The film that shaped my vision of the world

Joyce Marriott of Pyrton, Oxford, has written a letter to the Times on the subject of how a person’s imagination can be unduly influenced by one particular film. The film Old Yeller, she says, had such a powerful effect that for the past 30 years she has devoted her life to animal welfare, dogs particularly. ‘Such is the power of movies,’ she concludes.

Although I haven’t seen Old Yeller, I agree that a film can sow seeds in the imagination which prosper and flourish and eventually overrun it. My own imaginative Japanese knotweed was sown by the first film I ever saw, aged seven, on the big screen at the Ritz cinema in Southend-on-sea in 1964: Zulu, starring Stanley Baker, written by John Prebble and Cy Endfield, directed by Cy Endfield and produced by Stanley Baker and Cy Endfield.

Zulu is basically one long battle scene, a dramatic retelling of the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a company of South Wales Borderers against 4,000 Zulus, the untested section of the massive Zulu impi which earlier in the day had wiped out an invading British army column.