Derek Malcolm: my predecessor was a mighty critic, film world darling and heir to a scandal | Film criticism

Derek Malcolm was a brilliantly funny, convivial, professional film critic and memoirist, the last survivor of that great Guardian generation of arts journalism titans that also included Neville Cardus and WL Webb. Derek was simply a legend and an international treasure on the film festival circuit. He was the indefatigably globetrotting president of Fipresci, the international film critics’ circle, and a passionate champion of Indian and south Asian cinema.

Well into his 80s, Derek wrote and broadcast about film – and cheerfully attended film festival parties – his latest television broadcasts being his witty and trenchant contributions to Sky Arts. His slight, wiry form was a familiar and much-loved sight at Cannes and Venice where he would appear, often with his wife, the historian Sarah Gristwood. He was as youthful as a very impish version of Peter Pan.

Derek had been an amateur steeplechase jockey before going into journalism, at the Daily Sketch and the Gloucestershire Echo and then the Guardian in Manchester. He was an unrepentant smoker to the end, often bearing an unlit cigarette between his teeth with a wicked grin, before lighting up and lambasting some director for his or her perceived indulgences, chiefly to do with making films too long, which Derek saw as storytelling indiscipline.

Perhaps as a result, he was philosophical about reviewers whose eyelids occasionally became heavy – and, although not a drinking man himself, he came from a generation of London critics who were affiliated to the lost 70s/80s Fleet Street tradition of the big lunch. (Even when I began, it was not unusual for producers and distributors to host fancy midday events at restaurants, where wine was served.) Well-fed reviewers would then saunter to afternoon screenings in Soho. Derek was said to have grabbed a slumbering critic at one of these, shook him and hissed drolly: “Will you please stop snoring? You’re keeping the rest of us awake.”

He wrote two invaluably insightful and funny reference books: Derek Malcolm’s Personal Best: A Century of Films and 100 Years of Cinema. He also wrote a book about Robert Mitchum whom he hosted for an onstage Q&A when he was director of the London film festival.

Derek was my predecessor as the Guardian’s film critic, from the early 70s to 1999, and it was into his mighty boots, in 1999, that I timidly attempted to place my own feet. He was always a great friend and ally and a voice of humour and level-headed calm at a time in journalism when such qualities were under pressure. Criticism was to be shaken up by Web 2.0 and by social media; the number of films being released weekly was increasing and so was the number of instant opinions required. Derek was amused by Twitter and took to it amiably, but he came from an era that predated the world of the hot take, and the new, bad-tempered era of giving and taking offence online. He had seen enough to know that these squalls would pass and what mattered was the quality of the films themselves.

Once retired from the Guardian, Derek went to the Evening Standard and then, remarkably, made a splash in 2003 with his sensational personal memoir Family Secrets: a quite staggering book about a poignant family secret that the 16-year-old Derek discovered by accident. In 1917, his father, Lt Douglas Malcolm, had been the subject of the only crime passionel case in English legal history. Malcolm Sr returned from the front to discover that his wife, Dorothy, a great society beauty, was having an affair with someone the courts described as a “Russian-Polish adventurer” called Anton Baumberg, also known as the Count De Borsch. Through a kind of gallantry – or what we would now call denial – Malcolm senior declared that he did not believe that an affair had taken place, merely that this man had insulted his wife’s honour. He stormed round to Baumberg’s seedy bedsit in Paddington, London with a horsewhip and his service revolver, and shot him dead.

Douglas Malcolm was a war hero and a gentleman, and it was no surprise that the jury sided with him and accepted the rather absurd claim that he had acted in self-defence. There was no question of divorce (which would have made a mockery of the acquittal), so Derek’s mother and father grimly stayed together in a state of awful unhappiness for the rest of their lives, never mentioning to their son what had happened. Derek’s book is a poignant portrait of this strange and very British melancholy: part anticlimax, part emotional repression.

But was it as repressed as all that? Derek’s book records that after his father’s death he received a postcard from his Aunt Phyllis telling him that his real father was not Douglas but rather the Italian ambassador in London, with whom his mother was also having an affair. It was another elephant in the marital living room that Douglas had chosen to ignore. The records show that, if Phyllis’s information is correct, Derek’s father was in fact a senior staffer at the Italian consulate in the late 1920s.

To all of us who knew and loved Derek, these wonderful details were eagerly gobbled up – it was all part of his legend. He was the critic who had been to Eton (which he hated) and became a jockey before working as a journalist in Manchester and London, where he was a raffish man about town, an intimate of Christine Keeler and an uneasy acquaintance of the Kray twins – one of whose goons beat him up because Derek had been having an adventure with his wife. Then he was given the job of film critic and never looked back, although there were few films that could compare with the real-life drama of his own background.

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.