To a dad who raised me on movies
My dad, John Peter Howell, who died recently, had a movie question for me when I last saw him, this October past. He lived in Vancouver, so I didn’t see him or my mother Winnie as often as we would have liked.
“What was that western we saw together, the one with ‘dreadful’ in the title?” he asked.
“Are you talking about The Hateful Eight?” I replied. “The Quentin Tarantino movie?”
“Yes, that’s the one!” he said. “I want to write the name down on a piece of paper and put it by the phone, so when people call I can tell them, ‘Don’t see The Hateful Eight! It’s dreadful!’ ”
That was my dear ol’ dad, who died peacefully in his sleep Feb. 21 at the age of 92. He loved movies, and he wasn’t shy about expressing his opinions about them, even if it meant disagreeing with his film critic son. (For the record, I thought The Hateful Eight was disappointing — it’s Tarantino on autopilot — but not dreadful.)
Many of my fondest childhood memories, growing up as one of eight Howell siblings in Scarborough, are of piling into my dad’s huge green Rambler station wagon and seeing whatever was playing at the Northeast Drive-In, Toronto’s first such facility, which used to sprawl near the corner of Sheppard and Victoria Park Aves.
The family went often — it was something like five bucks for an entire carload — and westerns and war movies were by far my dad’s favourite genres, especially the latter. He’d fought in the Second World War, serving as a flight mechanic in the Royal Air Force, which he joined at the too-young age of 16 in 1941, his height making him seem older. He was stationed for three years in North Africa, working on Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft and Lancaster Bombers.
Dad was willing to see any war movie, good or bad. He was never one for idle chit-chat, but he loved telling the real-life stories behind such screen sagas as Tora! Tora! Tora! and The Battle of Britain (his favourite). Listening to these stories help spark my interest in becoming a journalist.
He had a historian’s fascination for all aspects of the Second World War, possibly because he narrowly escaped being killed during it. He was aboard a troop transport ship, RMS Windsor Castle, which was sailing off Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea at 2:30 a.m. on March 23, 1943, when it was hit by a torpedo dropped by a German or Italian aircraft. (There’s a Wikipedia page about it.)
As my sister Ann Marie recalled in her wonderful eulogy at our dad’s funeral, he nearly went down with the sinking ship because he slept right through the bombing. He was awakened by a pal who’d dashed back to retrieve a shaving kit, and found him still sleeping in his bunk. Dad had to jump in the dark, across raging waves, from the Windsor Castle to a small rescue vessel. He loved to tell this story, which I always thought would make a great movie scene.
Dad wasn’t big on sci-fi, but I managed to persuade him to take me, my middle brother Michael and my school chum Mike to see Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for my 13th birthday in January 1969. It had been playing for months at the Glendale Cinerama on Avenue Rd., a theatre now sadly long gone, and it took about that long to persuade my father to take us.
He liked 2001a lot more than he thought he would, especially in hindsight when, a few months later, we watched the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV and realized how accurately Kubrick had depicted a lunar visit.
And there’s a point in the movie where a space official named Dr. Heywood Floyd, played by William Sylvester, begins a top-secret briefing at the Clavius moonbase with a greeting from a mysterious “Dr. Howell.” My dad and I shared a conspiratorial glance and smile at that.
But war movies remained my dad’s favourite viewing right up until his death, even though in later years his 20/20 vision had faded and his hearing had dimmed. With the kind assistance of Chris Lewchuk and Felicia Pileggi of Warner Bros. in Toronto, I managed to get dad and Ann Marie into the Vancouver premiere of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk last summer, where my father marvelled at seeing, one last time, the RAF aircraft he’d helped repair during the war.
And with the help of Janice Luke of Universal Pictures, and publicity rep Mark McLeod in Vancouver (who also assisted with Dunkirk), dad and Ann Marie attended the Vancouver premiere last December of Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, which plays like a companion piece to Dunkirk.
Dad of course loved both movies, especially Darkest Hour. He correctly predicted that Gary Oldman would win the Best Actor Oscar for his masterful portrayal of Winston Churchill.
He didn’t live to see this year’s Oscars show, not on Earth, at any rate. I like to think he saw them from a comfortable perch in the Heaven’s Eight Multiplex, where they only show movies that get two thumbs up from John Peter Howell.