![\"Tom](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Tom-Waits-03-Far-Out-Magazine-F-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ J.B. Mondino)<\/p>\n
Tue 23 December 2025 19:00, UK <\/p>\n
If a film<\/a> is truly great, it will linger for a long time. <\/p>\n Sometimes, when I\u2019m stuck with no signal on the tube or in the deep belly of a forest, I\u2019ll conjure up the fantastical shapes of the shots in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s The Shining, or the visual typography in Tarsem Singh\u2019s The Fall, but a film can be invoked differently; rather than appeasing you, it can, quite frankly, scar you for life, and one knows this better than Tom Waits.<\/p>\n The American singer-songwriter loves film just as much as the next guy, and his experience with the cinema started when he was young, because Waits\u2019s story sounds similar to my own: at seven years old, I spent an evening with a strange babysitter I\u2019d never met before, who put the gaudy, grizzly Hot Fuzz on the television and allowed me to stay up way past my bedtime to see one of the characters impaled through the bottom of his jaw. <\/p>\n Waits\u2019 experience isn\u2019t too far from that, but rather than the comfy confines of a cluttered couch, his took place in a cinema, when at the tender age of nine, Waits admitted that he was already \u201clooking for something, you know, [like when] you see a Fellini movie,\u201d referencing Italian film director and screenwriter Federico Fellini, the man behind dazzling cinematic epics like La Dolce Vita<\/a> and Amarcord, works that expanded the film industry beyond anyone\u2019s wildest dreams.<\/p>\n But Fellini wasn\u2019t the directorial mastermind behind the film that lingered uncomfortably with Waits, it was Sidney Lumet who directed the 1964 film, The Pawnbroker, which follows a Jewish pawnbroker who loses all faith in his religion and mankind after he was numbed by the experiences in a concentration camp during the Nazi reign. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a film of sharp edges and harsh realities, which ends in profound tragedy that amalgamates the crushing legacy of trauma and guilt, and for a nine-year-old, that\u2019s a hell of a lot to swallow.<\/p>\n