Organisation', those things have given me lots of friends". He said that his motivation for these extra curricular activities was that he had : "Always been a kind of political animal more than most of them" and in the case of the 'World Film Critics' it was an : "Attempt in to see if we could move the goal posts a little". He put his experience as a critic to good use when he became director of the BFI's 'London Film Festival' for three decisive years in the mid-1980s, making it a livelier, more inclusive event, helped by such novelties as a 'surprise film', and screenings outside London. He also served on juries at many film festivals worldwide.

Derek was quick to expel any idea that there was anything exciting about being a film critic and said : "I hate bad movies. In the course of a year, aeons of rubbish - absolutely frightful. What a film critic has to see is unlike an art critic or music critic, because the music critic wouldn't go to something that's really bad. He wouldn't even be sent to it. But a film critic has to see everything put out by Hollywood and others in the name of entertainment. I don't know which is worse : seeing a bad and boring art movie or a bad and boring commercial movie. They're equally dreadful. What one has to sit in front of most of the time is rubbish. Theatre or opera critics, they wouldn't have the same amount of total crap to sit in front of. I don't like sitting in front of rubbish. It's awful. It's bad for the brain, as well as the arse and I hate it". Having sad that he was quick to add : "I do believe in the cinema and I do love the cinema when it's good. But I love the theatre when it's good and I love music when it's good".

The decades of Derek’s tenure at the Guardian saw major shifts in the film business, of which the most important was probably the arrival of home video in the early 80s. In Britain, this was accompanied by an outbreak of moral outrage directed against low-budget horror films with provocative titles, collectively dubbed 'video nasties'. When the idea that these could irrevocably damage children gained traction, especially among Conservative MPs and campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse, Derek found himself testifying in court on behalf of the movie titled 'Nightmares in a Damaged Brain'.

In the court case which followed, when he described it as : "Not a classic, but well-executed" he could scarcely believe the judge’s response : “So was the German invasion of Poland”. Such was the hysteria that accompanied the arrival of video, which would lead to a tightening of Britain’s draconian film censorship. However, Derek had many opportunities to defend challenging films of vastly greater integrity, including Ken Russell’s 'The Devils' during its protracted struggle to be seen as originally intended.

On television in the mid-1980s, he was host of the 'Film Club' on BBC Two, dedicated to art house films (link). In 1996 Derek said : "One of the problems in Britain today is that newspapers don't give a damn about critics they want star profiles, they want gossip about Bruce Willis and a critic's job gets less and less easy to do properly, They want the obvious thing : review of the new releases and glitzy, silly films most of the time, because they think that's what their young readers want to know - obsessed with youth like all the other papers. So I'm afraid being a critic is anything like a good job it was before, because its a general feeling that popular is being trivia. What everybody wants to read about and please don't go to a dreary Russian film. So it's very difficult to do the job as well as one could do, even in the Guardian, let alone the other news papers".

Derek followed his retirement form the Guardian with a stint at the London Evening Standard from 2003 until 2015 when he was eighty-three. In fact, having succeeded Alexander Walker as Film Critic of the Evening Standard in 2003, he eventually left regular reviewing and concentrated on film festivals. He also became a principal contributor to two series on the Sky Arts Channel, 'Discovering Film', highlighting Hollywood stars and, no doubt, more to his liking, 'The Directors', explaining the technicalities of camera angles and tracking shots, but mostly talking about the flair and foibles of the great movie makers he had known, among them Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick.

When it came to shifts in cinema audience behaviour Derek said in 1996 : "Every time I go to a multiplex now I'm surrounded by people talking, sucking that ghastly pop corn, slurping coca cola, belching and walking in and out and I wonder whether it us a very valuable experience ? If its a decent film it's wonderful. If it's an entertaining film and everyone's laughing, that's a nice experience. But to me I think its just as valuable to sit in front of a video and be able to turn it back to see how something works a little better. I don't mind the fact that people see a lot of films on telly which they wouldn't see otherwise. Television is their national film theatre. They'll see a lot of old films and like a lot of old films they would not think about".

He also said : "I don't mind the fact that most people love Hollywood movies. I would be a fool not the love good Hollywood movies, though I don't think there are many of them about now. They realise they can make money everywhere not just in America . They're now more towards violence, sex and basic special effects, because that's what knocks the whole world between the eyes".

In 1996 Derek said : "Morally I get very worried about what is being poured over people now. The carelessness  of the Tarantino violence - entertaining and sharp and wonderful, as a lot of his work is, there isn't any real moral thought behind it and that worries me because young people go and cheer and clap and think 'how wonderful' but it doesn't do much good to their psyches".(link)

On Derek's passing Peter Bradshaw, his successor as Film Critic at the Guardian simply said :

"Derek was a wonderful man and a great example to every other critic, in that he took cinema and criticism seriously, but he never took himself too seriously. I shall miss him very much".