The director’s incredible versatility and talent meant that he could reduce to tears with anguish or laughter, effortlessly pivoting from comedy to courtroom drama, romcom to rock mockumentary
Obviously The Shining remains the greatest Stephen King adaptation ever made, but Stand By Me is the one I love beyond all measure. It’s the warmest, the saddest and the funniest, too: a lovely, grubby ode to the joys of misspent youth. “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12,” remarks small-town adventurer Gordie Lachance, who sets off with his pals to find a dead body in the woods. “Jesus, does anyone?”
Certain films land at just the right moment in life and so it was with Stand By Me, which I first saw as an adolescent, in a Bristol cinema, alongside a schoolmate who had already seen it a few weeks before. We had to skip the last five minutes in order to catch the last bus home to our own small town. This infuriated me at the time, but now feels all of a piece. It means that Stand By Me’s heart-piercing final scene – the four kids ambling back into Castle Rock at dawn – is inextricably bound up with that long, slow bus ride through the night as my friend recounted the movie’s ending, explaining how friendships wane and heroes die, and I stared out the window and tried very hard not to cry. Xan Brooks
