But that decision has not been taken, so we only half feel or glimpse the scheme of one soldier – a beauty named Witt – who goes AWOL, or goes away, communing with nature in an effort to forget the war. But that thread, and many others, are all so far away, and they are not reconciled with the strongest story – that of an officer (well played by Nick Nolte in what is really the only conventional performance) who will do anything for victory, honour and medals.Maybe The Thin Red Line needs time to settle in; maybe it is closer to a kind of contemplativeness drawn from Oriental art – it is fascinating to note that in the early 1990s, Malick served as writer (with Andrzej Wajda as director) in a not very successful effort to translate the great Kenji Mizoguchi film, Sansho the Bailiff, to the stage. In other words, and perversely, Malick chose American classics – James Jones and Guadalcanal – to explore the chance of making a “European” film, poetic, novelistic, musical, something closer to Antonioni or even Mizoguchi?But can American film be like that? Just as American soldiers in 1942 were not on Guadalcanal to admire the light on the windswept grass, the butterflies and the birds, so American film is always pledged to the idea of essential narrative incident. I’d guess that Malick was deeply affected, and even dislodged a little, when Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened just a couple of weeks after our dinner. That film re-appraised our sense of combat on screen, and it turned upon an amazingly cute and acute narrative incident.

It is the kind of story germ that re-enforces America’s sense of film being determined by universal anecdotes. It’s a nutshell.Once before, in Badlands, Terry Malick had that sort of situation – the kids driving headlong into the distance and their future – and that organised his eye. Yet in his nature and preoccupations, I think, he is not like Spielberg, Disney, Hitchcock or Chaplin in his capacity to see cogent incident. Rather, he is a mixture of Audubon, Antonioni, Mahler and Musil, someone who wants to see all the impressions and gather them all in to make some enormous – limitless? – amalgam. But in America, and in the film world affected by America, we are not used to thinking of that as a movie.I’m not sure that Terrence Malick needs or wants to go much further in a movie-making climate where fierceness and tidiness are so dominant. The Thin Red Line strikes me as wayward notes for a film as yet unmade – and its box-office colapse will weigh heavily, for this one at least $50m.

Late in the day, actors supposedly in lead parts were cut entirely or drastically reduced. Some time last summer or fall, an action picture became threaded through with ruminative voice-overs from soldiers one cannot always identify. Everything blurred a little.But it is plausibly the work of a mind that finds itself in the camera’s observation of life. That’s why The Thin Red Line is being so staunchly defended by some. Still, next to Badlands, it is slow, long, confusing, prettified and pretentious. None of which matters if you happen to find yourself at dinner with the rather wistful yet very likeable, presence, Terry Malick, as well as the intellect open to wondering just what would have happened, say, if Nurmi, Zatopek, Pirie, Ron Clarke, Viren and Gebrsalassie, all at their best, had been in the same race. To say nothing of wondering, in that event, which of the gang would have said this race was too good to miss, so maybe he’d rather sit out and watch.`The Thin Red Line’ opens in March..

Garbo famously wanted to be alone, and in the next century she will be. Given the increasing availability and expanding repertoire of old movies on video, it may seem perverse to consign a screen star to millennial oblivion, and I’m not suggesting that her work will ever be impossible to track down. Just that the passage of time will eventually dissipate the mythic aura which still attaches to her – Garbo, the queen in self- imposed exile, in whose absence Hollywood became a republic – and only the performances will be left. Since these performances already provoke titters among younger audiences (to the extent that she has any), it’s safe to assume that Garbo, who was herself once better-known than the historical figures she played in the cinema (Mata Hari, Marie Waleska, Queen Christina), will soon be only a name, a name as tinnily resonant as the names of those flamboyant monstres sacres of an earlier era – Bernhardt, Duse – of which next to no filmic record has been bequeathed us.
The analogy with the theatre isn’t a fortuitous one. Garbo would alternate between letting her hair down to play a wronged woman in some tawdry potboiler (Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise) and pinning it back up again in deference to Pirandello’s Nobelised eminence (As You Desire Me), and it was in this schizophrenic oscillation between hack material and someone’s idea of high art that, like the great stage actresses of the turn of the last century, she functioned best. Unlike Dietrich, whose recognition of her own outre absurdity made her a creature of celluloid par excellence, Garbo wasn’t just a theatrical actress through and through but, in the grandiloquent melancholy of her gaze and the near-hieroglyphic extravagance of her gestures, the last upholder of a now obsolete histrionic tradition whose origins can be dated back to Mrs Siddons and beyond.The cinema, especially the contemporary cinema, is the art of irony even more than the art of realism, and Garbo’s performances were fatally deficient in both.